#that would be required for a community of a certain size to sustain itself

[mourning-again-in-america]

what's interesting to like, people in general, around here? what do people want to see more thoughtful writing on? the obvious thing to me is type-theory, systems administration/orchestration/automation, historyposting, and analyses of personal bugaboos of this or that apparatus of the state (i still hold a flame that there may be a conclusion this decade to the gitmo military commissions) but it has become very clear to me that my experiences are not universal. dw i'm not going to suddenly start "brand-maxxing" or some shit, mostly just looking for inspiration.

#there's also lawposting but i'm too eager to engage in it that i don't take the time to read my books and learn my words. #so i end up building models that are incorrectly shaped and looking like a fool to the learned in the process >.> #i *could* rant about my 'what if my clones settled america' AU but uh. that's getting a bit close to my #*actually controversial* political/moral opinions. also i might get geography wrong or incorrectly assume some inaccurate amount of acreage #that would be required for a community of a certain size to sustain itself

[kedreeva]

By giving me the marble, has the god fully abandoned its purpose?

Does the god now have any purpose beyond remaining on this realm with Georgia?

Yes. The god's purpose is to carry the fragment until the god reaches maturity and can spawn it into a new realm, which it has now abandoned as a purpose. The marble is not a part of the god's purpose.

No. It will now remain in this realm, unchanged.

(combining asks about the god for space)

Q: what is it a god of?

It is not the god of anything, it is just a god, the species.

Q: Why won't the god swallow it?

The god has no mouth.

Q: If the god has no mouth, by what means does it sustain itself? Does it need to like, photosynthesize? Or does it not need sustenance?

It requires no sustenance

Q: How does the god communicate?

Through telepathy

Q: how big is the god?

Very, very, very big, able to walk among the rocky mountains and be seen from miles away.

Q: What is the god's life span compared with an average human?

The god will not die.

Q: what is the god's opinion of predestination?

It has no opinion on predestination

Q: Was the god in any way responsible for causing the apocalypse?

The god was not responsible for any part of the apocalypse's cause.

Q: Do the gods not have a choice in creating a universe? Do they have to make one once they reach a certain size? And when they do, are they separated from everyone who is not born in the universe they made, or will they see their siblings again? Do they change once they spawn a universe?

The gods may choose to start over and be reborn until they are ready to use their fragment, or to surrender it as this one has done. They do change upon spawning a new realm. It would not be able to contact anyone in this realm if it returned to its own or created a new one.

Q: Does the god have free will? Did it choose to turn its fragment into a marble and give it to me, or did it turn its fragment into a marble simply because that is what happened?

The god has free will, and it did choose to turn the fragment into the marble. The marble is not a form of the fragment, it is a marble that used to be something else.

Q: how does the god perceive time? if we perceive it in a line, is there a way analagous to that that we would understand?

It sees all of it at the same time. imagine a hollow tube, like a straw. Pour water from one end to the other, and that is how we see time, traveling with the water one side of time to the other. Plug one end of the straw, pour the water in, and close the other end- you can see all the water at once, that is how the god sees it.

Q: If the god has no mouth, by what means does it sustain itself? Does it need to like, photosynthesize? Or does it not need sustenance?

It requires no sustenance

Q: What does the god like about its original world? Is there anything specific it misses about it?

It does not miss it, that is just where it belongs. It does not have emotions like humans do.

Q: Furthermore, what about the apocalypse caused the god(s?) to come to our world?

At the beginning of the apocalypse of your realm, a bridge opened in this location, between your world and the Void. The three gods, who were traveling together, could not halt their forward momentum in time to stop themselves from walking through it, and it closed before they could turn back around and return.

Q: was the fragment hurting the god in some way? if not physically, then emotionally?

No

Q: What is the god's life span compared with an average human?

The god will not die.

Q: Does the god plan to remain in this realm permanently, or only for the remainder of Georgia's life?

The god intends to stay for the duration of the planet's existence.

Q: Were all gods spawned at the same time? If not, how comparatively old or young is this god to its brethren?

All of this god's species was spawned at once, but is also dying and being reborn at various times in the Void. That's a different story.

Q: Does the god have any attachment to this realm beyond wanting to be with Georgia?

The god has no particular devotion to this realm, aside from being in it and wanting to be with Georgia.

Q: if the god has siblings, does it have parents? cousins? if not, how did the god come into existence?

The god does not have parents and its concept of siblings is recent to its arrival to your realm; they are more 'entities which spawned at the same time through the same means' than siblings.

Q: Has the god been changing in size since its arrival 6 years ago?

It has been growing at a rate imperceptible to humans, which it will no longer do, now that it has given you the marble.

Q: What does the god look like, and can it change its appearance (or size, prior to giving me the marble) at will?

The god cannot change its appearance or size. It stands on four long, lanky legs like skinny elephant legs. its body is oblong and covered in eyes like mouse eyes, except big enough to put a building in each socket. It has no head or tail. Its belly is concave, with "hooks" underneath that are soft tendrils that can extend or contract, which glow brightly on occasion. When you met it, the fragment was held against its belly by these.

Q: How does the god feel about me? Like what are its opinions, does it feel kindly, spiteful, neutral, or something else about me?

The god can feel a sort of gratitude toward you. It is pleased its siblings have returned where they belong, as this means Georgia is protected. Georgia's world would have been destroyed if all of them stayed and continued to grow to maturity.

It otherwise feels neutrally toward you.

Q: Does this god also wish to return to it's own realm, or is it content to remain in this one?

This god wishes to return to its own realm and is content to remain in this one.

Q: Also why won't the god answer questions about what will happen?

Because it is a god, and it doesn't have to. The god knows what will happen, and there is no one forbidding it from telling you. It's just not going to.

Q: I ask the god where it got the thing that became the marble.

When the Origin shattered and became existence, the fragments of it were collected by the first spontaneous creations; the gods.

Q: Was the arrival of the god either cause or consequence of the concurrent apocalypse?

Their arrival was a consequence of the apocalypse in your realm.

Q: How does the god communicate?

Through telepathy

Q: what do i know about the realm the god(s) come from?

You do not know very much about the god's realm, beyond the name. Georgia has told you that it exists and doesn't exist, that it is in a state of constant creation and destruction.

Q: why did the god's siblings need the help of a mortal to return?

The gods' siblings needed help because they cannot manipulate the magic of your realm.

Q: Why did the god come to this realm? And why did it’s siblings want to return to their realm?

The god's arrival in this realm was an accident, the result of the supernatural apocalypse which affected your realm. Neither you, nor the god know what caused the apocalypse.

Its siblings wanted to return because their realm is where they belong.

Q: Where did the god come from? Do the people interact with the god?

The god came from the Void. The townsfolk mostly do not interact directly with it, but one of the women from town acts as the intermediary. Her name is Georgia.

Q: what is it a god of?

It is not the god of anything, it is just a god, the species.

Q: Why won't the god swallow it?

The god has no mouth.

Q: how big is the god?

Very, very, very big, able to walk among the rocky mountains and be seen from miles away.

Q: as far as we know, has the god deliberately caused deaths to occur? And if so, under what circumstances?

As far as you or the townsfolk know, the god has not deliberately caused deaths to occur.

Q: by "generally benevolent" does that mean i have seen times when the god has not been benevolent? if so, what happened then?

You have not personally seen times when the god was not benevolent.

The people of the town have told you that its arrival to this plane of existence was harrowing. It brought with it creatures that initially attacked the town and killed several people before it learned how to communicate safely. Since it learned how to communicate, it has behaved with benevolence.

Q: how big is the god?

Very, very, very big, able to walk among the rocky mountains and be seen from miles away.

#the marble game

[swmwconstruction]

Renovation

Developed in Delaware in the early 1990s and headquartered in Connecticut, Wayback Burgers is a franchised restaurant specializing in classic comfort food: burgers, milkshakes, and old-fashioned lemonade.

The brand is renowned for its nostalgic-yet-modern aesthetic and prides itself on sustainable sourcing and a solution-oriented approach to restaurant patrons and franchisees alike.

The rapidly growing Wayback Burgers migrated to Western Canada in the late 2010s, with the first location opening in Winnipeg, Manitoba. More franchise locations have since opened throughout Manitoba alongside Alberta, Saskatchewan, and British Columbia.

This project gave our team another opportunity to show how we effectively manage projects with many different chefs in the kitchen, and reinforced the importance of effective communication skills.

Getting Started

In early 2021, as coincidence would have it, the Southwest and Midwest Design & Construction team completed a retrofitting project for a commercial property owner - for the same unit that Wayback Burger would eventually move into.

Initially, a pizza establishment occupied the unit. This restaurant moved to the unit next door to facilitate renovations and prepare for Wayback’s arrival. The retrofitting renovations were significant - and on a fairly tight timeline. Our team oversaw cutting through the existing concrete slab to install new plumbing lines and ultimately ‘gutted’ the unit to bring it up to standard.

With the unit renovated and ready for occupancy, Wayback made preparations to move in and renovate the space further to comply with their restaurant standards, add an effective HVAC system, and add Wayback-specific furnishings and appliances.

The Bidding Process

Because of our previous success with the unit in question, we were recommended to the new owner of Wayback to bid on the project and subsequently awarded around September 2021.

Project Scope and Timeline

Unlike most other projects, procurement remained in the hands of the restaurant franchisee and their consulting team.

We had to regularly coordinate with the franchise for their equipment, and with transportation delays and supply chain issues, there were points of concern as far as the timeline went.

Of course, many facets of a construction job rely on certain tasks being completed before the next ones can begin. This requires effective procurement methods and coordination with different members of the team - something the team at Southwest and Midwest does with a high level of efficiency.

This unique situation required us to maintain a robust level of communication with those responsible for ordering and ensuring that work could continue progressing and be done in a timely manner. It’s a tender balance to manage these key players and maintain positive relationships, but we did it successfully.

Design and Architectural Considerations

Because we were fortunate enough to have worked extensively on the space before Wayback Burgers took possession of the unit, this gave us keen insight into the architecture and sizing of the restaurant.

We collaborated with the architectural design team to ensure the drawings accurately reflected the space and were on hand to answer any questions other team members had.

It’s also noteworthy that the general space in which our team and the franchisee’s team had to work was quite small, so properly coordinating sub-trade work was key to ensure every party had adequate space to complete their work.

Final Thoughts

While it is always ideal, whenever possible, to use a local general contracting service to fulfill all of the needs of any given project, from procurement to project management to construction - it’s not always feasible. Restaurants are unique in this regard, particularly franchises. What may take one step in a more traditional corporate space may take three within the hospitality industry, as there are naturally more dotted lines to sign.

Ultimately, it boils down to managing relationships and time as best as possible. Delays happen - this is inevitable, but once we were able to secure the equipment and furnishings that we needed to finish the job, it was all hands on deck toward completion - something that only took about a week and a half.

This attitude is what separates a successful contractor from the rest. Our strength as a team is sourced in how we deal with delays as they arrive and how we work to overcome them - all while keeping high value, reasonable cost, and on-time delivery of the project top of mind.

Contact Southwest And Midwest Design & Construction

Want to learn more about how we can help your next design and construction project? Contact the team at Southwest and Midwest Design & Construction with our convenient online quote request tool. A member of our staff will be in touch to discuss project details and the next steps.

[echo-of-sounds]

bnha original characters

This is less about the characters themselves and more about their quirks, their strengths, weaknesses, and the like. I only included Ursa and Cujo in this from anxiety bear. 

I might make more about Quick Comfort’s reader, some side characters, and villains to explore their quirks further. Let me know if you’d like to read about more characters! I liked doing this!

anxiety bear’s reader

Hero Name: Ursa (Latin; bear)

Quirk: Arctotherium

She can transform into an Arctotherium angustidens (an extinct genus of South American short-faced bear). A secondary effect of her quirk is her enhanced senses.

Height: on all fours, she’s 5’11ft at the shoulder (perfect height for biting people right in the jugular); on her hind legs, she’s 12ft

Weight: around 2,900 pounds

Hero Costume: It’s made out of simple, relaxed, and breathable clothing. To nullify her heightened smell, she has a mask. It’s a small, specialized respirator that filters even the tiniest odor. After she uses her quirks, she needs food, so there’s a small pocket on her thigh that she keeps filled with protein bars. For cold weather, she adds a cloak.

Strengths:

Ursa’s sheer mass and weight benefit her, making her difficult to knock/jar, a powerful hitter, and becomes quite the tank when she gets charging. Running up to 45mph at long distances, she’s easily able to break through walls, catch those trying to escape, and escape herself if necessary. She relies mostly on her senses of hearing (which exceeds frequencies humans can hear) and smell (which is about 2,000 times greater than a human’s).

Her fur, dark brown in color, provides protection against impact and some claws/knives due to its thickness. It is not impenetrable. Enough force behind the weapon can spear through her fur.

For offense, her claws and teeth are her main weapons. Her paws are about 1.2 feet (not including her claws). Her claws are around 4 inches. As with other bears, they aren’t actually that sharp. She just has enough power behind her swing to cause damage no matter their acuteness. It’s enough to knock the wind out of someone.

Weaknesses:

She can’t talk while in bear form. She can hear, but being unable to communicate back can cause difficulties while working in teams.

While Ursa’s enhanced senses prove useful in many cases, they’re also her main weakness. Overloading her senses is a sure-fire way to force her unconscious, incapacitated, or to unshift. Smell is the quickest and easiest to overtax, especially with acrid, bitter, and sharp scents. Hearing and sight are next: with high-pitched noises, inaudible by the average human, and deep, bass sounds that rumble her bones; and with bright lights, flashing ones are the worst.

Because of her sensitivities, she acts more like a powerhouse for brief fights. If she’s in one too long, the greater the chances of her becoming overwhelmed. She’s more of a hindrance than anything if she gets overwhelmed.

Quirk Side Effects/Other Info:

Ursa’s senses are still enhanced when she isn’t in bear form. It mimics Sensory Processing Disorder. Her mask helps with her sense of smell. For sight, she has glasses that block out the wavelengths that irritate her eyes the most. For hearing, she has hearing hampers. They work the opposite of hearing aids; instead of amplifying noises/pitches, they dampen them before sending the soundwaves into the ear.

After exerting a certain amount of energy while using her quirk, her body rapidly depletes its resources. The protein bars in her costume help while she’s on patrol. After intense fights, she needs much more than the snacks, often choosing chicken breast topped with fried eggs on any combination of rice, steak, vegetables, and cheeses (she refuses to eat any type of seafood or beans, hating the smell, taste, and texture in her mouth).

Although she tends to ignore this part, she goes through a sort of ‘heat’ like bears do. It starts around mid-May and lasts till early July. She spends more time inside during it.

Quirk Malfunction:

Shifting in and out of her bear form isn’t always a smooth process. Changing is typically easy as her body is reverting into its natural state; she just relaxes, let’s go, and it happened. It’s quick, and she hardly has to try. Sometimes, when she’s exhausted, injured, or otherwise overwhelmed, parts of her body may not revert properly.

Here’s an example from when she was eight (this is a condensed/slightly modified version of the explanation I gave in anxiety bear):

She couldn’t remember what was overwhelming. Something just hurt. She couldn’t move or do anything. So she started panicking. When she shifted back, her face felt horrible. It felt as if her skin was being stretched and her bones were warped. She screamed. Her dad came outside, wrapped a towel around her face, picked her up, and brought her to the hospital.

Her facial bones didn’t properly shift. In our maxilla, we have an infraorbital foramen which is the opening to the infraorbital canal. It transmits a nerve, vein, and artery. Bears also have this, but their anatomy is different. The important difference, in this case, is their maxilla and mandible length due to their muzzles. Human skulls are relatively flat in comparison.

When Ursa shifted, her maxilla remained long like a bear’s (about four inches). Her upper canines were still large and pointing outward. At the hospital, X-Rays showed her infraorbital canal was shoved forward. Because it was only her maxilla that malfunctioned, her nerves and arteries were stretched almost to the point of ripping as they were still fit for a human. She couldn’t talk or see and could hardly smell.

To fix it whenever this happens, she needs to be given Tizanidine. It’s a skeletomuscular relaxant with antispastic agents. It slows the brain and nervous system’s activity to let your muscles relax. Her body will eventually fix itself.

Kuma (reader’s brother in anxiety bear)

Hero Name: Cujo (From the Stephen King story. He prefers the film because of the more optimistic ending.)

Quirk: Arctotherium

Kuma’s quirk is very similar to his sister’s. He can transform into an Arctotherium angustidens. A secondary effect of his quirk is enhanced senses. However, they aren’t as enhanced as Ursa’s.

Height: He stands at 6’1ft on all fours and 14 feet on his hind legs

Weight: around 3,200 pounds

Hero Costume: Much like his sister, his costume is relaxed and comfortable clothing. He also has a mask to filter smells (but uses it less frequently than Ursa) and a pocket on his thigh for protein snacks.

Strengths:

Cujo shares many strengths and weaknesses with Ursa, mainly thick fur for protection, sharp teeth, and long claws. One difference is that he has more mass and weight to his advantage. It makes him a heavier hitter, able to cause more damage in less amount of time. And since his senses aren’t as sensitive, he doesn’t have to worry about becoming overwhelmed as much as Ursa does. These factors allow him to hit harder, last longer in fights, and take in more sensory input.

He’s willing to fight dirty and bloody to win (though some believe that to be a weakness) With his size, he’s able to sustain quite a bit of damage without it hindering him. A bullet to the side or a slash to his back would incapacitate an average human/someone of a smaller size. He’d barely feel the bullet, let alone have to worry about it.

Weaknesses:

The burden of Kuma’s weight takes a toll on his body. Bones undergoing shifting, sometimes grinding against one another, the sudden and intense weight changes, and stress on his muscles often lead to aches and pains. He’s gotten accustomed to it as he’s trained and grown-up. Some preventive measures are: taking pain medication before going on patrol, wearing compression sleeves under his costume, hot baths, and cold compresses.

Due to his size, he requires a higher amount of protein than his sister. And the longer a fight is combined with how much energy he exerts, the quicker his body exhausts. He’s built for dealing damage as hastily and as fiercely as possible. If a fight occurs while he’s on patrol, he’s done after the fight, needing a great deal of protein before his body gives, typically going for seafood and/or steak. If he doesn’t get the protein in time, he’ll faint, suffering from a sudden onset of severe protein deficiency, and need medical attention.

This doesn’t have to do with the fighting part of a Hero’s career, but he is not kid-friendly, often caught swearing on camera, shoving cameras and reporters out of his space, and sometimes picking fights with other Heroes and interviewers he doesn’t like. It makes his popularity suffer.

Quirk Side Effects/Other Info:

Kuma’s senses aren’t enhanced enough to be considered a weakness, but they do cause significant stress in his daily life, notably touch and feel. Textures, high temperatures, and others touching him are what irritates him the most. His reaction is less distress (like Ursa’s is) and more anger at the cause.

It’s not proven, but his quirk seems to affect his personality a bit. He’s very protective of his sister and very prepared to snap (with his mouth as a warning sign) at anyone who he doesn’t know and/or doesn’t like.

From mid-May till early July, Kuma also goes through a heat. Unlike his sister, who’s timid and resistant when it comes to socializing, he’s very brash, impulsive, and sometimes aggressive, going to bars throughout those months, choosing any man or woman piques his interest enough to go home with.

Quirk Malfunction:

Kuma also undergoes the same bodily malfunction as his sister. It happens to him more often due to the strain on his body and its need for large quantities of protein. The ladder is usually the reason for a malfunction (kind of like biological short-circuiting).

Picture of an Arctotherium for reference:

Link for photo: https://www.theguardian.com/science/gallery/2018/jun/11/when-size-does-matter-big-beasts-last-of-the-giants-in-pictures

#bnha #bnha oc #my ocs #bnha quirks #quirk thoughts #boku no hero academia #anxiety bear

[arcticdementor]

Imagine that the world as we know it ends tomorrow. There’s a global catastrophe: a pandemic virus, an asteroid strike, or perhaps a nuclear holocaust. The vast majority of the human race perishes. Our civilisation collapses. The post-apocalyptic survivors find themselves in a devastated world of decaying, deserted cities and roving gangs of bandits looting and taking by force.

Bad as things sound, that’s not the end for humanity. We bounce back. Sooner or later, peace and order emerge again, just as they have time and again through history. Stable communities take shape. They begin the agonising process of rebuilding their technological base from scratch. But here’s the question: how far could such a society rebuild? Is there any chance, for instance, that a post-apocalyptic society could reboot a technological civilisation?

Let’s make the basis of this thought experiment a little more specific. Today, we have already consumed the most easily drainable crude oil and, particularly in Britain, much of the shallowest, most readily mined deposits of coal. Fossil fuels are central to the organisation of modern industrial society, just as they were central to its development. Those, by the way, are distinct roles: even if we could somehow do without fossil fuels now (which we can’t, quite), it’s a different question whether we could have got to where we are without ever having had them.

So, would a society starting over on a planet stripped of its fossil fuel deposits have the chance to progress through its own Industrial Revolution? Or to phrase it another way, what might have happened if, for whatever reason, the Earth had never acquired its extensive underground deposits of coal and oil in the first place? Would our progress necessarily have halted in the 18th century, in a pre-industrial state?

It’s easy to underestimate our current dependence on fossil fuels. In everyday life, their most visible use is the petrol or diesel pumped into the vehicles that fill our roads, and the coal and natural gas which fire the power stations that electrify our modern lives. But we also rely on a range of different industrial materials, and in most cases, high temperatures are required to transform the stuff we dig out of the ground or harvest from the landscape into something useful. You can’t smelt metal, make glass, roast the ingredients of concrete, or synthesise artificial fertiliser without a lot of heat. It is fossil fuels – coal, gas and oil – that provide most of this thermal energy.

In fact, the problem is even worse than that. Many of the chemicals required in bulk to run the modern world, from pesticides to plastics, derive from the diverse organic compounds in crude oil. Given the dwindling reserves of crude oil left in the world, it could be argued that the most wasteful use for this limited resource is to simply burn it. We should be carefully preserving what’s left for the vital repertoire of valuable organic compounds it offers.

But my topic here is not what we should do now. Presumably everybody knows that we must transition to a low-carbon economy one way or another. No, I want to answer a question whose interest is (let’s hope) more theoretical. Is the emergence of a technologically advanced civilisation necessarily contingent on the easy availability of ancient energy? Is it possible to build an industrialised civilisation without fossil fuels? And the answer to that question is: maybe – but it would be extremely difficult. Let’s see how.

…

Well, it could, in a very limited way. If you find yourself among the survivors in a post-apocalyptic world, you could scavenge enough working solar panels to keep your lifestyle electrified for a good long while. Without moving parts, photovoltaic cells require little maintenance and are remarkably resilient. They do deteriorate over time, though, from moisture penetrating the casing and from sunlight itself degrading the high-purity silicon layers. The electricity generated by a solar panel declines by about 1 per cent every year so, after a few generations, all our hand-me-down solar panels will have degraded to the point of uselessness. Then what?

New ones would be fiendishly difficult to create from scratch. Solar panels are made from thin slices of extremely pure silicon, and although the raw material is common sand, it must be processed and refined using complex and precise techniques – the same technological capabilities, more or less, that we need for modern semiconductor electronics components. These techniques took a long time to develop, and would presumably take a long time to recover. So photovoltaic solar power would not be within the capability of a society early in the industrialisation process.

…

On the face of it, it’s not beyond the bounds of possibility that a progressing society could construct electrical generators and couple them to simple windmills and waterwheels, later progressing to wind turbines and hydroelectric dams. In a world without fossil fuels, one might envisage an electrified civilisation that largely bypasses combustion engines, building its transport infrastructure around electric trains and trams for long-distance and urban transport. I say ‘largely’. We couldn’t get round it all together.

While the electric motor could perhaps replace the coal-burning steam engine for mechanical applications, society, as we’ve already seen, also relies upon thermal energy to drive the essential chemical and physical transformations it needs. How could an industrialising society produce crucial building materials such as iron and steel, brick, mortar, cement and glass without resorting to deposits of coal?

You can of course create heat from electricity. We already use electric ovens and kilns. Modern arc furnaces are used for producing cast iron or recycling steel. The problem isn’t so much that electricity can’t be used to heat things, but that for meaningful industrial activity you’ve got to generate prodigious amounts of it, which is challenging using only renewable energy sources such as wind and water.

An alternative is to generate high temperatures using solar power directly. Rather than relying on photovoltaic panels, concentrated solar thermal farms use giant mirrors to focus the sun’s rays onto a small spot. The heat concentrated in this way can be exploited to drive certain chemical or industrial processes, or else to raise steam and drive a generator. Even so, it is difficult (for example) to produce the very high temperatures inside an iron-smelting blast furnace using such a system. What’s more, it goes without saying that the effectiveness of concentrated solar power depends strongly on the local climate.

No, when it comes to generating the white heat demanded by modern industry, there are few good options but to burn stuff.

…

But charcoal-based industry didn’t die out altogether. In fact, it survived to flourish in Brazil. Because it has substantial iron deposits but few coalmines, Brazil is the largest charcoal producer in the world and the ninth biggest steel producer. We aren’t talking about a cottage industry here, and this makes Brazil a very encouraging example for our thought experiment.

The trees used in Brazil’s charcoal industry are mainly fast-growing eucalyptus, cultivated specifically for the purpose. The traditional method for creating charcoal is to pile chopped staves of air-dried timber into a great dome-shaped mound and then cover it with turf or soil to restrict airflow as the wood smoulders. The Brazilian enterprise has scaled up this traditional craft to an industrial operation. Dried timber is stacked into squat, cylindrical kilns, built of brick or masonry and arranged in long lines so that they can be easily filled and unloaded in sequence. The largest sites can sport hundreds of such kilns. Once filled, their entrances are sealed and a fire is lit from the top.

…

Around two-thirds of Brazilian charcoal comes from sustainable plantations, and so this modern-day practice has been dubbed ‘green steel’. Sadly, the final third is supplied by the non-sustainable felling of primary forest. Even so, the Brazilian case does provide an example of how the raw materials of modern civilisation can be supplied without reliance on fossil fuels.

…

Is that our solution, then? Could our rebooting society run on wood, supplemented with electricity from renewable sources? Maybe so, if the population was fairly small. But here’s the catch. These options all presuppose that our survivors are able to construct efficient steam turbines, CHP stations and internal combustion engines. We know how to do all that, of course – but in the event of a civilisational collapse, who is to say that the knowledge won’t be lost? And if it is, what are the chances that our descendants could reconstruct it?

In our own history, the first successful application of steam engines was in pumping out coal mines. This was a setting in which fuel was already abundant, so it didn’t matter that the first, primitive designs were terribly inefficient. The increased output of coal from the mines was used to first smelt and then forge more iron. Iron components were used to construct further steam engines, which were in turn used to pump mines or drive the blast furnaces at iron foundries.

And of course, steam engines were themselves employed at machine shops to construct yet more steam engines. It was only once steam engines were being built and operated that subsequent engineers were able to devise ways to increase their efficiency and shrink fuel demands. They found ways to reduce their size and weight, adapting them for applications in transport or factory machinery. In other words, there was a positive feedback loop at the very core of the industrial revolution: the production of coal, iron and steam engines were all mutually supportive.

In a world without readily mined coal, would there ever be the opportunity to test profligate prototypes of steam engines, even if they could mature and become more efficient over time? How feasible is it that a society could attain a sufficient understanding of thermodynamics, metallurgy and mechanics to make the precisely interacting components of an internal combustion engine, without first cutting its teeth on much simpler external combustion engines – the separate boiler and cylinder-piston of steam engines?

It took a lot of energy to develop our technologies to their present heights, and presumably it would take a lot of energy to do it again. Fossil fuels are out. That means our future society will need an awful lot of timber.

In a temperate climate such as the UK’s, an acre of broadleaf trees produces about four to five tonnes of biomass fuel every year. If you cultivated fast-growing kinds such as willow or miscanthus grass, you could quadruple that. The trick to maximising timber production is to employ coppicing – cultivating trees such as ash or willow that resprout from their own stump, becoming ready for harvest again in five to 15 years. This way you can ensure a sustained supply of timber and not face an energy crisis once you’ve deforested your surroundings.

But here’s the thing: coppicing was already a well-developed technique in pre-industrial Britain. It couldn’t meet all of the energy requirements of the burgeoning society. The central problem is that woodland, even when it is well-managed, competes with other land uses, principally agriculture. The double-whammy of development is that, as a society’s population grows, it requires more farmland to provide enough food and also greater timber production for energy. The two needs compete for largely the same land areas.

We know how this played out in our own past. From the mid-16th century, Britain responded to these factors by increasing the exploitation of its coal fields – essentially harvesting the energy of ancient forests beneath the ground without compromising its agricultural output. The same energy provided by one hectare of coppice for a year is provided by about five to 10 tonnes of coal, and it can be dug out of the ground an awful lot quicker than waiting for the woodland to regrow.

It is this limitation in the supply of thermal energy that would pose the biggest problem to a society trying to industrialise without easy access to fossil fuels. This is true in our post-apocalyptic scenario, and it would be equally true in any counterfactual world that never developed fossil fuels for whatever reason. For a society to stand any chance of industrialising under such conditions, it would have to focus its efforts in certain, very favourable natural environments: not the coal-island of 18th-century Britain, but perhaps areas of Scandinavia or Canada that combine fast-flowing streams for hydroelectric power and large areas of forest that can be harvested sustainably for thermal energy.

Even so, an industrial revolution without coal would be, at a minimum, very difficult. Today, use of fossil fuels is actually growing, which is worrying for a number of reasons too familiar to rehearse here. Steps towards a low-carbon economy are vital. But we should also recognise how pivotal those accumulated reservoirs of thermal energy were in getting us to where we are. Maybe we could have made it the hard way. A slow-burn progression through the stages of mechanisation, supported by a combination of renewable electricity and sustainably grown biomass, might be possible after all. Then again, it might not. We’d better hope we can secure the future of our own civilisation, because we might have scuppered the chances of any society to follow in our wake.

#lewis dartnell #aeon.co #industrial revolution #fossil fuels #resource depletion

[comicaurora]

Was working on the wiki and thinking about Vash (the city)'s water system so I really want to know - How does Vash compare in size to other cities? What did Vash trade? What major guilds or artisan groups existed? How did education work? What laws existed, and what were the punishments? What were the purposes of those towers? What stereotypes existed? In summary, what is some general worldbuilding behind the scenes? Answer whatever you want - I'm just incredibly curious about worldbuilding here.

Oh jeez, it’s like a pop quiz.

Vash (the city) was smaller in footprint than most other comparable cities, since it didn’t expand beyond the radius of the crater it was built in. It compensated for this by having somewhat taller buildings and a denser city layout.

Most cities have similar trade systems to one another. A dense population center like that can’t produce the raw materials and food required to sustain its population, so they rely on trade and transport from the rural farming regions - food and raw materials come in, artisans and guilds use them as raw materials to create something more specialized or high-quality, and then those products are typically made available to other cities - very little material trade goes back to those rural communities, which largely work on a subsistence farming system and have less use for a money economy.

What exactly the cities manufacture and export varies from region to region; Asera, for instance, technically mostly exports highly trained mages who are hired for magical purposes, but in terms of goods they largely export lacrimas and magic items crafted at and around the Academy. Many cities effectively “export” experts in certain fields; a town that needs a monster hunted might hire an expert from a nearby city or guild to get rid of it. Most of the cities have roughly the same access to raw materials, and unless a city has a very uniquely skilled craftsman, intercity trade is fairly sparse because it’s kind of unnecessary - cities are supported by nearby farming towns, not each other. Because of this, Vash didn’t have a unique export.

But some regions have unique things available to export, and those are often highly sought-after for trade. The Ignan Desert, for instance, largely exports a very fine (and very fireproof) silk woven from the cocoons of volcano-dwelling dragons, as well as some unique herbs and spices that are found in tiny underground oases throughout the desert.

Anyway, Vash’s city had some subdivision and a few guilds - a small mage guild that largely dealt in construction and weather management, a large artists and artisans guild, a hunter’s guild (”hunter” is a broad term; hunters in rural areas typically do more food-based hunting, but in urban areas hunters usually handle the odd monster attack and generally serve as guards), and a guild dedicated to managing and helping out former godless who Vash took in - there was a bit of an adjustment process.

It’s not a guild per se, but the city also had a small population of the Silver Fang, a society of wolf-shifter ferin who banded together for group advocacy and strength in numbers. Technically not wolves-only, but other ferin are much less commonly found in the organization. Often looked at somewhat askance in other cities.

Vash had one school that got progressively bigger as the population grew. Children would enroll usually before the age of seven and spend an average of five years learning some basics - reading and writing, world history, math, science, magical theory, basic travel safety, etc. The artist and artisan guild ran a few trade schools that older children and adults could enroll in for higher education, and some artisans and merchants had an apprenticeship program. The mage guild also ran a basic school for young latent mages, mostly to teach them utility magic and get them tattooed if necessary. The hunters guild also took in and trained interested young folks, though this was typically more on-the-job training with the occasional monster-hunting field trip. This schooling setup is not uncommon for cities in this area.

Vash’s legal system was handled by his priesthood (visible on the second page in the robes with his Ω-symbol) and they generally mediated legal disputes. Smaller crimes were generally punished via some form of reparation or community service, occasionally a temporary indenture to the injured party. Vash didn’t have a prison - most cities don’t; instead, offenders severe enough to warrant a lengthy imprisonment are exiled and their connection to their city is severed, making them “godless”. Most godless are treated as anathema, but Vash considered some of the other cities to be a bit too harsh about this, and often repatriated godless if their crimes seemed minor to him. He had a small list of crimes he considered unforgivable - certain kinds of magical experimentation, abuse of life magic and the creation of chimeras, certain kinds of murder, harming children, etc etc.

The tall towers with crystals at the top were passive-charging lacrimas, a technique the Ancients pioneered. Lacrimas can be placed in the route of natural flows of magic and gradually charge with elemental power. Vash’s lacrimas were largely charged with lightning and water, and were used by the mage guild in case of severe weather to disrupt storms and prevent them from causing serious flooding. This is also not uncommon in cities in the area.

Vash didn’t have much in the way of unique stereotypes, but Vash itself was rather stereotyped by other cities - Vash has always been scrappy, and his citizens were generally pretty similar, so Vash’s people were sometimes stereotyped as being rather meatheaded and simple, unconcerned with the complex political machinations and power plays the other cities engaged in. Some cities regarded Vash as a rogue element or an agent of chaos because of his disregard for their rules and regulations.

#aurora #asks #worldbuilding #vash

[random-thought-depository]

So, in my last post I wrote this:

“Like … right now I’m planning out a story I intend to write in January; it’s supposed to be a kind of deconstruction of the Fremen mirage, and very much one of the thoughts going into it is “yo, a Proud Warrior Race would be a horrible society to live in or have as neighbors, we shouldn’t romanticize them!” and yet … I feel that the “bad guy” culture in it is much better, from a literary viewpoint, for me having given some thought to the material base of their society and how that would shape their culture. I could have just written them as flat edgelordy-grimdark barbarians, but thinking about their culture in materialist terms gave me a more complex and nuanced picture that I think will make for a more interesting and nuanced story and a fictional society that feels more interesting and human and alive.”

So, I want to infodump a little about this fictional culture I’ve thought up! I’m splitting this up into two posts because otherwise it’d be long in a way my Tumblr’s format is not kind to; in the first post I’m going to talk about the material base that defines this fictional society I’ve thought up, and in the second post I’m going to talk about more historically contingent features of their culture.

Note: for a lot of what’s in this post, I tried to make something hard SF-ish, but much of what I’ve written was the result of kind of “working backwards” from the sort of culture I was imagining to a material base that might create such a culture. So this is more playing with an idea than an attempt at anything particularly realistic.

Material base:

The basic political and economic unit of this society is the semi-self-sufficient space habitat community. These communities are about the size of a small town, I’m thinking thousands to tens of thousands of people (though I haven’t quite fixed it firmly, and anyway there’s wide variation; more successful communities are bigger). This town-size community lives in a semi-mobile space habitat, which I’m thinking is more-or-less a hollow cylinder spun for centrifugal gravity attached to a central spindle which is spacecraft construction facilities, engines, etc.. This space habitat contains enough hydroponic gardens, industrial machinery, etc. that the habitat can sustain itself completely independently for at least a few years. The space habitat has a rocket engine and a hyperspace engine, so it’s mobile, and these people are at least semi-nomadic, often moving their habitats when faced with opportunity or danger. The space habitat carries smaller spacecraft that can be detached and sent out to mine asteroids and KBO-type bodies, scoop helium 3 up from gas giant atmospheres, etc. and return these resources to the main habitat. Along with a closed life support system and efficient recycling, this makes such a community almost self-sufficient (though the almost qualifier is important, as I’ll discuss later).

People who are remembering Brett Devereaux’s last essay here may have noted a certain parallel with steppe nomads, with the main habitat being kind of analogous to the mobile but vulnerable main nomad camp where the non-combatants, livestock, and valuables are kept while the smaller resource-gatherer etc. craft are kinda analogous to the highly mobile horse-mounted war parties.

The reason these communities are so small is that their economies are not resource-limited but machinery-limited, labor-limited, and skilled specialized labor limited. Most raw materials these people may need are super-abundant to them, the bottleneck is transforming those raw materials into air, food, machinery, furniture, useful energy, etc. and maintaining efficient almost-closed loops of recycling. Sustaining a space community requires lots of complex machinery and lots of specialized skilled labor, and maintaining and replacing the machinery often requires more complex machinery (tools to make the tools) and more specialized skilled labor. Keeping humans alive in space is hard, so the return on investment from this is low. Therefore, these communities generally try to make efficient use of labor and maintain more-or-less the smallest viable population.

This implies reproduction within communities like this will probably be carefully controlled. A community like this must stay within a delicate balance; they must have enough people to do all the necessary labor with a comfortable safety margin to avoid situations like the only person with some important skill dying unexpectedly before they could train their replacement, but they must not have so many people that they strain the life support capacity of their habitat. That suggests reproduction usually tightly and deliberately controlled to stay at more-or-less replacement rate and no more.

It also implies a community like this will probably be quite communitarian and disciplined. Consumption will have to be tightly controlled. The means of production will probably be directly controlled by the political leadership. Its economy would probably look communist-ish to us, or maybe like a Bronze Age palace economy, with most necessities and luxuries being distributed basically as rations. Commercial transactions will be marginal to the internal economies of these communities; they’ll probably exist, but only in the form of informal mostly small-scale barter (think something similar to the cigarette economy that may exist in a prison), and they will not be anyone’s primary occupation or source of subsistence or power. Internal economic inequality within a community like this will be mostly a matter of status, not wealth; if somebody eats better it’s because they receive more and better food as an entitlement associated with their political office and/or social status, not because they own a big pile of gold that they use to buy food or something. Probably a community like this will be fairly economically egalitarian even if it is socio-politically unequal; if there’s a king he might have a somewhat bigger apartment, somewhat more and better food, a nice wardrobe of good-quality clothes with lots of bling, etc., but the difference in access to resources between him and one of his servants would be trivial compared to the difference in access to resources between me and a billionaire.

OK, but these people are supposed to be “bad guys” and a “Proud Warrior Race,” so where does that come in? Well, now let’s look at the economy of a community like this and ask: what might they need to get from other communities, and by extension what might they want to violently steal from outsiders?

Certainly not raw resources! If they want water, nitrogen, deuterium, iron, copper, platinum, etc. they can just send out a mining ship to an asteroid or KBO-like body to get some and bring it to them. If they want helium 3 they can just send out a scoop-ship to go down into the atmosphere of the nearest gas giant, gather some up, and bring it to them. And so on. Raw resources are mostly super-abundant to a culture like this and it would make no sense to risk injury or death stealing them from armed outsiders (there are a few exceptions to this that prove the rule, more on that later). So, if not raw resources, what?

Remember that their economy is machinery-limited. They need lots of complex machinery to survive, and then they need more complex machinery to repair and replace that complex machinery (tools to make the tools), and then sometimes they need tools to make the tools to make the tools, and so on. If each community had to be completely self-sufficient this might spiral out unmanageably. But it becomes much more manageable if they are just mostly self-sufficient and tap into larger commercial/industrial networks, e.g. a mostly planet-dwelling society with some orbital infrastructure and asteroid mining that has millions of people. Then if there’s the occasional hard to make spare part they can’t make themselves, it’s not a big deal, they can just send a trading expedition to get some of those parts from outsiders every ten years or so. Or if there’s some hard to make anti-viral drug they can’t make themselves, again, no big deal, they can just send a trading expedition to get some of it from outsiders every few years. A trading expedition ... or a raiding expedition.

Probably they would usually prefer to trade, humans usually prefer sharing or trading to violent theft because it’s less risky, violent theft means the possibility of injury or death (plus in this case complex machinery would be likely to get smashed up in a violent heist). A mutually beneficial trading relationship between a culture like this and a planet-dweller culture would be quite natural; to these people a planet-dweller society is rich in labor but poor in mineral resources such as platinum, while to planet-dwellers this space-dweller culture is rich in mineral resources but poor in labor and certain kinds of machinery and high value added finished goods. But here we have a potential basis for a culture that follows a Viking-style strategy of “if they outgun us, trade, if we outgun them, raid,” with the consequence of this culture’s relationship to other societies being a mix of trade and war.

Some raw resources may be worth stealing here; exceptions that prove the rule that for a space-dwelling culture like this raw resources aren’t worth stealing but value-added finished goods may be. For example, it’s theoretically possible to sift small quantities of naturally occurring antimatter from gas giant magnetic fields, and that stuff might be valuable for catalyzing fusion reactions. That might be worth stealing, because in a sense it’s a raw resource that’s kind of like a finished good; the difficulty is concentrating the very diffuse stuff; an antimatter capture facility with its Penning traps almost full might be worth raiding in the same way a big hoard of gathered acorns might be worth raiding for hunter-gatherers (this resource is abundant but diffuse, somebody else has taken the trouble to gather a lot of it into one spot, you can effectively appropriate their hard work by stealing the hoard). Similarly I could see this culture opportunistically intercepting freighters carrying helium 3, mined semi-refined asteroid material, etc., not so much stealing the resources as functionally stealing the labor of gathering and refining the resources.

There’s another thing a community like this might want to take from outsiders: people.

The economy of a community like this is also skilled specialized labor limited. In fact, that’s probably the more fundamental bottleneck: they can’t build and operate all the machinery they need to be truly self-sufficient because they don’t have the skilled specialist labor, and this is an equilibrium trap because trying to create more skilled specialist labor has a low return on investment for them; keeping a human alive in space is resource-intensive, and a new human probably won’t begin to give them a return on the investment for at least 15 years or so, likely longer (skilled specialized labor, so think e.g. doctors and engineers and literal rocket scientists; training them will take time). One way a community like this can adjust the equation to be more in its favor is to acquire skilled specialized laborers who have already been raised and trained by a different community; then they can skip all the investment in the child and go straight to benefiting from the labor of the fully trained adult.

There’s another reason a community like this might want to take people: genetic diversity. We’re talking about a small community, maybe a few tens of thousands of people, that is somewhat isolated. Inbreeding and lack of genetic diversity can kill small and isolated communities. As I said earlier, reproduction in a community like this will probably be extensively controlled, and I think one aspect of that might be controlling marriages to eliminate or minimize the risks associated with inbreeding. But it would be helpful if a community like this could assimilate some outsiders every generation, to increase its genetic diversity. So the community may want to assimilate even outsiders who don’t have any particularly in-demand specialist skills, to boost its genetic diversity.

Note: while this is a setting where aliens exist, it’s one that’s demographically dominated by humans, so most of the foreigners these people interact with will be other humans. This is significant here.

These two motivations synergize with each other. Most obviously, assimilating a skilled specialist outsider increases the community’s skilled specialist labor pool and also the community’s genetic diversity. But also, because of dynamics adjacent to Baumol’s cost disease, even relatively “unskilled” labor would be valuable in a community like this. Somebody who cleans toilets frees up somebody else to be e.g. a doctor or a nuclear engineer, in a much more reliable and direct way than is the case in a high-population capitalist society like ours. So even assimilating a relatively “unskilled” outsider could both increase the community’s genetic diversity and give it a real economic boost (as with a skilled specialist, compared to creating a new worker through natural reproduction and education, it’s a significant savings to the community if the new worker has been raised to adulthood by a different community).

I’m putting “unskilled” in quotes here cause I think when people say “unskilled” when talking about labor often what they are really talking about is “skills that are taught outside formal school institutions” or “skills that are transmitted but not taught.” I think “unskilled” in this sense is often a political term used to devalue people’s labor and justify people being paid little, worked hard, exposed to unpleasant working conditions, etc., so I don’t like using it ... but I can’t think of a better word to quickly communicate the concept I want to communicate here; I must work with the language my culture has given me. But I’ll put it in quotes here, to indicate I’m not using the concept uncritically.

Aside: you might think that a labor-limited community would make lots of use of robots and other automation, but I’m not sure that’d be true of these people. You’d think a futuristic super-Roomba would be a labor savings compared to a person with a simpler hand-pushed vacuum cleaner, but what about all the labor and machinery needed to make the Roomba? A Roomba represents a strategy of investing secondary sector labor to save tertiary sector labor, and that makes sense if you’ve got a big population and can build big factories so you can benefit from economies of scale, but it might not work as well for almost-self-sufficient small communities. A Roomba factory may be worth it if it saves the labor of a million human cleaners, but what about if it saves the labor of 100 human cleaners? A human is a very useful general-purpose gadget that can replace many specialized gadgets. So I think, counterintuitively, in a community like this you might actually see a lot of theoretically relatively easily automated manual labor being done by humans. This would synergize with a strategy of assimilating some relatively “unskilled” outsiders to increase genetic diversity; these people must be fed, given air to breathe, etc. like everyone else, so it would make sense to try to take advantage of their “as a human, they are a very useful general-purpose gadget that can replace many specialized gadgets” feature. Remember, this is a community that would want to make efficient use of labor and that would want to maintain approximately replacement rate reproduction.

As I said, humans generally prefer sharing or trading to violent theft, because violent theft is risky, and I think that would probably apply here too. Space communities like this would likely have traditions of peacefully “trading” people with each other. One relatively nice way this might happen is e.g. every ten years communities exchange groups of young volunteer emigrants. A less nice way is something like a political leader selling another community’s political leader a doctor and receiving as payment two relatively “unskilled” but young, pretty, and fertile women to be brides for his sons. But again, where trade is a possibility, violent theft is also a possibility. So along with stealing machinery and value-added finished goods, a primary goal of raiding may be capturing people; especially skilled specialists such as doctors, nuclear engineers, etc., but anyone who looks like they might make a good slave might be opportunistically abducted.

If this is starting to sound like nightmare fuel, you’re not wrong, but there is one significant mitigating factor. Remember that the most high-value and sought-after captives would be skilled specialists such as doctors, nuclear engineers, etc.. This is the kind of work where trying to extract labor from people by simple brutality doesn’t work well. You can’t just whip a computer programmer to make them code faster, and you really don’t want to anger the person who fixes the machine that makes the air you breathe, one of the people who tend the nuclear reactor that creates energy for your community, or the person who might do surgery on you. So the experience of being captured and enslaved by these people will often be less chain gang or Gor novel stuff and more “You are given a small but comfortable apartment, decent food, and moderate work assignments. It is made clear to you that bad things will happen to you if you make trouble or don’t work. If you obey your captors and do the work they tell you to do, they will be nice to you and treat you well. Their ultimate plan is to get you to become accustomed to your new life, make friends, get a boyfriend or girlfriend and make a child or three with them, and in this way become sufficiently invested in your new community that you wouldn’t want to go home even if you could.”

Of course, let’s not be too charitable to people who are basically enslavers; that’s how relatively high-value captives are treated, less valued captives are at much more risk of physical and sexual abuse, reproductive coercion, and unsafe and unpleasant working and living conditions.

If you’ve read James C. Scott’s The Art of Not Being Governed and Against The Grain, this may remind you a little of Mr. Scott’s thesis that for much of the history of civilization states were labor-limited, not land-limited. Mr. Scott’s work was a big inspiration to me when I was imagining this culture. Someday I might make a post talking about how I think “the purpose of war isn’t to acquire resources, it’s to acquire people, infrastructure, and machinery” is one of the more plausible paradigms for war in space, but this is long enough so I’ll leave that for another day.

Earlier I drew an analogy between the resource gatherer ships of these people and the war parties of steppe nomads. The context I’ve described here makes the analogy much better. Communities like this won’t just carry resource gatherer ships, but also raiding ships, built for raiding and heavily armed. This also implies violence will be a substantial factor in the life of a community like this; either they will have a significant class of professional warriors, or raiding and preparing for raiding will be a significant part of the average person’s life. I’m going with the first option, which is how you get a Proud Warrior Race instead of weekend-warrior types; as is usual in cases like this, the “Proud Warrior Race” is actually a specific privileged class within this society, and when you read that they are proud you should think of it in that context. I’ll talk about that a lot more in my next post, in which I’ll talk about these people as a culture instead of just as an economy.

#my writing #worldbuilding #James C. Scott #my big ideas #cw: slavery #cw: rape #cw: reproductive coercion #space #hard SF #warning: long #Artemis of the airless vastness

[restitutiopax]

Spark Types (of the Uniend Cluster)

     Given that all of these are based on the Covenant Thirteen, rather than the Multiversal Thirteen, consider this to be applicable to any universal stream where said Thirteen are in use. And, obvs, this ain’t canon, but feel free to use it and adapt it as you like or as it suits.

                            To Start:

Sparks, the very core of a Cybertronian, are primarily composed of light. They give a Transformer life, soul, and often personality; and, while most are unable to survive outside the body for any length of time, a few are even immortal and capable of traversing space without a body for eons. 

      Sparks, for the purpose of this article, can be broken down into these parts: a Corona, also known as a EM Field, that encircles the Spark and Body with some level of distance; a Photosphere, the light that defines a Spark; and a Core, the Photonic shard that roots their Light to the Material Plain. Also of note is a Cybertronian’s Innermost Energon, which keeps the Spark fueled.    

      As far as the Uniend Cluster is concerned, no unaffiliated Spark is purple. And, if one does appear (which can happen), they’re typically snuffed out before they make it to a body. 

      Similarly, no Spark is a ‘dark’ shade (deep navy, mahogany, etc), but the intensity of their light can make something appear to be darker than it actually is.

                             Types: 

      Prima: The Spark of an Attacker. These Sparks are a harsh gold, heavy in all ways but not dense. These Sparks like to be Primes and, when not being Leaders, they can take a lot of damage in preparation for becoming a Leader. These Sparks are almost always sphere-like, as if the concept of being unique or different was an affront to their very being. 

      Vector: The Spark of a Defender. These Sparks are thin-Cored, with a dense Photosphere and a twirling Corona. These Sparks can vary between a soft gold to a gentle magenta, or sometimes both in spiral-patterns. Oddly enough, these Sparks are completely immune to the effects of long-term Space-Bridge usage, and are less likely to succumb to Space Madness.  

      Trion: The Spark of a Scholar. This Spark tends to have a larger and more detailed Core, but a lighter Photosphere and a complicated Corona. Most are a soft magenta pink. When removed from a body, these Sparks are more likely to recall their memories upon being transplanted; this is often attributed to their unique Photonic Crystals. 

      Solus: The Spark of a Maker. This is the Spark of architects, weapon-masters, and those who know better than to experiment past their limits. These Sparks have a typical Core, light Photosphere, and tight Corona. Their colouration is often a sharp, steely blue. 

      Micronus: The Spark of all Minicons. This Spark is dense, with a large Core and a compacted Photosphere, but the Corona tends to be rather small. Mint colouration is common. They’re capable of storing great amounts of energy in their Spark, which allows them to enhance their partners. In the Uniend cluster, Twins are very common from this Spark Type.

      Alchemist: The Spark of Students. This Spark tends to be blue, often varying between soft and brilliant, uniformly light in all ways. These Sparks are so light that, supposedly, they’ve been found wandering outside of the body, floating amongst materials and others. These Sparks have the highest tolerance for High-Grade.

      Nexus: The Spark of a Combiner. While Combiners can be made of non-Nexus Sparks, having a Nexus Spark involved makes the process far easier and far more comfortable. These Sparks tend to be an almost-white shade of Gold, with a dense Core, varied Photosphere, and short-range Corona. 

      Onyx: The Spark of a Beast Former. Despite the name, this Spark appears in non-beastformers. This is a typical Core and foggy Photosphere, with a large Corona attributed to the Predacon Empire’s success in communication. Uniquely enough, this Spark tends to be split in colour; the colours are always complimentary. 

      Amalgamous: The Shifter, and rarest of all the Spark-Types. The only definer in this type is the latticework of their Spark’s energy; they can be any colour, any density, and any frame-type. Transformers who were built with multiple alternative modes are often this typing and, typically, they can sustain multiple modes without a modifier.

      Quintus: The Spark of Dreamers. Supposedly, those of this Typing have the most vivid of dreams, bordering on out-of-body experiences; but, quite frankly, this is usually just because this Type in inclined towards drinking practically anything put in front of them simply because of their curiosity. These Sparks like to be a sharp green, with swirls of silver. Heavy Cores, wavy Photospheres, and absolutely enormous Coronas are quite common.

      Maximo: The Spark of a Silvertongue. They’re a soft red to uncomfortable green Spark, with delicate Cores, brilliant Photospheres, and dense Coronas. These Sparks are almost always Seekers (leading to an unfortunate reputation, even if entirely fair at times), and are thus a common sight in Vos. Otherwise, they’re quite rare.

      Megatronus: A common Spark, especially in Kaon. Well known for being as brilliantly red as rust, these Sparks tend to have dense Cores, dense Photospheres, and brittle Coronas. They tend to be rather large as well, even in Minibots or those teeny-tiny hand-sized bots that occasionally pop out of the Well.

      Arisen: Otherwise known as a Thirteenth Spark. These are amongst the most common Spark-types and, similarly, are amongst the most varied. Their defining feature is the holographic tones in their dense Photosphere, seemly reflective of anyone around them. Like the prior Typing, these like to be strangely large for the size of the body often attached to them.

                            Modifiers: 

Sparks, in addition, often have Modifiers in addition to their base Typing. These can stack.   

       Point One Percenters: The biggest of the big and the best of the best. These Sparks have enormous output, typically being so dense that they’re nearly physical. Prolonged exposure to one of these can make those who lack this Modifier very sick.

       Bonding: The act of merging one’s Spark, sometimes in a semi-permanent state, can affect their Spark quite dearly. In cases where mass or density is unequal between the Sparks, they’ll trade out and become almost identical (pardoning their Core). This includes colour, which, instead of mixing perfectly, will often just swirl about.

       Innermost Energon Transfusions: Similar to bonding, removing and replacing someone’s Innermost Energon may cause the colour of the donor’s Spark to swirl through the patient’s Spark. This is usually temporary. 

       Afflicted: Otherwise known as Corruption. Upon being exposed to Dark Energon, or any Angolmois in general, Sparks will slowly require more and more energy to function. Mass will gather around their Photonic Core, like Energon crystallizing, and rust will slowly infect more and more of the body. After enough time, the host’s Spark will suddenly fade, before the gathered mass restarts and resets the Spark itself. Some medics call this fully Afflicted Spark an ‘Anti-Spark,’ which sounds way dumber than it actually is.

       Age: Sparks will naturally lighten in density and fade in brilliance as they spend more and more time away from the Allspark. Rumor goes that annual trips to the Well ‘can brighten and lengthen one’s life,’ but that’s a load of hogwash. The dimming of age actually doesn’t affect one’s lifespan, beyond their Photonic Core becoming steadily more and more brittle. 

      Robot Babies: There’s probably a system of dominant Sparks and regressive Sparks that decides what your weird little parasite robot baby gets, but good luck figuring it out. 

      Shapes!: Not so much a modifier like the others, but Sparks can come in all sorts of shapes and sizes. Spheres and blobs are amongst the most common, but galactic shapes such as spirals and twirls have been recorded. One unfortunate, non-affiliated Decepticon even had a core shaped like Primus’ Cog!

      Throwbacks: Certain Sparks exhibit perfect confirmation to their typing, plus an outlier ability expected of that type, and define the Spark as a Throwback. That means that Spark resembles that of the Prime it’s based off of that it’s believed the Spark is a direct descendant of that mechanical. A good example of this would Orion Pax being a throwback to Arisen. 

                            Others:

While not technically Sparks in their own right, these particular congregations of energy are either very similar to Sparks or formed the basis for Sparks. 

       Primus: The progenitor of Sparks, Primus’ Spark forms the basis for all of his children. Other than his Core, which is a massive Photonic Crystal that splinters and reincorporates those who come to and from, his Spark is quite light.

       Unicron: And, in opposite, Unicron’s ‘Spark’ (sometimes called an Anti-Spark, othertimes simply as a Core) is dense enough that humans confused it for a giant, molten iron ball.The exact makeup is unknown, what with no good scientist wanting to get near that nonsense, but it seems capable of splintering like his Brother’s. 

       Humanity: Analogous to a Soul, a human’s brain puts out similar enough wavelengths that it can actually survive in a Transformer body for a while, and can interface with certain artefacts. Too long of the former can drive a human mad tho’.

                            In Conclusion:

This would get way more complicated if you incorporated IDW1′s Spark Typings, because it would probably stack until it’s as complicated as human genealogy. 

#text #headcanons; #aka this thing got steadily sassier and sassier as it went on #anyway #have fun figuring out ya'lls Spark Typing

[dat-town]

CODE Z3RO | CODE 01

characters: BTS & Red Velvet genre: thriller, futuristic au warning: none summary: The twelve most ambitious and promising university students are welcomed in Choego, the world’s first entirely artificial intelligence-driven city, to compete for five job contracts that could change their life. But what if something goes wrong? What if they get trapped? What if the city suddenly turns against them? Can they find a way out before the countdown reaches zero? words: 4.4K tagged: @philosopher-of-fandoms​

➼ Chapter Index

Smart cities had been prickling people's mind ever since microchip was created and even before. A place with infrastructure so developed you could find everything you need in a 10 minute walk radius, with such top security you wouldn't have to be afraid of letting your child outside, with an air so clear thanks to the green places and lack of cars that you could see stars clearly at night. The city that itself produced all the energy it needed making it sustainable and environmentally friendly. A community that didn't need nor relied on physical workers anymore but had machines to do everything they did. A city like that used to be a dream. Now, after dozens and dozens of failed projects, that city was Choego.

And Jeon Jungkook was there to make a name for himself.

After getting checked by a high tech security system, not to mention the more than 6 months long application and selection process, he was finally here, inside of those enormous gates of the artificial city, in the heart of future, as the second youngest of the twelve candidates to be a part of the real-life simulation, to experience another world, the life as it was and what it could be.

"This is beautiful," a girl with her brown hair in a ponytail, tied by a red ribbon whispered on his right in awe.

Jungkook glanced at her a little disinterested but followed her gaze anyway to marvel at the city built of metal and glass, pretty parks in-between of the human-made constructs and a part of him agreed. The lack of annoying mass of people flooding the streets, the clean roads without litter or stinking smell, the mathematical architecture of this place sure impressed him too.

Even if Choego was more of a ghost town with the lack of people than the dream city presented on ads.

"Sure if you have the taste of a caveman," another girl chimed in sarcastically, flipping her long black hair behind her shoulder, grabbing on her Gucci bag like her life depended on it.

Jungkook scoffed, averting his attention back to the huge projectors welcoming them in the city of future. It was a short movie about the development and building of the town, the fight and struggle of the hundreds of researchers, scientifics, politicians and other powerful people who dreamt a place like this could exist as it was today. 

An awkward laugh cut through the murmurs of arrived students as their host descended on the granite stairs.

“Sorry for the advertisement. Our PR team insisted on showing you this,” said the tall, graceful female figure. She had a lab coat over her carmine dress, thick framed glasses on her snub nose and ginger hair so shiny she could have made an appearance in advertisements. She looked gorgeous, no wonder half the boys widened their eyes at the sight. However, the other half turned a blind eye to the welcoming committee, more immersed in the city itself.

Jungkook barely bat an eyelash at her as his mouth rather hang agapé on the enormous computer and server room the city had, a whole new district of wires and chips and machines that keep the city alive, it was basically the heart of its blood circulation. Amazing.

“My name is Han Raina and I’m the lead researcher here,” the woman bowed towards them slightly and being either polite or intimidated, most of the candidates did the same. “It’s my pleasure to greet you all.”

It sounded a bit forced, artificial but everybody anticipated her welcome speech because of the loads of classified information they basically came here in the blinds, not knowing anything about what to expect. Jungkook for one was clueless, and as he looked around, the other candidates had just as curious eyes like him. He was sure in one thing: he won’t go home without getting a job and the foundation of his stable future here.

“First of all, congratulation for passing our tests and being chosen. You are the greatest hope of the next generation and that’s exactly why you are here now. To see and be a part of the future. I would like to remind you that everything you do is recorded on hidden CCTV cameras all around the city because of security reasons and so that we can monitor your reactions.”

“I haven’t seen any cameras,” a pastel-haired boy interrupts as he checks the surroundings. A few follow his lead and he’s right, there are no cameras that can be seen around.

“They are too small to see. Probably micro or nano-sized,” Jungkook muttered and relished in the way every head turned towards him. As an electronic engineer student that was something he knew well.

“That’s right, Mr. Jeon, great thought,” Miss Raina smiles at him fondly and the screen that previously showcased the city’s presentation, was now divided into nine smaller frames, live recording of them from different angles. “But please, don’t pay any mind to them, act natural.”

For those who weren’t overdramatic, it was an easy task since they were aware that each public places had these kind of cameras recording people’s every move even in Seoul. Also, for safety reasons of future it was essential for the city to have eyes everywhere.

“I know all of you are very excited and curious since we left you in the dark but please understand that the simulation will only be realistic if you don’t know the details. However, it’s time to give you a little head-up on the city and about your week here. We can sit down and make ourselves comfortable in our meeting room. Follow me,” she beckoned a finger, inviting them closer and the dozen of university students followed her in unison.

“Sorry,” the earlier, ponytail girl apologized when she bumped into Jungkook on accident. She had pure innocence and childlike wonders in her eyes. Kim Yerim, the boy glanced at the name card hanging in her neck and he made a mental note about this girl not being a real competition.

“Let’s go, Yeri,” an older guy, Kim Seokjin based on his card, nudged her to move forward and there was both familiarity and fondness in his voice as he guided the girl by a hand on the small of her back. What a coincidence for siblings to make it to the top 12. Smartness must run in family or maybe the researchers wanted to add this as a factor to the simulation, who knows?

The group walked along a wall with a huge 3D map of the city into a room on the second floor which had a great view of the park in front of the building. They were merely 2 hours from Seoul yet it felt like another world, fancy, clean, ultramodern and green. Even the chairs in the room were done with utmost care to fit all the health requirements and ergonomic needs.

As soon as everybody was seated, the woman pulled out a high pack of documents and shared one pile of paper with each of them.

“First, we will need you to sign a non-disclosure agreement. You can’t tell anybody what you saw or experienced here. It’s a business know-how we can’t risk. If it’s done we can finally talk freely,” she explained as nobody complained. When they agreed to help this project, it was an evident, understandable condition.

Quickly everybody scribbled their names onto the paper but only a few of them read the contract throughout about the consequences of violating the confidentiality. Jungkook was one of those people.

When all of them handed the papers back to Miss Raina, she clapped happily.

“Okay, so now let’s talk about the city. You probably know a lot about its history, or if you don’t, you can always take our leaflets, so now let’s talk about its design,” she pointed at the map appearing on digital screen. As she was talking about certain parts of it, the map constantly changed, zoomed in or out. “We are now here, in the main research building of the town. Next to us is the laboratory, there’s the hospital, the public offices on the other side of the road. You can see the parks as the green blocks yourself too. Your dorms are located in the residential area, on the western part of the city. So yes, you will be able to see the sea but we do not recommend visiting it. For security reasons we closed off the ports.”

“And the bridge too,” a messy, brown haired guy mumbled as he stared at their cheerful host with cold suspicion. No matter how quiet he was, with that firmness of his voice nobody could not hear what he said and the hidden implication behind it.

Han Raina raised one of her prettily arched brows. 

“Sorry but what do you mean by that?”

For a minute, it seemed like the guy was about to leave it with a grimace and careless shrug but then he pointed at the eastern side of the map where the Bridge of Silence, as they called it, connected the artificial island with the mainland.

“This city is totally closed and has only one way in and out with a gate controlled by electronics. Do you have any emergency plans for like terror attacks, or if they hack the gate?” he asked edging on the border of being necessarily polite and an arrogantly know-it-all. However, it was undebatable that the question he stated was an essential element of the security and safety of Choego. 

“That’s highly unlikely to happen, Mr. Min but of course, “ the researcher lady nodded and sat down with her elbows resting on the table. She acted like the patient elementary school teacher educating the kids about the basic laws of physics. “Imagine this city as a huge computer. What happens when a computer is attacked?”

“The firewall kicks in,” the apparently tech-educated guy replied without hesitance and earned a satisfied smile from their host. A pang of envy poisoned Jungkook’s veins as he watched their interactions. Wasn’t it unfair for one of them to have a head start like this?

“Correct, it’s the same here too. Though, since our security is so high level any computer control panel has three-factor authentication including a biology one too,” Miss Raina explained and as Jungkook looked around, he wasn't sure everybody understood the concept of three-level protection. That it needed three separated traits to open a door, one knowledge-based like a password, one possession-based like an ID card and one biology-based like a retina scan. Because of the latter it was the most difficult kind of security system to trick without making a scene and the researcher echoed his thoughts:

“It’s impossible to hack our system from the outside. If anybody tries that, they have to be here and then we can pull a Louvre move on them. Does anyone know what happens if the security system detects a theft in the most famous museum of Paris?”

Ah, what is this? A quiz night? Jungkook almost grunted because he had no idea but he was actually surprised that for a long minute, nobody spoke up.

“It will close its doors, seal the endangered zone with bars until the police arrives,” the tall, wide-shouldered guy from earlier, Seokjin said much to the delight of the lady.

“Yes, so if anything like that happens, we plan to trap the intruders inside. The sectors would be switched off the electrical grid one by one until the attacker has no choice but to wait for the authorities right here,” she concluded and turned back to the suspicious guy. “And we have evacuation plans, too. Don’t worry.”

Jungkook wanted to laugh. If they were worried about something that definitely wasn’t terrorist attacks or a tsunami flooding the city. What were the chances of these events to happen right now while they were being evaluated? See? He was more stressed of the possibility of leaving without a contract in his hands, head down in shame.

“Okay, so since we talked about your dorm. Here are your ID cards,” Miss Raina flicked her fingers and at cue, the staff started handing out metal bracelets for each of them. “You can take off the visitor cards you got at the gate earlier since you are going to use these bracelets for identification from now on.”

The accessory’s design was simple, gender-neutral, easy to clamp on and light on the wrist.

“This functions as the prototype of the chips that will be injected into our future residents. It not only stores all the data about you but also monitors your health in case you were in an endangered situation. It also keeps track of your GPS coordinates to locate you and it holds all your authorization to make sure which sectors and offices you can and can’t go in. Your authorization level right now is a common researcher’s so you access most of our buildings including the labors. Once you will work here, of course, it will depend on your job position.”

“Does it have a camera in it, too?” a guy in baseball cap chimed in certainly not impressed by the idea of always being followed around. Not like phones didn’t have the same functions already and millions of people used those voluntarily.

The woman was quick to shake her head, seemingly absolutely horrified at the presumption.

“Of course not, we respect personal space.”

“But you will know when we go to pee,” said the guy as he threw in his visitor card that said Jung Hoseok to the middle of the table and put on the bracelet anyway. Even if this test took the evaluation process a bit too seriously with analyzing all their reactions, none of them wanted to leave. No matter how much doubt or fear they felt, they were too curious or too ambitious.

“What’s more, based on our health factors they will know when we need to go before we do,” a red-haired girl chirped and Jungkook frowned at the bracelet clipsed on his wrist.

“Yes, Miss Son is right, it’s an advanced tool, but keep in mind, it’s for your own good. It’s the future,” the researcher lady reminded them. The ‘future’ seemed to be their magic word solving every problem and being the ultimate answer.

“All in all, you need to have the bracelets on you all the time since it’s the key for your dorm rooms, too. Boys and girls will be separated, of course, but we provide you a common area to socialize where dinner and breakfast will also be served everyday. Based on your daily activities you will have lunch in either the offices’ or labor’s canteen,” she once again points at the map that highlighted the mentioned parts and flashed tomorrow’s menu on the board. Reading about Korean barbeque and pasta salads with salmon made Jungkook hungry as it was almost dinnertime and he hadn’t eaten since morning.

“Ahh it’s excited, isn’t it?” Miss Raina clapped enthusiastic again but nobody joined her. A few forced an awkward smile and some didn’t even care. They didn’t come here to have these chitchats and the middle-aged woman was most likely aware too as she added: “Don’t forget, even though we evaluate you individually, you have to work together in teams to succeed the simulation. Any questions?”

A few candidate exchanged uncertain glances but then a stern looking guy in dress shirt asked the question that had been on all of their mind: “What is the simulation about exactly?”

With his Rolex watch and elegant attire, it was obvious he came from a rich household. The son of Parks, Jungkook had heard about him. It was all in the news, that the child of the right-hand of Seoul's mayor will be a part of this test, one of those who can experience the dream city first hand. Some even thought he came here to spy for his father.

It was an interesting thought. Why would the investors of Choego let a potential rival's son on their land willingly? Or people are just being nosy and making fuss about nothing?

“I can’t tell you, sorry," Miss Raina shook her head and provided a diplomatic answer about her reasons. "It would change your natural reactions and the results of our research would be false.”

It actually made sense but Jungkook still couldn't make anything out about this project. He applied for the promise of bright future but they all basically dove into the unknown as they came here. But he wasn't the only one worrying about being left in the dark.

“And when will we be notified about our daily activities?” An older girl with rounded glasses asked as she was tapping on the glass table rhythmically but the awaited answer was just as vague as the earlier one.

“You will find your schedule for the week in your dorms. If you don’t have more questions, my colleagues will accompany you to there. Rest well, tomorrow will be a long day,” the researcher lady bid her goodbye with a well-practiced smile and two other scientists showed them the way to their temporary residences.

“You were brought here in an environmentally friendly bus but since the city is designed for pedestrians and not for cars you'll have to walk convenient distances like this,” they explained as they headed outside.

Their guides kept talking about the advanced technologies used in certain parts of the cities, the borders of the zones, the buildings' functions but Jungkook's mind wandered off as he stared ahead at the paradise made of glass, metal and money. He would live here one day, he decided and he wouldn't let anybody stop him now that he was finally here.

Kim Yerim had long learnt that in every group of people there was that one who knew the most nasty secrets of everybody and couldn’t shut up. She didn’t have to wait long to realize that among the twelve of them, Park Sooyoung was the gossip queen. No wonder since her whole family came from the tabloids.

“I really don’t get what half of these people even do here. It was in the requirement to have a major that can contribute to the development of the city and yet, here we have a psychologist, a sociologist and even a journalist?” she scoffed pointing at Joohyun, Hoseok and Yerim one by one. She didn’t even try to be discreet about her opinion as she was talking to noone in particular. She just wanted to show off but maybe it wasn’t the best crowd to do so, to outstand from. The mentioned boy didn’t seem to care that he was titled useless while the group’s eldest, Joohyun turned tomato red. It must have been quite offensive to her to be told off by a third-year while she was working on her doctorate.

And Yerim, she quickly turned her gaze away and her brother patted the back of her hand.

“Don’t even listen to her, okay?” Seokjin whispered into her ear and shot a sharp look at the girl in brand designed clothes. He was trying hard not to snap. He might have been a pretty calm person but for his sister, he would have done anything, to any extent.

It definitely wasn’t the hosts’ greatest idea to lock them into one place competing to get those limited job offers while they had to cooperate. They were both rivals and team members. What kind of absurd paradox it was? So when after having their nutritional dinner at their dorm place, they were advised to get to know each other a bit by introducing themselves or at least their name, age and major, it was almost obvious it wouldn’t end well.

“And that shabby kid?” Sooyoung carried on unbothered, pointing her finger at the youngest engineer of the group, Jungkook, if Yerim remembered correctly. “Believe me, he is the charity case here. This dorm is a real glow up from his place. The city creators must have taken pity on him”

“Oh as if you are any better. What the hell are you doing here, little vacation girl?” Jimin snorted and brought his arms onto the table, locking his fingers and looking straight at the Gangnam girl over his hands. From the look of her eyes, it was obvious the two of them had some history together or at least they knew each other, which wasn’t surprising as both of them lived the high life of rich kids. “You are only here because your daddy slipped a big pile of money to the investors.”

“Excuse me,” Sooyoung’s breath hitched and she looked downright offended by the accusation. “Every city needs tourists and that’s why I’m here. It’s just as important as the bullshit you do.”

That said bullshit was actually genetics, an innovative and really fascinating field of engineering. Yerim was actually quite impressed that even genetics were presented by the candidates.

“What did you just say? At least my field makes our lives better and healthier, it makes progress while you are just money-hungry...” the politician’s son kept raising his voice until Jin interrupted him:

“Enough,” he stopped the heated dispute with a single word before it could get even worse. “Haven’t you heard? We will need to work together. Not against each other.”

Maybe it was his Crisis, Disaster and Risk Management masters classes that taught him how to approach these problems but unfortunately, not everybody was so cooperating.

“As if,” somebody mumbled from the back, his lilac hair falling onto his forehead. He looked like he wanted no part in this desperate attempt at staying civilized as he stood up and left without any further goodbye. It stirred up the calming atmosphere again and Yerim couldn’t help but wonder if it was on purpose. Marketing was the keypoint of manipulation after all. That’s why she didn’t blame Sooyoung entirely for stereotyping all of them based on their majors and the information her father provided.

“Watch if I ever team up with these,” Gucci girl’s mouth pulled a grimace and as dramatic as she could be, she walked out the opposite direction Taehyung did, towards the girls’ dorm.

Yerim sighed. It was only their first day here and yet tension was already cuttable in the air. And the couple’s fight didn’t help either…

“Stop being so clingy, Joon,” the red-haired med student snapped at her boyfriend in disbelief. “We are not on a vacation, for god’s sake, let’s be professionals about this.”

“Huh? Now you’re saying we can’t be boyfriend and girlfriend here or what?” The pastel blonde hair guy blinked in confusion and - in Yerim’s opinion - understandable hurt written clearly on his face.

“It’s nothing personal, honey, but it’s basically a very unique job interview and you don’t befriend your rivals,” she said and trotted after Sooyoung.

A heavy sigh left Namjoon’s mouth and Hoseok who sit on his other side patted his back in empathy.

“My girlfriend also applied,” he told the exasperated engineer. “But when I got my letter, she said she was happy she didn’t got in because it would tear us apart. For your sake I hope she was wrong.”

She probably wasn’t, they all knew but nobody said anything and slowly they went on their way dispersing in the building.

Yerim got a good night hug from his brother and waved him off as she scribbled down some notes in her diary about today. Nobody was bothered by her little bit childish antics, nobody cared. The dining room was empty - save from one boy on his phone - when she finished and got up to shower and get ready for tomorrow.

Her assigned roommate was a very quiet girl called Seulgi who learnt some quite fancy named major - Civil, Environmental and Architectural Engineering as Yerim recalled - and she seemed pretty kind so far. They exchanged a few words before Yerim could actually use the bathroom. By the time she let her sore muscles loose under the hot water and brushed her teeth in front of the foggy mirror, Seulgi was fast asleep. With her nerves, the younger girl wasn’t so lucky, she struggled to close her eyes and let dreamland take her. Even the smallest noises of the ventilating system kept her awake.

After half an hour of tossing and turning in bed, she decided to take a world and have a glass of water so as quietly as she could she left their room. When the door closed behind her the corridor’s lamps automatically turned on much to her relief. She followed the directions she remembered from earlier, occasionally opening doors with her high-tech ID bracelet. Luckily she didn’t take it off for sleeping or else she would have had to go back for it. To her own surprise, she was able to locate and found the common room with kitchen without getting lost.

She filled a glass full of refreshing cold water and gulped it down as quickly as a man on verge of dying. Just as a relieved sigh bubbled up from her throat, she heard it… the clock ticking and hitting another hour. Then a flash of red painted the whole room colourful and Yerim almost dropped the glass as she turned on her heels. Putting it down onto the counter, she took careful steps towards the floor to ceiling glass windows. Her palm fit onto the cold surface nicely as she watched the moon’s reflection on dozens of glass buildings with wide eyes. The red light came from the building vis-á-vis burning carmine and angry. Yerim’s heart skipped a beat when suddenly she heard the unmistakable sounds of sirens.

“Ah I knew you were going to be here. Can’t sleep?” a familiar voice questioned in an amused tone and in her panicked state, the girl turned towards his brother, face breaking into a confused and terrified expression just like hers when they were children and she found a spider in their room.

“I think there’s something very very wrong, Jin,” she whispered in a trembling voice.

The faint distant sound of alarms and the warning red light suddenly stopped and then, all the lights darkened in the sector next to them. Like somebody turned the light switch off right at two o’clock and the border between the zones sparkled with electricity.

“No, it’s okay,” the elder said hurriedly pulling his sister away from the window. Just in time so she couldn’t see that lost bird flying right into the invisible wall and falling down as if it was struck by lightning. “I guess the simulation just started...”

#stories #series: code zero #bts fanfic #red velvet fanfic #bts thriller

[fatehbaz]

Could you tell us more about polynesian ecological knowledge?

Thanks for the ask. As usual, I’d always recommend trying to read the work of locals or Indigenous people of a given region, if they are willing to share their knowledge with non-Indigenous or non-local people. Rapa Nui was not the only Polynesian island group to have been conspicuously abandoned; it seems that soil degradation was somewhat common, especially on smaller and more ecologically sensitive islands. This might be a result of the Polynesian habit of exploring and “testing” islands for potential long-term settlement. I am not a good source of info on specific Polynesian tactics to maintain soil, but I might be able to recommend some sources that can answer how soil was replenished. (I’d also look into the Polynesian cultivation of taro, breadfruit, and pandanus). I’ll try to keep this post short, but like I mentioned in an earlier post, I spent several years periodically writing and updating two theses on Polynesian and Micronesian environmental knowledge and historical ecology. And, again, I did try to use mostly sources from Polynesian and Micronesian people or scholars close to and respectful of Oceanian cultures. I’m not really still all that knowledgeable or up-to-date on these subjects (it’s more like, I went through an “Oceania” phase) so take what I recommend with a grain of salt. That said, I carried this book in my overstuffed backpack, or kept it on my desk, just about everyday during that time. This is a good place to start exploring Polynesian use of plants for food crops, construction, and for navigation/voyaging.

So as I’ve blabbered on about before, I am so excited by Polynesian traditional ecological knowledge because it’s my impression that this kind of environmental knowledge, on islands in the Pacific, is uniquely impressive because (1) of the remoteness of islands, even from nearby islands occupied by related communities, meaning that cultivation and acquiring food requires extremely reliable maintenance of environmental knowledge, because in the middle of the ocean, you can’t exactly call for rescue or assistance easily; (2) the small size of many islands, the delicate sensitivity of such small islands, the essentially-closed ecological system, and easily depleted health of soil on islands means that unsustainable horitcultural or agricultural practices, or one bad seasonal harvest, can doom an entire island’s community to starvation; and (3) all of this sophisticated environmental knowledge was historically transmitted from generation to generation through oral tradition and storytelling, in the absence of written languages. Knowledge of the stars is of course an aspect of environmental knowledge. So this oral transmission of information in Polynesia is spectacular, especially with regards to astronomy and the ocean itself. For some island societies, intimately knowing the stars was a matter of life and death; the stars not only guided navigation, but could tell you that the annual migration of a certain fish was a few days away, or that a marine worm mating event would soon happen near the ocean surface a few kilometers to the east, meaning you could harvest them and eat (ask me more about the worm harvest). And it’s not like there was a written encyclopedia you could consult to identify stars; in some communities, like in Kiribati, even laypeople and teenagers (not just a priest class who had committed their entire life to navigation) can name over 770 different stars in the sky. (!)

Many individual Oceanian islands have a very clear archaeological record demonstrating the arrival of humans and food crops, the development of consistent horticultural practices, and, in some cases, the abandonment of settlement on the island. So a lot of archaeological work on historical ecology (especially the work of Patrick V. Kirch) can be enlightening in trying to understand which food crops were planted, how sustainable they were, and what the long-term ecological effects on soil were. However, the self-reported knowledge and oral histories of Polynesian/Oceanian people themselves are, probably unsurprisingly, the best sources for learning about plant use, horticulture, and related subjects.

I’m honestly not entirely sure how the Euro-American popular consciousness perceives Polynesia, aside from the typical colonialist fascination with “the exotic” and tropicality. Mayhaps some people would be surprised by just how big and expansive the South Pacific is? I know that Polynesia and Oceania are often perceived as “tropical,” but there are still many islands traditionally inhabited by Polynesian cultures that exist south of the Tropic of Capricorn, in some temperate and seasonally “chilly” climates, including Aotearoa (New Zealand). It seems that many Micronesian islands share many traditions with Polynesia, especially including horticulture, astronomy, and navigation. So just for reference, here’s a map of Oceania:

Here are a few singular sources that contain a lot of info on horticulture, environmental knowledge, and environmental change in Oceania:

– Historical Ecology in the Pacific Islands. Edited by Patrick V. Kirch and Terry L. Hunt. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997.– Cultural Ecology in the Pacific Islands. Edited by Patrick V. Kirch and Terry L. Hunt. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997.– pretty much all the work of Patrick V. Kirch, who focuses on pre-European historical ecology and environmental change of Polynesia, often using thorough archaeological research and self-reported local Indigenous histories– the work of Patrick D. Nunn is also widely respected; he focuses more on Polynesian/Micronesian myth and folklore, but a lot of this folklore has to do with ecology/environments– The People of the Sea: Environment, Identity, and History in Oceania. Paul D’Arcy. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2006.– The Growth and Collapse of Pacific Island Societies: Archaeological and Demographic Perspectives. Edited by Patrick V. Kirch and Jean-Louis Rallu. 2008. (A little too Western/Euro-American in its perspective, but there is a lot of discussion of historical ecology of the islands.)– Plants and the Migrations of Pacific Peoples: A Symposium (1963).– Migrations, Myth and Magic from the Gilbert Islands. Arthur Grimble. London: Routledge, 1972. (Mostly about navigation, astronomy, and folklore, but includes lots of firsthand accounts from talented traditional navigators as they discuss the importance of plants in voyages.)

—-

And here are some of the better sources - specifically involving ethnobotany and environmental change - that I’ve used in essays:

Abbott, Isabella A. “Polynesian Uses of Seaweed.” In Islands, Plants, and Polynesians: An Introduction to Polynesian Ethnobotany. Edited by Paul Alan Cox and Sandra Anne Bannack. Portland, Oregon: Dioscorides Press, 1991.

Allen, Melinda S. “Coastal Morphogenesis, Climatic Trends, and Cook Islands Prehistory.” In Cultural Ecology in the Pacific Islands. Edited by Patrick V. Kirch and Terry L. Hunt. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997.

Anderson, Atholl. “Epilogue: Changing Archaeological Perspectives upon Historical Ecology in the Pacific Islands.” Pacific Science 63:4 (2009).

Aswani, Shankar and Michael W. Graves. “The Tongan Maritime Expansion: A Case in the Evolutionary Ecology of Social Complexity.” Asian Perspectives 37:2 (1998).

Bannack, Sandra Anne. “Plants and Polynesian Voyaging.” In Islands, Plants, and Polynesians: An Introduction to Polynesian Ethnobotany, edited by Paul Alan Cox and Sandra Anne Bannack. Portland, Oregon: Dioscordes Press, 1991.

Burley, David V. “Archaeological Demography and Population Growth in the Kingdom of Tonga: 950 BC to the Historical Era.” In The Growth and Collapse of Pacific Island Societies: Archaeological and Demographic Perspectives. Edited by Patrick V. Kirch and Jean-Louis Rallu. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2008.

Cunningham, Sean P. “A Story of Yams, Worms, and Change from Ancestral Polynesia.” The Journal of Island and Coastal Archaeology 7:2 (2012).

D’Arcy, Paul. The People of the Sea: Environment, Identity, and History in Oceania. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2006.

Gunson, Niel. “Understanding Polynesian Traditional History.” The Journal of Pacific History 28:2 (1993).

Jost, XM; et al. “Ethnobotanical survey of cosmetic plants used in Marquesas Islands (French Polynesia).” Journal of Ethnobiology and Ethnomedicine (2016).

Kirch, Patrick V. “Changing Landscapes and Sociopolitcal Evolution in Mangaia, Central Polynesia.” In Historical Ecology in the Pacific Islands. Edited by Patrick V. Kirch and Terry L. Hunt. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997.

Kirch, Patrick V. The Evolution of the Polynesian Chiefdoms. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984.

Kirch, Patrick V. “’Like Shoals of Fish’: Archaeology and Population in Pre-Contact Hawaii.” In The Growth and Collapse of Pacific Island Societies: Archaeological and Demographic Perspectives. Edited by Patrick V. Kirch and Jean-Louis Rallu. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2008.

Kirch, Patrick V. “Solstice observations in Mangareva, French Polynesia.” Archeoastronomy: the Journal of Astronomy in Culture 18 (2004).

Kirch, Patrick V. “Temple Sites in Kahi Kinui, Maui, Hawaiian Islands: Their Orientations Decoded.” Antiquity 78:299 (2004).

Kirch, Patrick V. and Jean-Louis Rallu. “Long-term Demographic Evolution in the Pacific Islands.” In The Growth and Collapse of Pacific Island Societies: Archaeological and Demographic Perspectives. Edited by Patrick V. Kirch and Jean-Louis Rallu. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2008.

Ladefoged, Thegn N. and Michael W. Graves. “Modelling Agricultural Development and Demography in Kohala, Hawaii.” In The Growth and Collapse of Pacific Island Societies: Archaeological and Demographic Perspectives. Edited by Patrick V. Kirch and Jean-Louis Rallu. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2008.

Luomala, Katharine. Ethnobotany of the Gilbert Islands. Honolulu: Bernice P. Bishop Museum, 1953.

Merlin, MD. “A History of Ethnobotany in Remote Oceania.” Pacific Science Vol. 54 No. 3 (2000).

Ragone, Diane. “Ethnobotany of Breadfruit in Polynesia.” In Islands, Plants, and Polynesians: An Introduction to Polynesian Ethnobotany. Edited by Paul Alan Cox and Sandra Anne Bannack. Portland, Oregon: Dioscorides Press, 1991.

Rallu, Jean-Louis. “Pre- and Post-Contact Population in Island Polynesia: Can Projections Meet Retrodictions?” In The Growth and Collapse of Pacific Island Societies: Archaeological and Demographic Perspectives. Edited by Patrick V. Kirch and Jean-Louis Rallu. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2008.

Stone, Benjamin C. “The Role of Pandanus in the Culture of the Marshall Islands.” In Plants and the Migrations of Pacific Peoples: A Symposium. Edited by Jacques Barrau. Honolulu: Bishop Museum Press, 1963.

Tuljapurkar, Shirpad, Charlotte Lee and Michelle Figgs. “Demography and Food in Early Polynesia.” In The Growth and Collapse of Pacific Island Societies: Archaeological and Demographic Perspectives. Edited by Patrick V. Kirch and Jean-Louis Rallu. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2008.

–

These are just the sources exclusively dealing with plants, soil, and land use. Most of the sources I’m familiar with deal more with folklore and mythology, which are still pretty relevant to Polynesian environmental history, because much of the folklore has to do with understanding the environment. Most of these sources focus on understanding the ocean, sea life, and astronomy. Let me know if you’re interested in those.

And as long as we’re discussing Polynesian historical ecology, Polynesia also hosted some of the most unique and interesting relict species, strange and ancient endemic species left over from the Pleistocene that were able to hold on to existence on islands until human arrival. Like terrestrial and tree-climbing crocodiles, weird nocturnal birds, and frogs that somehow crossed the ocean despite their permeable amphibian skin. Just, Oceania is a really cool region.

Thanks again for the ask. :)

[teaxch]

Mosiplatinus, the Emperor Eternal

The worldsouls of most planes are deep and mysterious, communicating with the inhabitants of the plane minimally or indirectly, if at all. This is not so on Mosiplatinus, where the soul of the world rules the plane as a tyrant unquestioned. Mortal society on the plane is bent around serving the worldsoul itself.

Despite its supreme authority, Mosiplatinus is not unduly cruel. On some level, it wants the best for its inhabitants, even as it displays minimal regard for their individual lives. It also, by virtue of being the plane itself, is vulnerable to injury by just about anybody who lives on it. While the Emperor Eternal is quick to harshly punish anybody who deliberately acts against it, these acts do still harm it, so Mosiplatinus is generally avoid inspiring outright revolt. For the most part, this is not a major issue; the residents of the plane have always lived under the rule of their plane’s worldsoul, and it would not even occur to most of them that there’s any alternative, and all understand that war against their own plane would be utterly futile.

The primary things that Mosiplatinus demands are fealty and extreme care in maintaining the physical plane. Fulfilling the worldsoul’s whims sometimes requires extensive and strange terraforming tasks, such as replanting a forest from one area to another or digging large channels between lakes that serve no real commercial purpose. Some people believe that these tasks are designed to reorganize the plane’s leylines or perhaps to simply beautify the plane, but Mosiplatinus does not feel the need to justify its requests, so the true purpose of these labors is not known. Many residents of the plane go above and beyond in demonstrating their fealty, erecting monuments and organizing festivals in Mosiplatinus’s name. While the worldsoul seems to at least tolerate these displays, they are not part of its central tenets.

The plane does enjoy some advantages for having such an active worldsoul. Mosiplatinus absolutely forbids warfare of any kind, as it is devastating to a plane. At least as a default, mining, logging, fishing, and farming are done in a sustainable fashion to avoid incurring its wrath. Diseases that threaten to erupt into widespread plagues are simply eliminated by the intervention of the worldsoul. Mosiplatinus also has little patience for lesser rulers who overstep their boundaries in terms of the amount of authority they attempt to wield. Monsters do exist - the plane considers them to be part of its splendor and wonder - but they are limited in the amount of devastation they can cause.

Mosiplatinus’s full name is Mosiplatinus IV. The significance of this is unknown.

Mosiplatinus’s People and Creatures

Mosiplatinus is inhabited by predominantly by humans, goblins, and elves, with sizeable populations of centaurs, minotaurs, homarids and ratfolk. Avatars of Mosiplatinus are also a common sight. There are no undead creatures on the plane; while the magical knowledge exists to raise the dead as zombies and animated skeletons, any attempt to do so results in the immediate destruction of both the undead creature and the spellcaster foolish enough to meddle in necromancy.

Humans are numerous on the plane, and tend to congregate in large cities. Because they are disproportionately represented in many governments, many nations are considered human nations even if humans do not make up the majority of the citizens. There is some degree of variation among human cultures in terms of appearance, mode of dress, common foods, and other characteristics, Mosiplatinus enforces a certain degree of conformity when it comes to cultural norms - for example, necromancy, divination, and chaos magic are all completely forbidden by the worldsoul. Many other cultural mandates are designed to keep any one individual or group from accruing too much power, to mollify would-be dissidents, and to ensure the general welfare of the population in order to minimize unrest.

Goblins are very common on the plane, and live almost everywhere. They generally are not permanent residents of any nation, instead travelling from place to place searching for new opportunities and experiences. Goblins, more than any other intelligent species, have difficulty with Mosiplatinus’s rule. They frequently ignore its explicit commands in favor of doing things that they think the worldsoul will like better, and are often punished for it.

Elves believe that they are the chosen of the worldsoul and that they have a special bond with it. Although there is little direct evidence of this - Mosiplatinus seems to treat them the same way it treats other mortal races - it also does not actively care refute the elves on this point. Most elves live in a small number of predominantly Elven nations, where they conduct ancient rituals that they claim bind them more tightly to the worldsoul and give them deeper insights into its mind and nature. The belief that elves are favored by the worldsoul is sufficiently widespread that an elf can sometimes get away with claiming to speak for Mosiplatinus, although they all understand that making that claim is a risk.

Ratfolk are the worldsoul’s youngest creation, having only been brought into existence about sixty years ago. They mostly live in cities and are still working out their place in the world. They are able to thrive in the plane’s few blighted and wasted areas as well, and have been active in reclaiming these areas. While there are still no ratfolk nations, they are increasingly influential as a people in many places.

Centaurs, homarids, and minotaurs live in less crowded areas. All three are heavily involved in fulfilling the worldsoul’s bizarre terraforming requests. Centaurs take to this with gusto, getting involved in as many projects as they can. Their central role in many of these projects is a point of pride for the race. Homarids often make up most of the crew of projects that involve redirecting water, but are disinclined to interact with land-dwellers otherwise. Many of their projects are totally unknown to the rest of the plane, as they’re developed and executed entirely between the surface of the plane’s large seas. Minotaurs generally only cooperate on projects under protest, but are eager to display their strength once a project is underway and quick to boast of their involvement after the fact.

Genuine avatars of Mosiplatinus are common enough that many people consider them to be an ordinary species, although they do not lead ordinary lives - rather, they manifest in and out of existence as necessary, with some advising generations of local leaders and others existing for mere moments in order to fill some specific purpose before vanishing. As a rule, these tend to be observers, advisors, and protectors; they fastidiously avoid taking leadership roles and very rarely hold ordinary jobs. Their forms are as varied as their functions, but they tend to appear to be composed of natural materials - usually, sand, earth, and fine plants, but sometimes feathers or scales. Most avatars are roughly human in shape and size, but it is not uncommon for them to have quadruped or other body plans. Many can fly despite having no visible means of keeping themselves aloft. They are uniformly faceless, and appear to sense their surroundings using a sort of cosmic understanding, rather than conventional senses.

#magic the gathering #mtg #fan plane #fan walker #fanwalker #fanplane

[arresteddevelopmentgoals-blog]

Feeling connected

Yes, in our new global society I certainly feel interconnected to those who are also in tune.

Interconnectivity is a mindset that is a natural byproduct of healthy, environmentally conscious, and active habits. Habits like composting in your own home or carrying awareness of how your money changes the world every time you spend it. These are not easy habits for people to learn, and are often coming from a place far away from any ideas of interconnectivity. However, the more than a person walks a certain walk the more they begin to think about it, improve on it, and make it a part of who they are all the time.

My own journey into interconnectedness began when I was 19 and living on a campground with my then wife. We moved from our homes in New Hampshire to Pensacola, Florida and built a home together in the Five Flags Campground. When we came across that living opportunity, we have been considering a camper for our home for only a few months. The campground itself had not been open for more than a year. Our timing just happened to be in our favor. This lifestyle we fell in to was very different than what either of our upbringings taught us about life. We were both relatively cold-shouldered having grown up in the winters of New England. But the campground was a massive family that partied every month and had a cookout every weekend. What really got my attention at that point in my life was seeing how so many people worked together without really ever being asked to. “What caused them to do that” I wondered, and the answer was clear: the campground was their home. From there I asked myself how to create a sense of home around the globe. I dream big.

Big dreams take lots of small steps and even more hard work. Luckily, that hard work was available to me right there in the campground. While the residents of Five Flags were like a family, an actual family of two men and their parents actively ran this business of theirs and I was quick to get in on the action. With construction experience and a track for an environmental science degree I was an easy sell to get on the landscaping team for the campground. From there and over the course of two years we doubled the size of the campground from forty sites to 80 in less than a year, each site with fully equipped power boxes, plumbing into our local septic systems, and a concrete slab with driveway and patio extensions. I began to be a part of something bigger than myself and as I learned about the families, I was building these homes for I began to see a theme about what it truly meant to live as a camper.

Camping requires a constant measure of what is in your home, how you’re using resources, and what affect that has on your local environment – given that local now means a 100ft radius instead of a town sized locality we tend to associate with the word. I took it upon myself to behave more responsibly with my own resources than I ever had before. Seeing how much my fellow campers needed water in the heat of Florida summers, I began to use my water much more sparingly. Seeing how much trouble it was for some of us to regularly have food had me thinking about gardening for the first time in my life. Learning how others had come up with ways to give back to the world inspired me to do not just one or two actions, but every one of them that I could possibly fit in to a day. My cost of living dropped dramatically. My diet changed to reflect my new values and I feel better every day because of it. And in the end, it was my diet that gave me the sense of interconnectivity that I carry with me today.

Eating became a consciousness of what it took to allow to have a plate of food in front of me. First to go was meat. The awareness of what it meant to support companies that allow for industrial animal farming made me sick. I do not stand for giving companies money when they are actively murdering the planet. Second to go was supporting corporations in general, as best I can. Unfortunately, we are not truly able to be loud on a global scale without buying into the very system we hope to dismantle. And once that became clear, the rest was easy. It is not in the current system that we succeed – it is in working together as individual people. We all breath, we all want to be warm at the end of the day, and we all want our kids to have food. To assume that another human being does not hope for a better tomorrow is ignorant of the fact that you are a human, they are a human, and there are not as many differences between us as we like to think there are. I believe that it is through working together that we change the human mentality from our very individual way of life to once that is more aware of the needs of everyone. And I mean literally everyone.

Once my consciousness had reached a point of concern on a global scale, however, things got stressful fast. News of famine made me not want to eat at all. News of social injustice made me feel guilty for the comforts I experience on a daily basis. But these things I felt did not at all change what others experience every day regardless of how I feel about myself. So, it all became about learning. Learning to take those feelings of guilts and make small adjustments in my life that allow to keep moving forward quickly without taking more than I absolutely must. But small adjustments can only go so far and eventually the question came to my mind: “If I achieve this lofty goal of a sustainable life, what am I even going to do with it?” and as quickly as the question came so did the answer: I must build. To take my knowledge and build something out of it is the best thing I can do. I can leave behind in this world that can allow people to learn how to not only live longer themselves but allow others the opportunity to live longer as well. If I die, and my knowledge dies with me, then what was the point of becoming to sufficient in the first place?

So, what I will build is a campground of my own. Camping is where my own journey started. Campers create environments of interconnectivity on a personal scale, and that creates the perfect opportunity for others to learn. The community I build is one that I hope is full of love, patience, and hope for a long future for humanity. Those are my kids I’m talking about, as well as your own kids. I want us all to have the beautiful planet I have experienced in my life. Why anyone else would feel differently about that, I simply do not know.

#interconnectivity #article #1 #concious #camp #camping #campground #short story #story

[arlingtonpark]

Frozen 2 Review

You know, I’m starting to notice a trend with me and these Disney kid’s movies: I don’t like them.

And not because I’m not a kid, but because they really are badly written.

I’ll start with what I liked.

The animation was great, like in all Disney movies. Animation for Disney is like John Williams’ music in Star Wars - it’s good no matter what movie it is.

The song sequences, taken on their own, were show stopping. The action was grand, the singing was commanding, and the visuals were gorgeous.

…OK, now on to the stuff I didn’t like.

The movie starts off with Anna and Elsa playing together as kids. You know, before Elsa almost killed Anna. I don’t think this is bad per se, but I do think it undermines the gay subtext people read into Elsa’s character, and I’m sure lot of people will see that as bad, so I’m putting this in the “bad” section of this post.

Why do people read Elsa as a lesbian? Because she has to hide her powers, the thing that makes her different, like how gay people have to hide their gayness.

This has always been the case, but this movie really reinforces it: Elsa was only forced to hide her powers after she showed the capacity to harm others with them.

In other stories, people with superpowers have to hide those powers because they have powers, not because they can harm people with them. It’s about the power itself, not the burden of having them. This is a good metaphor for things like homosexuality.

In Frozen, things are kind of a mess. Elsa was forced “into the closet” because of the demonstrable harm she posed to others, not because she had the powers to begin with. Frozen 2 emphasizes this point: Elsa’s parents were accepting of her powers up until she showed they could be used to harm others.

Gay people are forced to hide themselves because people in polite society are expected to conform to certain standards. There is an element of rejecting nonconformity in Frozen. In that movie, people see Elsa using her powers and dub it witchcraft.

So there are some elements to the movie that support an LGBT metaphor, but other elements contradict that reading, so it all ends up being a big mess.

Frozen 2 is about how different groups need to get along and how past wrongs need to be made right.

The story opens with some storytime by Elsa and Anna’s dad:

Anna and Elsa’s granddad made contact with an indigenous group of people called the Northuldra. These Northuldra were not magical, but they were able to harness the magic that was endemic to their land.

Granddaddy had a dam built in the Northuldra’s territory as a peace offering. But during a celebration of its completion, a fight broke out and grandad was killed. Why the fight happened is unknown, but the forest spirits were angered and a mist overcast the whole region, locking it away.

And that is how Elsa and Anna’s dad became the king.

Seriously. That’s the payoff to the king’s story. Interethnic conflict and it’s all setup for how he got his cool hat.

I think that was smart!

Lots of awful historical events are glossed over for the sake of relatively trivial bullshit. I mean, I’m writing this on Thanksgiving. A holiday about being thankful is great! But the peace between colonists and natives that this holiday is built around is negated by…how there was no peace in the end. We all understand that on some level, right?

So I think this is a cool nod to how historical events, even historical atrocities, are mythologized.

The motivator for our heroes is uncovering the true history of Arendelle so the angry forest spirits can be calmed.

The true history is this:

Grandad actually hated the Northuldra. He built the dam to make them a vassal of his kingdom…somehow.

The ceremony was just a way for him to size up the Northuldra and determine their strength. He was the one who started the fight.

So…

Why did grandad use the ceremony to size up the Northuldra if that same ceremony was a trap to…kill them all, I guess?

Grandad uses the ceremony to learn of their numbers and strength, the same ceremony he uses to kill their leader and incite a conflict. You’d think the king would have learned the Northuldra’s numbers and strength before this. Just, you know, in the course of interacting with them and coordinating construction of the dam.

And why did King Grandad go to all the trouble of building the dam if he was just going to start a war with the Northuldra?

That’s a big ass dam! The king had it built and for what? Was he going to enslave them? That hardly seems worth it.

I guess the king was just a greedy bastard, but…he’s barely a character at all, so it’s just bad writing.

The point, though, is that the past!Arendellites did something awful and this needs to be set right. The dam still stands and its existence angers the forest spirits. But if the dam is destroyed, the water behind it will flood the area and destroy Arendelle.

So……

Arendellites of the past are big meanie heads.

This has repercussions through to the present.

This has to be made right.

That means destroying Arendelle.

Is this supposed to be applicable to our world?

White people of the past are big meanie heads.

This has repercussions through to the present.

This has to be made right.

That means…destroying white people?

Yes, the institution of racism still exists, and yes, that has to be made right. But no one is saying white people have to lose their homes. What is this movie even talking about?

Radical leftists, the ones who aren’t shitheads, want to sweep away the current order, but that’s because they want to replace it with a new one.

Reparative action means destroying the old order to replace it with a better one. This movie casts reparative action as just destructive.

I like to think of this as being like global warming. Many people think that to fight global warming we have to basically ruin our lives and sacrifice economic growth. We need to give up all our environmentally harmful practices and this basically means living Extreme Paleo. It’s that or a world with no ice caps.

But that’s not true. We don’t have to make that choice. We can have an environmentally sustainable economy and be just as prosperous as we’ve always been.

This movie seems to believe that making amends for the past requires some sacrifice by the descendants of the perpetrators.

If the racial hierarchy were destroyed, white people would no longer benefit from it, so in that sense they would lose out, but that’s not the same thing as losing your home!

The movie is clearly a commentary. It tries soooo hard to be topical and relevant; it only succeeds in being irreverent.

Why do the people at Disney keep trying to talk about racism? They suck at it! They have no idea what they’re talking about.

First Zootopia, now this. They keep trying and trying; I wish they’d stop.

Do they have any self-awareness? If they did, they’d realize they’re just confusing children with these badly designed messages.  

The movie tries to be a social commentary. It does so by elucidating a dilemma that doesn’t exist. There is no trade-off between righting the past and continuing our livelihoods.

Ah, but you see, this movie is multilayered in how bad it is.

In the end, Anna decides to destroy the dam, Arendelle be damned. The dam breaks and the kingdom is about to be swamped.

And then, in an almost literal deus ex machina, Elsa swoops in on a magical contraption and uses her powers to BS the tension away.

So………

On one level we have the silly trade-off the movie proposes. Do the next right thing and fix racism, but lose your home. (If this movie were a person, it’d be an old man yelling at clouds.)

On another level, if we take this proposal for granted, we’ve got a completely uninspired message about how doing what’s right will never backfire on you.

*vomits*

Returning to the social commentary level, this means the message is that we need magic to solve the dilemma that doesn’t actually exist.

We need a special, almost magical someone who can BS away all the BS sacrifices white people need to make to right the sins of their ancestors.

(It’s not just the politics, this movie is poorly thought out in general.)

This movie has a very unsubtle theme about change. It’s so horribly done, I can’t believe it’s real.

By the end of the movie, Anna is queen now and Elsa decides to live with the Northuldra. That’s the only meaningful change and the implications of it are not shown to us.

The movie ignores the burdens of statecraft, so how much being queen now affects Anna’s life isn’t important to the narrative.

And we don’t see much of Elsa’s new life either. All we see is her frolicking on horseback through a field with a wide smile on her face. Really.

Elsa struggles with alienation in this movie, except we don’t really see it. We are told that she feels out of place, but there’s nothing in the movie to suggest a fundamental disconnect between Elsa and everyone else.

I mean, I get that Elsa’s magical and Arendelle isn’t, but Elsa doesn’t seem unhappy when the film picks up. Whatever angst she has in the first act is because of the voice she’s hearing. If she feels that Arendelle is a poor fit for her, it wasn’t communicated well.

This is to say that Frozen 2 is only tepidly about the dynamism of life. There’s no change for the worse, and what change for the better there is lacks gravitas.

Elsa’s decision to live amongst the Northuldra is another example of the writers not paying attention.

Another attempted example of change occurring is the unification of the Northuldra and Arendelle. A statue of Elsa and Anna’s parents, who it turns out were each from one of the groups, is erected to commemorate this newfound unity. Anna remarks that the races have “finally” been united.

Unfortunately, the implications of this unity are not shown, so it’s all meaningless.

You would think there would be an exchange of ideas between the two groups. Things like music, food, ideals, etc. We don’t see that. So the change that this movie talks a lot about just isn’t there.

Back to Elsa living with the Northuldra, I take it as implying that there won’t be much real coexistence between the Arendellites and the Northuldra. Because if there were a real cultural exchange, I don’t think Elsa would’ve made the move.

She felt she had to live with the Northuldra to feel more at home. This implies there will continue to be a meaningful disconnect between the two groups.

Instead of Elsa moving, why can’t the people of Arendelle integrate magic into their daily lives like the Northuldra?

Are human settlements just inherently anti-magical?

That’s problematic, because the Northuldra in general smack of being noble savages.

The noble savage trope is a stereotypical depiction of native peoples. The stereotype is that natives have a primitive way of life that lets them be one with nature. It romanticizes native culture.

Frozen 2 leans very heavily on the noble savage trope to communicate its ideas. The Northuldra are one with nature, but this is disrupted when the dam is built. Human civilization is a taint upon the Northuldra’s communion with nature, as represented by the forest spirits.

The whole point behind the noble savage trope is that the native way of life is uncorrupted by human civilization.

Exactly how the dam’s existence is a blight is never explained; the movie uses the noble savage trope as a cheat to get across why the dam is a bad thing.

“Why is the dam bad?”

“Uh, er, well, it’s civilization!”

The movie tries to be about how the races need to coexist, even as it sets one side up as being superior to the other, while showing no sharing of ideas or even goods.

In Frozen 2, “coexistence” means separate but equal.

This movie tries to do a lot.

There’s an arc for Anna about doing the next right thing, an arc for Kristoff and Anna about getting married, the social commentary about uncovering the true history and atoning for past misdeeds, and two major arcs for Elsa. One about her feeling alienated and another about her having this savior complex. She thinks she has to be the one to save everyone.

Subsequently, many plot beats feel half-baked and rushed. Elsa’s alienation wasn’t really established. Anna’s decision to destroy the dam wasn’t dwelled upon, so it didn’t have the emotional weight it could have.

Elsa’s arc about trying to go it alone is very badly handled.

The point of the arc is that teamwork is golden and relying on your powers is as valuable as a shiny penny.

But once again, it is clear the writers aren’t paying attention. One scene in particular was a galaxy brain fuck up.

A forest fire breaks out and Elsa tries to put it out. Anna jumps in because it looks like Elsa is going to be overwhelmed. You would think that Anna will get Elsa to drop putting the fire out and save herself.

But nope.

Anna is the one who needs to be bailed out. Elsa successfully puts the fire out.

Just, ugggghhhh.

Then later on, some rock giants are lumbering about and everyone has to avoid their notice. But Elsa tries to go off on her own again and follow them.

Because she thinks she can tame them.

Huh???

Elsa’s arc here is about teamwork, but trying to tame these things is just a stupid idea. With following the voice, it’s clear they have to do it if they want to get things to normal. It’s their mission.

Why tame rock giants?

The problem with this moment is that Elsa isn’t just being arrogant, she’s being an idiot.

Then we get to the finale and Elsa’s arc about teamwork just peters out and isn’t a factor in it. Everyone has a role to play in the climax, but it’s all serendipitous.

The kind of teamwork the movie tries to uphold up to this point entails not just trusting other people, but actually working together.  

They learn they have to venture into the unknown. Elsa tries to go alone, but relents when Anna argues she should go too.

Later, Elsa tries to go alone to the mystery river and sends Anna away against her will. This is presented as a bad thing.

The lesson, so far, seemed to be that you can’t go it alone.

In the finale, they all go it alone while still working with each other. The finale emphasizes trust, while the rest of the movie emphasizes actual teamwork.  

It’s not that they’re all a team working together, it’s more like they’re all playing off each other and making it up as they go.

Elsa learns the true history and communicates it to Anna.

Anna takes it upon herself to go dambusting.

Kristoff helps, but he doesn’t know what’s going on. Teamwork implies everyone is of the same mind. That’s not the case here.

The guards try to stop Anna, but they eventually choose to trust that this is the right thing to do. They don’t really know what’s going on either.

Then, just to really drive home how much they don’t care, at the very end Elsa uses her powers to save everyone singlehandedly.

Because you can’t go it alone.

You can’t just rely on your own power.

Every bridge has two sides, so even Elsa needs help from others.

(That bridge metaphor is the dumbest line in the whole movie.)

The people behind this movie obviously didn’t care. They put no thought in this. See Kristoff’s in-movie MTV music video.

Yes, really, that happened. In it, Kristoff laments being unable to really connect with Anna.

I’m about to sing a song lamenting the future of this franchise.

#frozen 2 #spoilers

[goodvibesatpeace]

Theories: Inner-Earth (Agartha) Glows

If you fancy a bit of light reading 😀

Can there be light below the surface of the Earth, without any exposure to the Sun? Surprisingly, the answer is YES.  Bioluminescent organisms have the ability to glow almost like magic. Many organisms use their natural ability to produce light to trick predators, to attract mates and even to communicate. The word for this seemingly magical ability is called “bioluminescence,” which comes from “bio,” meaning life, and “lumin,” meaning light.

Most of these organisms, such as plankton, glow blue, but a few glow red, green, or orange. Some tiny animal plankton (zooplankton) are big enough to see with the unaided eye.

Most bioluminescent zooplankton don’t glow in the dark themselves, but instead squirt globs of glowing chemicals into the water.

Some zooplankton use bioluminescence to attract a mate, or to form reproductive swarms. Not only is nature’s biochemistry fascinating, it can also be extremely beautiful, especially given the backdrop of a dark, misty cave.

Glow worm is the common name for various groups of insect larvae and adult larviform females that glow through bioluminescence. They may sometimes resemble worms, but are actually insects.

The glow they produce, through by a chemical reaction, is incredibly efficient; nearly 100% of the energy input is turned into light (Compare this to the best light-emitting diodes at just 24%).

Australia and New Zealand have some of the most spectacular caves, where one can go on guided tours to witness this natural phenomenon up close. (see video below)

Why do some mushrooms emit light? Making light isn’t common in fungi; scientists have described about 100,000 fungal species, and only 75 glow. Lab work has shown that the glow did not happen randomly or by accident.

Scientists found that these mushrooms made light mostly at night, so experiments were conducted to determine why.

According to studies (referenced in the book), in dark environments, bioluminescent fruit bodies may be at an advantage by attracting insects and other arthropods that could help disperse their spores.

Conditions that affect the growth of fungi, such as pH, light and temperature, have been found to influence bioluminescence, suggesting a link between metabolic activity and fungal bioluminescence.

The diversity of creatures with this ability is equally astonishing, from algae and the common firefly to deep-sea dwellers that are rarely seen by humans.

What’s also fascinating is that many of these creatures are not closely related, and bioluminescent traits have seemingly evolved separately at least 30 times.

With countless well lit subterranean caves and glowing caverns, it makes one wonder what could be dwelling in vast unexplored areas under the crust.

The idea that our planet consists of a hollow, or honeycombed, interior is not new. Some of the oldest cultures speak of civilizations inside of vast cavern-cities, within the bowels of the earth.

According to certain Buddhist and Hindu traditions, secret tunnels connect Tibet with a subterranean paradise, and they call this legendary underworld Agartha.

In India, this underground oasis is best known by its Sanskrit name, Shambhala, thought to mean ‘place of tranquility.’

Mythologies throughout the world, from North and South America to Europe and the Arctic, describe numerous entrances to these fabled inner kingdoms.

Many occult organizations, esoteric authors, and secret societies concur with these myths and legends of subterranean inhabitants, who are the remnants of antediluvian civilizations, which sought refuge in hollow caverns inside the earth.

Assuming that the myths are true, and the Earth is partially hollow, how could life survive underground? How would organisms receive the ventilation required to breathe miles below the surface?

Surface trees and rainforests are responsible for less than one-third of the Earth’s oxygen, while marine plants, such as phytoplankton, are responsible for between 70 to 80 percent of the oxygen in the Earth’s atmosphere. The vast majority of our oxygen comes from aquatic organisms.

Phytoplankton, kelp, and algae produce oxygen as a byproduct of photosynthesis, a process which converts carbon dioxide and light into sugars which are then used for energy.

Phytoplankton is responsible for HALF of Earth’s oxygen

While the process of photosynthesis usually implies the presence of sunlight, the Sun is not the only available light or energy source able to power photosynthesis.

Before the discovery of hydrothermal vents, and their ecosystems, scientists believed that only small animals lived at the ocean bottom, in seafloor sediments.

They theorized that these animals received their food from above, because the established model of the marine food chain depended on sunlight and photosynthesis, just as the food chain on land does.

Mainstream academia taught that this was the only way life could survive in the darkness of the deep seafloor. The discovery of hydrothermal vents changed all that.

It became clear that vast communities of animals grew quickly and to larger than expected sizes in the depths without the aid of the Sun.

Instead of using light to create organic material (photosynthesis), microorganisms at the bottom of the food chain at hydrothermal vents used chemicals such as hydrogen sulfide (chemosynthesis).

At the seafloor, there are thriving ecosystems that receive energy not from the sun, but from the heat and chemicals provided by the planet itself.

For many thousands of species dwelling in the deep, the energy to sustain life does not flow down from above, but comes up from the interior of the earth.

Even in the unlikely scenario where every single tree were chopped down, we would still be able to breathe thanks to aquatic plant-life (ex. algae).

The Earth has a tremendous amount of water, and these oceans, rivers, and lakes are teeming with numerous species of biologically active, oxygen-producing organisms.

Are there any known sources of sustenance available that could provide for a large human population?

What evidence is there that a sustainable biosphere could exist miles below the surface, totally isolated from the nourishment and the established life cycle provided by the sun?

Where are the entrances to inner earth, and which races live inside?

Author and anthropologist, Robert Sepehr, explores these questions and attempts to unlock their riddles, which have eluded any consideration in mainstream academia.

Numerous endeavors have been undertaken to access the interior of the earth.

Polar expeditions and battles, such as Operation Highjump, still remain largely classified, and have been shrouded in secrecy for decades, but scientific revelations validating the rumors surrounding these covert events, and their implications, are finally being exposed to daylight.

What are the mysteries of inner Earth?

Be Open Minded And Question Everything

Love And Light To All 💓💓💓

#theory #earh #inner erath #agartha #light #glow #colour #color

[observenature]

Acceptance

“Is everything ok?” said the young grasshopper.

The lily turned its petals down and said “Can I share something real with you?”

“Yes.” said the young grasshopper.

I believe that words have the power to resonate in a mind, and that when a mind senses that resonance in another, a community is born.  These thoughts are my tuning fork; trio tones of joy, fear, and excitement, jointly holding the baton that conducts the cacophony. All of what follows are my anecdotal impressions, nothing more – I’m sorry that this is the truth (an indictment as I see it).  

The world is full of so much possibility and beauty, and so much ugliness and petty squabbling. It’s sad to think that with our collective resources, intellect, and technology there is so much we might have accomplished – cured most of the major diseases, understood the brain, reinvented ourselves physically and mentally, left our home rock and explored the wild and humbling beauty of the Cosmos.  I suppose that those things might still happen, but it also seems that we are peaking too early, using up too much of our resources, and we have a will to destroy ourselves and irreparably alter our planet long before we grasp our uniqueness, all because we are fundamentally enslaved to our amygdala. I dream of a world where we put aside our very minor differences and realize that not so deep down, we are all very similar. We all feel the pain of living, the emptiness of loss, the longing for love and connection, the joy of friendship, the satisfaction of accomplishment, and the power of Nature. Our evolutionary legacy leaves us beholden to a set of brain chemistries and circuitries that reinforce selfish behavior, that bias our perception toward continual scarcity, amplify apophenia until we see diety and monster in the mist, and intoxicate us with power and greed – we have all those things in common too. We posture, pivot and pontificate to project an image of certitude, because to stare directly at the random and uncertain complexity of it all would crush anyone. Hunter S. Thompson said:  Life is beautiful, and living is pain.  

It amazes me that we are all here on this small planet, burning the most abundant energy source any life form on it has ever known, to go about our daily lives, to build large screen TVs that suck up our precious time and sell us a lie of happiness we don’t need. Consider for a moment that we can now instantly know where we are on Earth and we can instantly communicate with a single person or group. On a whim we have access to nearly the entire sum of all human knowledge. We know the age of the Sun and when it will die. We have seen the edges of the Universe and clocked its growth by the afterglow. We created machines to whisk us from one end of the planet to another, we harness the power of the atom, and we are in labor to give birth to powerful and unmoored digital intelligences, that will, in their own right, soon see us as the tools, rather than vice versa.  All of this in the name of technological, economic, and geopolitical ‘progress.’

“But to what end?” said the young grasshopper.

So that we can surf the world addicted to data and dogma that we believe will finally answer the questions that nothing and no one can -- the intangible and ineffable “why’s” of existence. We spend our communal energy – our most valuable asset – believing that other people we call gods have wisdom that we don’t, that paradise is earned by obedience and unlocked by death rather than by expressing gratitude for the only and greatest paradise we will ever inhabit -- our home, this world, the Cosmos expressing itself. The nebulous notion that technology, whose mindless implementation and adoption accelerated these trends, will save us is tantamount to thinking that the best way to put out a fire is to make sure that there is nothing left to burn. We have opened Pandora’s box and confused raw technical capabilities with informed stewardship. And the belief that supernatural forces will guide us through these, the most challenging of times, is a fairytale born of justifiable ignorance and confusion, it warps our objectives and dangerously disconnects us from the here, the now, and the other. It attempts to define virtue by what we should not be, and gives lip service to the formative actions of compassion, patience, and thoughtfulness. Both worldviews wrestle to make sense of, and find security within, the master dynamical system whose chaotic trajectory is, fundamentally, unpredictable. Both believe that it can be understood and guided to a place of certain security, rather than accepting and reveling in the undeniable links that chain freedom to security, and suffering to autonomy.

“But to what end?” said the young grasshopper.

So that 100 or 1000 or 1,000,000 years from now we will have selected against the curiosity that leads to real progress and spent the resources that could have enabled the transformation in our species and our quality of life that we imagine lies just outside our reach. This is the greatest and saddest generation of which to be a part, and I can’t help but look at the long arc of history and see that we have been struggling, time and again, with the same problems.  We still have not figured out how to equitably steward our resources with collective action, we still have not figured out how to live in a degree of harmony with the Natural world on which every aspect of our survival depends. We still have not learned to cherish and protect the diversity that defines and stabilizes all living systems. We still have not learned that whatever our circumstance, our forms have needs that require care and balance. We still have not learned that the magic of Life stands on feet of mystery and knowledge – we were not intended to, nor are capable of, dealing with the full sensory and information experience of existence. And yet there are those that vigorously call for us to fight the other, to amplify our differences so that we no longer see other humans as humans, to pass observable truth through a lens of distortion, to disfigure and sharpen our discourse until the barb can pierce dignity, and they rape our world at any expense with no consideration for our own future nor the future of those that come after us.  We place too much value on pleasure to risk progress. And much as I would like to say that I am part of the solution, which I suppose in some areas I am, I know well that I, we are all the problem. In little choices every day we waste and use and think only of our pleasures and progress now – almost no one is playing the long game. We are essentially never willing to sacrifice a momentary and clearly visible personal gain for a potential but uncertain greater good -- that is the fundamental issue.

What will be left when we have used all the fossil fuels, and there is no energy source abundant enough to propel us into the next “greener” technological era of our existence? What will happen when we have devalued and destroyed objective physical truth and hard-earned expertise to the point when no one has the knowledge or will to tackle the problems of governance and environment that loom supremely large on the stage of civilization? What will happen when our specters convince us that creativity, non-conformity, and any observable difference are threats?

I don’t know, but I do know that things will look very different, that the world population as such will not be able to continue at its current size and state.  I know that Nature will eventually force us to pay Her heed, when the forests burn, the farm land is depleted, and the medical advancements of the last 200 years are for not because we misused our discoveries and forgot our methods.  It’s tempting to think that we’ll just start over, but that surely cannot be.  We will have spent all the abundant energy, the solar panels will be long cracked and inefficient, the cars will be planters, the nuclear power plants dark forests, and this thing we call civilization will have died back to a scraggly weed of its former self.  It’s not a question of ‘if’, it’s a question of ‘when’.

I want to find the silver lining in all of this.  Will our descendants look back and marvel at what we accomplished?  Yes.  Will they ponder incessantly as to why we didn’t or couldn’t take the steps to avoid decline? Yes.  Will they learn from our mistakes and embrace a wider view of humanity and commitment to each other? Maybe.  Will they build a new civilization that respects natural limitations and recognizes that dogma has no place in a free society?  I don’t know.

The system has made us weak and we are knowingly cultivating a culture that values only the most vapid pursuits of momentary validation and material wealth, while discouraging the introspection that asks – If more people behaved as I do, would that move us toward a more tolerant and sustainable world?  I no longer seek to blame any one person, organization, or government -- we were all bestowed these brains with systematic faults that we sum to “human nature”.  I think the point might be that we are here together, and like every thinker and leader of thought on the right side of history has tried to tell us – we need to look out for each other, we are all we have in the vast pointless emptiness.  I look around and see unavoidable failures in our system – choice structures like the Tragedy of the Commons – that have no solution because we are incapable of shifting our view from short to long, from me to us. The world is falling apart because we all see it happening, and we all feel like we’re on this sinking ship, most of us can’t figure out where the water is coming from, but there are gushing leaks all around us.  I believe we are living at the peak of civilization on Earth.  The juggernaut of civilization, really, the billions of choices made by the masses and the few pivotal decisions made by the powerful for their own benefit, all sadly make sense.  We have created a system that constantly shows us the material wealth we should strive for, while empowering no one to act beyond their own needs and desires.  Sometimes, I wish there was a God or a galactic super race that would come to save us from ourselves, but I have no faith in either.  

So here we are, the third wet rock from an average star, on the out skirts of a typical galaxy, and no one will hear our laughing or screaming or pleading or self-expressions through music, no will see our art, or take satisfaction in our discoveries, no one will sit on our mountains and in our forests to find peace and wholeness among the spontaneous and awesome self-organization of this world, no one will come to say ‘hey, here’s a better way.’  It’s all on us and if that reality cannot motivate us to be better people and a better civilization, if that does not thrust us into a period of deep self-examination, then nothing will.  So maybe it’s ok, given those realities, that we continue with business as usual, that we recognize that inequity is as natural as gravity, that we chant the mantra of maximization, and everyone suffers in a life punctuated by moments of love and joy and we whiz through space and search for meaning as strange and animate assemblies of the same atoms that are found throughout the Universe.

The only actions to take are to marvel at the continually unfolding beauty and dance when we can to the harmony and natural structure that permeates everything. And our greatest ideal – altruism – manifests as our desire to enable others to take those actions. The same struggle for existence, the master algorithm of Evolution that shaped us from molecules into ephemeral sentient forms will disintegrate us back into molecules. And one day, when time has lost its meaning and space has grown inanimate and cold, there will be peace. I don’t know how many times the Universe has tried or will try this experiment, but I do know that it will keep trying.  And maybe this is the best yet, in the incomprehensible complexity of it all, this is the truest expression of the natural order, this is the Cosmos in all its uncoordinated omniscience and omnipotence learning, flowing, evolving, making mistakes, this is the only way it can be.

I articulate this all in the hope that I can move on and live my life blissfully aware of what almost surely lies ahead, that this too shall pass.

They sat in silence for a time, swaying with the breeze, sunlight moving in dappled patterns over their forms.

“I hope that in other labs of the Cosmos, the experiments are yielding different results.” said the young grasshopper.

“Me too,” said the lily. “Me too.”

[ol1vj3-blog1]

After beeing a silent spectator of the humans are speceorks stories for a while, I decided to try one myself. I don't know if this ever came up, but what if the galactic community only contained relatively peaceful herbivores, without even a concept of war...

Aryl opened the door to his office as someone knocked.

"Ah, good morning Rokal, please come inside."

"You wanted to see me, knowledge keeper?"

"Yes, I'd like to discuss your offer of wisdom and your promotion as knowledge keeper."

"Are there any problems?"

"Several, you see, your theory, there could be an intelligent and possibly spacefaring civilization descending from predators somewhere in the unknown reaches, is not only improbable but also evolutionary impossible."

He attacked any possible knowledge keeper, to check their knowledge in the chosen field, and any knowledge keeper should be able to defend their opinions. But for the first time he firmly believed the applicant was wrong.

"I agree it is improbable but certainly not impossible. Intelligence and civilization can only develop under hardship and in groups above a certain size. I am not proposing solitary hunters like the Kindladesh of Kirgon 5 could develop a civilization but consider a species of pack hunters like the Zragan, only smaller to sustain a relatively high population."

"No, that wouldn't work. The Zragan, or any predator for that matter, have been proven to turn on their own to preserve themselves. Civilization, settlement construction, or even tool use require a stable community and a reason to do so. But as soon as a reason arises, the Zragan would turn to cannibalism."

"But what if it was less aggressive, then..."

"Less aggressive? Any predator without a considerable amount of aggresion couldn't have enough prey to feed itself."

In that moment the screen, dominating one wall of the office came to life.

"I am Falal, speaker of the interplanetary herd coalition. I will now inform you about previously secret recent events. Two standard cycles ago, the IHC got contacted by a new species, which took offense in our colonization efforts of systems they considered theirs. This species called human, turned out to be descendants of highly territorial predators. During the last two quarter cycles we lost contact to 6 of our colonies, bordering human space. This morning we received a message containing a so called declaration of war. The humans have marked all races of the coalition as their prey. I therefore announce the highest level of herd endangerment. Each individual of adult age in their respective species shall visit the nearest coalition complex to determine their skills and abilities to defend the herd by the end of this cycle. I want to be honest with you. I fear for the worst, this may well be the end of the IHC. May the herd grant us strength. "

With these last words the screen turned dark.

For a few moments there was silence. Finally Aryl spoke with a shaking voice.

"Rokal, I welcome you in the ranks of knowledge keepers."

#humans are space orcs #humans are space oddities #earth is space australia #space orcs #space orks #Space australia