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justplainsalty · 1 year

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Tedbecca, Battlestar Galactica AU 💀

Just so everyone has context, this one is a rubber band back to me. It is my fault. And now I'm having to eat crow.

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Rebecca Welton is the relatively new commander of the Battlestar Richmond, an old and creaky ship that hadn't won any battles in almost as long as she'd been alive, possibly longer. She was the ship's XO for years, under her longtime-ex-husband Rupert, until he was caught sleeping with an NCO on the flight deck and court martialed back to Caprica. Now she's faced with taking over command of a ship where every crewman was highly loyal to Commander Mannion, and she must prove herself out of his shadow. The negative press attention on her since Rupert's arrest has not helped boost her crew's opinion of her. Her new XO, Higgins, suggests accepting President Adar's request to send a PR team up to the ship to film an on-ship pyramid match between command staff and NCOs and boost morale. President Adar has been pushing a multi-pronged initiative to "sanitize" (or in Fleeters' opinions, sterilize and castrate) the Fleet forces for years; Rebecca is the unlucky commander who is forced to accept it this PR move, but it doesn't mean she has to be happy about it.

Ted Lasso is the current Secretary for Culture and Sport within the New Caprican government; he is currently 45th in line for the presidency. Ted is never without his shadow, Coach Beard, the Under-Secretary for Sport. There are questions about how Ted and Beard rose to their positions, debates whether it was a good ol' boy backroom deal, or something more scandalous. After all, Ted has no real government experience on his resumé: prior to his role on President Adar's campaign staff, and then his role as Secretary, Ted was best known for coaching university-level pyramid. Everyone who has worked with Ted understands why he is a good leader and policy-maker; to everyone outside the room where it happened, the choice could not be more opaque. Adar asks Ted to attend the pyramid match with the PR team in order to ensure its smooth execution and diffuse any conflicts that arise.

Nathan Shelley is an intern with the Department of Defense, in the department responsible for the maintenance of the planetary defense mainframe. His girlfriend, Bex, works for a defense contractor. Nathan wasn't supposed to, but he let Bex have some access to the mainframe, so she could scope out some specs and look good for her bosses when they put a bid in for the latest contract. And then she asked if he could get her access to the software the Colonial Fleet was writing to update all the newest ships, and Nate wanted to impress her, so he did. Nate didn't want to ask too many questions -- he was too grateful that someone like Bex was with someone like him in the first place.

And then the cylons attack.

Suddenly, these disparate paths converge, as Rebecca is faced with a fight for her life from the outside, a fight for control of her ship from within, and a fight for the future of humanity from the teeth-grindingly jovial sports coach-turned-president who doesn't seem to understand just how dire their situation is. And what kind of a person says, "We have to get out there and start making babies!" with a straight face, anyway?

Featuring:

Keeley Jones, Tactics Officer

Dr. Sharon Fieldstone, Chief Medical Officer

Trent Crimm, independent journalist-turned-quorum representative and general thorn in Ted’s side (although with plenty of mutual respect)

Pilots: Roy Kent, Jamie Tartt, Sam Obisanya, Isaac McAdoo, Colin Hughes, Dani Rojas, Richard Montlaur, Thierry Zoreaux, Jan Maas, Moe Bumbercatch

Bex, cylon number 6

Leave an AU and a pairing in my ask and I’ll give you the plot of the fic I won’t write for it.

#ted lasso #battlestar galactica #tedbecca #ask meme #i did a thing #fic life #yes in this au i will never write ted and rebecca do wind up togetherrrr #things get a little jumbled and Nate is more of a Billy position for Ted than a Baltar VP position #he still stabs ted in the back tho don't worry #it's the baltar of it all #wow that would be a great chapter title gods damn it #i can't believe my brain pooped this one out #Beard is going to be VP until concerns of favoritism arise and Ted picks Trent #i think idk i didn't get that far #it's mostly about ted and rebecca coming together and learning to respect each other and eventually making smushy faces at each other #even tho rebecca manages to blindside/hurt/etc Ted at least once a season #but you know roslin did that too so SHRUG

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headspace-hotel · 3 months

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The USAmerican imagination cannot consider land that is multi-purpose.

A corn field is Corn, an endless monoculture, and all other plants must be eliminated. A residential area is Houses, and absolutely MUST NOT!!! have vegetables or fruits or native plant gardens or small livestock. A drainage ditch is only a drainage ditch, and cannot harbor Sedges and native wetland plants, A sports field is for A Sport, and let no one think of doing any other event on that field, shops and storefronts must have their own special part of town that everybody has to drive to, which requires parking lots...and God forbid we put solar panels on roofs or above parking lots or anywhere they can serve an extra purpose of providing shade, instead of using a large tract of perfectly fine land as a "solar farm."

Numerous examples. But it is the most annoying with agriculture. The people who crunch all the numbers about sustainability, have calculated that a certain percentage of Earth's land is "Used up" by agriculture, which is troubling because that leaves less "room" for "Wilderness." It is a big challenge, they say, to feed Earth's humans without destroying more ecosystems.

Fools! Agriculture is an ecosystem—if you respect the ways of the plants, instead of creating monoculture fields by killing everything that moves and almost everything that doesn't. Most humans throughout history, and many humans today, sustain themselves using a mixture of foraging and agriculture, and the two are not entirely different things, because all human lifestyles change the ecosystem, and the inhabitants of the ecosystem always change themselves in response.

Even if you are a hunter-gatherer that steps very lightly in the forest and gathers a few berries and leaves here and there, you are being an animal and affecting all other parts of the ecosystem. By walking, breathing, eating, pooping, drinking, climbing, singing, talking, all of those things affect the ecosystem. If you gather leaves to sleep on, that affects the ecosystem...if you pile up waste, that affects the ecosystem...if you break a tree branch, that affects the ecosystem...if you start a fire, if you create a small shelter, if you cut a path, that DEFINITELY affects the ecosystem.

This idea, that human activity destroys the ecosystem and replaces it with something Else, something Not an ecosystem, is so silly. "But you just said that even the earliest most technologically simple human societies altered their environment!"

Yes, I did. Because we believe that "pre-agricultural" humans could have no effect on their "wilderness" environment, we ALSO believe another false idea: That when humans affect an environment, they destroy "Wilderness" and change it to something else, like Agricultural Land, that can never have biodiversity and never benefit many life forms.

I think it is the European idea of agriculture that it always involves people settling down and relying on a few special plants that are domesticated intentionally and grown in specially dedicated fields. After all, this idea of an agricultural lifestyle, is in contrast with the "hunter-gatherer" lifestyle, which is assumed to be what humans do before they "figure out" agriculture. The European mind imagines "pre-agricultural" folks ignorantly bumbling about, thinking plants and animals conveniently pop out of nothing for their benefit.

Bullshit! I shake my head in disappointment when I see websites describing Native Americans using wild plants as if those plants just-so-happened to grow, when those same wild plants just-so-happen to thrive only in environments disturbed by humans in some way, and just-so-happen to have declined steeply since colonization, and just-so-happen to be nonexistent in unspoiled "Wilderness" locations, and (often) just-so-happen to have an incredibly wide range where they either once were or are incredibly common, making it very...fortunate that they just-so-happen to have a wide range of uses including food, medicines, and materials for clothing and technology.

Accidentally of course, without any human impact from the humans that were impacting everything. /s

"But if it wasn't an accident, how did it happen?" Here is how to understand this idea: Look at the weeds! The weeds will teach you.

Look at the plants you always see growing without being planted around human buildings and roads, and learn their history. Often you will learn that these plants have many marvelous properties, and have actually been used by humans for thousands of years.

In fact, some of the most powerful and difficult to control weeds, were once actually some of the most essential and important plants for human civilizations to depend on. The dreaded Kudzu, in its home in East Asia, was one of the main plants used for clothing for over 6,000 years, and not only that, it has been cultivated for food and medicine for millennia. You can make everything from paper to noodles out of Kudzu! And Amaranth, the most expensive agricultural weed in all the USA, produces edible and healthy grains as well as several harvests of greens per growing season, and several species of the genus have been fully domesticated and formed a staple crop of Mesoamerica.

Meanwhile...some people have come up with this neat "new" idea called Polyculture, which is where you plant a field with two crops at once and somehow get better yields from both of them. WITCHCRAFT! Unrelatedly, there are other ideas like "Cover Crops" and "Agroforestry" that for some reason have the same beneficial effect.

Wow...It turns out, sterilizing the whole environment of every plant except one crop...isn't actually a good way to do agriculture in many places in the world.

Just think about it from an energy point of view...

We have some places used for "Agriculture," where we wring the land as violently as possible to squeeze green vegetation from light energy.

And we have other places for Other uses, where we spend massive amounts of fossil fuels mowing, chopping, poisoning and trimming to STOP the land from producing its incredible bounty of green vegetation.

And in the agricultural fields, we spend even MORE resources killing the unwanted plants that grow spontaneously

This system is hemorrhaging inefficiency at both ends. It simply isn't a one-to-one conversion of land and fossil fuels to food energy. The energy expenditure of agriculture is mostly going into organizing the vegetation's energy into the shape and configuration we want, not the food itself.

In the Americas, indigenous agricultural systems involve using the plants that exist in the environment to construct an ecosystem that both functions as an ecosystem and provides humans with food, clothing, and other important things. This is the most advanced way.

Most of our successful weeds are edible and useful. A weed is simply a plant that is symbiotic with humans. My hypothesis of plant domestication is that it was initiated by the plants, which became adapted to human environments, and humans bred them to be better crops in response. Symbiosis.

Humans did not pick out a few plants special to intensively domesticate out of an array of equally wild plants, instead they just ate, selected, and bred the plants that were best adapted to live near human civilization. That is my guess about how it happened.

Just think about it. Why would you try to domesticate teosinte (Maize ancestor?) It sucks. Domesticated plants in their wild form are usually like "Why would you put hundreds of years of effort into cultivating this?" Personally I think it's because the plant grew around humans and humans ate and used it a lot because it was abundant. So we co-evolved with the plant.

Supporting this hypothesis, there are many crop plants that mutated and evolved back into weeds, like "weedy" rice, "weedy" teosinte, and "weedy" radishes. Also weeds develop similar adaptations to crop plants to survive in the agricultural environment.

Consider Kudzu. Everyone in the USA knows it as an invasive weed, but since ancient times in China, it was a crop that provided people with fabric from its bast fibers, food from its enormous starchy roots, and many medicinal and other uses. Kudzu is not evil, it simply has a symbiotic relationship with humans, and just as any other species might serve as a biological control, the main biological control of kudzu in nature is the human species.

Think of the vast fields and mountain sides of the South swallowed by thick mats of Kudzu covering lumps that used to be trees. Think of the people toiling away to clear the Kudzu, while wearing clothes made of cotton that was grown in a faraway place using insecticides and depleting fresh water, using energy from their bodies that came from crops grown in fields far away.

Now imagine people working to harvest the Kudzu, to cut the new vines and dig up the starchy roots and use the plant the way it is used by the people who know its ways. Imagine the people using the starch from the Kudzu root to make flour and noodles and sweet confections. Imagine workers processing the vines into thread which is woven into fabric. The hillsides and fields flourish with plants that used to be suffocated, and hillsides and fields in faraway places also flourish with their own plants, instead of being made to grow cotton and crops to provide for the needs the Kudzu provides for.

Imagine the future where we accept our symbiotic relationship with the plants!

#from my drafts #the ways of the plants #plants #weeds #plantarchy

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