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headspace-hotel · 4 months

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How people in the USA loved nature and knew the ways of the plants in the past vs. nowadays

I have been in the stacks at the library, reading a lot of magazine and journal articles, selecting those that are from over fifty years ago.

I do this because I want to see how people thought and the tools they had to come up with their ideas, and see if I can get perspective on the thoughts and ideas of nowadays

I've been looking at the journals and magazines about nature, gardening, plants, and wildlife, focusing on those from 1950-1970 or thereabouts. These are some unstructured observations.

The discourse about spraying poisons on everything in your garden/lawn has been virtually unchanged for the past 70 years; the main thing that's changed is the specific chemicals used, which in the past were chemicals now known to be horribly dangerous and toxic. In many cases, just as today, the people who opposed the poisons were considered as whackos overreacting to something mostly safe with a few risks that could be easily minimized. In short, history is not on the pesticides' side.

Compared with 50-70 years ago, today the "wilderness" areas of the USA are doing much better nowadays, but it actually appears that the areas with lots of human habitation are doing much worse nowadays.

I am especially stricken by references to wildflowers. There has definitely been a MASSIVE disappearance of flowers in the Eastern United States. I can tell this because of what flowers the old magazines reference as common or familiar wildflowers. Many of them are flowers that seem rare to me, which I have only seen in designated preserves.

There are a lot more lepidopterans (butterflies and moths) presumed to be familiar to the reader. And birds.

Yes, land ownership in the USA originated with colonization, but it appears that the preoccupation with who owns every little piece of land on a very nitpicking level has emerged more recently? In the magazines there is a sense of natural places as an unacknowledged commons. It is assumed that a person has access to "The creek," "The woods," "The field," "The pond" for simple rambling or enjoyment without personally owning property or directly asking permission to go onto another person's property.

There is very little talk of hiking and backpacking. I don't think I saw anything in the magazines about hiking or going on hikes, which is strange because nowadays hiking is the main outdoor activity people think of. Nature lovers 50-70 years ago described many more activities that were not very physically active, simply watching the birds or tending to one's garden or going on a nice walk. I feel this HAS to do with the immediately above point.

Gardening seems like it was more common, like in general. The discussion is about gardening without poisons or unsustainable practices, instead of trying to convince people to garden at all.

Overall, the range of animals and plants culturally considered to be common or familiar "backyard" creatures has narrowed significantly, even as the overall conservation status of animals and plants has improved.

This, to me, suggests two things that each may be possible: first, that the soils and environments of our suburbs and houses have sustained such a high level of cumulative damage that the life forms they once supported are no longer able to live, or second, that our way of managing our yards and inhabited areas has become steadily more destructive. Perhaps it may be the case that the minimum "acceptable" standard of lawn management has become more fastidious.

In conclusion, I feel that our relationship with nature has become more distant, even as the number of people who abstractly support the preservation of "wilderness" has increased. In the past, these wilderness preservation initiatives were a harder sell, but somehow, more people were in more direct contact with the more mundane parts of nature like flowers and birds, and had a personal relationship with those things.

And somehow, even with all the DDT and arsenic, the everyday outdoor spaces surrounding people's homes were not as broadly hostile to life even though the people might have FELT more hostile towards life. In 1960, a person hates woodpeckers, snakes and moths and his yard is constantly plagued by them: in 2024, a person enjoys the concept of woodpeckers, snakes and moths but rarely sees them, and is more likely to think of parks and preserves as the place they live and need to be protected. Large animals are mostly doing better in 2024, but the littlest ones, the wildflowers and bugs and birds, have declined steeply. It's not because "wilderness" is less; it seems more because non-wilderness has declined in quality.

#plants #nature #the ways of the plants #save the bees #kill your lawn

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northern-passage · 8 months

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Reblogging something about celebrating terrorist groups murdering and kidnapping people.....I just hope that anyone who enjoys seeing such things will *never* have the experience of having their loved ones disappear one morning.

I hope they never have to see the faces of theirs relatives, friends, classmates, colleagues and neighbors on palestinian tv being beaten and dragged to gaza by terrorist.

Could you imagine seeing your friend who was missing the whole day on palestinian tiktok being kidnapped while people are happy about it? While entire streets are closed inside their homes because armed terrorist raid your city? Breaking into homes to kidnap people?

No matter what side theyre on i hope no one ever has to experience that kind of horror.

the Palestinian people have had to watch their children and brothers and sisters and mothers and fathers be murdered violently in the streets of Gaza for decades because of the violent occupation of Palestine.

you get to call the colonizers "relatives, friends, classmates, colleagues and neighbors" but the Palestinian people are only ever "terrorists." when the Israeli police drag Palestinians out of mosques and kill them in streets-- more than 200 Palestinians have been killed this year alone, plus the 161 that have already been killed in retaliation-- are you going to call them terrorists, too? as Israel continues their retaliation and kills 30 Palestinians for every single Israeli soldier, is it "terrorism" or will you find a way to justify it, then? will you care about the "relatives, friends, classmates, colleagues and neighbors" then?

"No matter what side theyre on i hope no one ever has to experience that kind of horror." again, Palestinians have been living this for decades. and what we're witnessing now is the inevitable response to those decades of oppression & occupation.

as for your "friends, classmates, colleagues and neighbors" -- they are living on occupied land. land that was taken by force through ethnic cleansing. they can leave at any time-- most of them have already, fleeing back to their home countries with their dual citizenships, or theyre safely sitting in hotels waiting for it to be over. they are settlers. they are part of the settler colony that is actively oppressing, dispossessing, and murdering Palestinians. and to be clear, that post you're talking about is not "celebrating civilian deaths," you are just purposefully misrepresenting it here to further dehumanize Palestinians and depict them as "terrorists." of course i do not want civilians to die. no one wants that. i feel for the Israeli people, the children & the ones who cannot leave. but at least they are allowed to be people, they are allowed to be friends, classmates, colleagues, neighbors. Palestinians have never been granted that, and you are proving it here in my inbox.

these "terrorists" you decry are oppressed people taking up arms-- scavenged from the weapons Israeli soldiers and police have been using against them for years-- to decolonize and take back their home. decolonization is a violent process. we absolutely cannot tolerate a double standard. there is no "both sides."

Myth: Israel is defending itself | Decolonize Palestine

Myth: Israel is not an Apartheid state | Decolonize Palestine

Myth: Israel has always sought peace | Decolonize Palestine

Myth: The Palestinian Authority subsidizes "terrorism" (pay to slay) | Decolonize Palestine

Myth: Israel (or any other state) has a right to exist | Decolonize Palestine

all of my support to the Palestinian resistance, from the river to the sea Palestine will be free.

#we really have to do this every time huh.#ask #anonymous #settler violence #genocide #ethnic cleansing #<- tw purposes

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mostlysignssomeportents · 15 days

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AI is a WMD

I'm in TARTU, ESTONIA! AI, copyright and creative workers' labor rights (TOMORROW, May 10, 8AM: Science Fiction Research Association talk, Institute of Foreign Languages and Cultures building, Lossi 3, lobby). A talk for hackers on seizing the means of computation (TOMORROW, May 10, 3PM, University of Tartu Delta Centre, Narva 18, room 1037).

Fun fact: "The Tragedy Of the Commons" is a hoax created by the white nationalist Garrett Hardin to justify stealing land from colonized people and moving it from collective ownership, "rescuing" it from the inevitable tragedy by putting it in the hands of a private owner, who will care for it properly, thanks to "rational self-interest":

https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/04/analytical-democratic-theory/#epistocratic-delusions

Get that? If control over a key resource is diffused among the people who rely on it, then (Garrett claims) those people will all behave like selfish assholes, overusing and undermaintaining the commons. It's only when we let someone own that commons and charge rent for its use that (Hardin says) we will get sound management.

By that logic, Google should be the internet's most competent and reliable manager. After all, the company used its access to the capital markets to buy control over the internet, spending billions every year to make sure that you never try a search-engine other than its own, thus guaranteeing it a 90% market share:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/21/im-feeling-unlucky/#not-up-to-the-task

Google seems to think it's got the problem of deciding what we see on the internet licked. Otherwise, why would the company flush $80b down the toilet with a giant stock-buyback, and then do multiple waves of mass layoffs, from last year's 12,000 person bloodbath to this year's deep cuts to the company's "core teams"?

https://qz.com/google-is-laying-off-hundreds-as-it-moves-core-jobs-abr-1851449528

And yet, Google is overrun with scams and spam, which find their way to the very top of the first page of its search results:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/24/passive-income/#swiss-cheese-security

The entire internet is shaped by Google's decisions about what shows up on that first page of listings. When Google decided to prioritize shopping site results over informative discussions and other possible matches, the entire internet shifted its focus to producing affiliate-link-strewn "reviews" that would show up on Google's front door:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/24/naming-names/#prabhakar-raghavan

This was catnip to the kind of sociopath who a) owns a hedge-fund and b) hates journalists for being pain-in-the-ass, stick-in-the-mud sticklers for "truth" and "facts" and other impediments to the care and maintenance of a functional reality-distortion field. These dickheads started buying up beloved news sites and converting them to spam-farms, filled with garbage "reviews" and other Google-pleasing, affiliate-fee-generating nonsense.

(These news-sites were vulnerable to acquisition in large part thanks to Google, whose dominance of ad-tech lets it cream 51 cents off every ad dollar and whose mobile OS monopoly lets it steal 30 cents off every in-app subscriber dollar):

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/04/saving-news-big-tech

Now, the spam on these sites didn't write itself. Much to the chagrin of the tech/finance bros who bought up Sports Illustrated and other venerable news sites, they still needed to pay actual human writers to produce plausible word-salads. This was a waste of money that could be better spent on reverse-engineering Google's ranking algorithm and getting pride-of-place on search results pages:

https://housefresh.com/david-vs-digital-goliaths/

That's where AI comes in. Spicy autocomplete absolutely can't replace journalists. The planet-destroying, next-word-guessing programs from Openai and its competitors are incorrigible liars that require so much "supervision" that they cost more than they save in a newsroom:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/29/what-part-of-no/#dont-you-understand

But while a chatbot can't produce truthful and informative articles, it can produce bullshit – at unimaginable scale. Chatbots are the workers that hedge-fund wreckers dream of: tireless, uncomplaining, compliant and obedient producers of nonsense on demand.

That's why the capital class is so insatiably horny for chatbots. Chatbots aren't going to write Hollywood movies, but studio bosses hyperventilated at the prospect of a "writer" that would accept your brilliant idea and diligently turned it into a movie. You prompt an LLM in exactly the same way a studio exec gives writers notes. The difference is that the LLM won't roll its eyes and make sarcastic remarks about your brainwaves like "ET, but starring a dog, with a love plot in the second act and a big car-chase at the end":

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/01/how-the-writers-guild-sunk-ais-ship/

Similarly, chatbots are a dream come true for a hedge fundie who ends up running a beloved news site, only to have to fight with their own writers to get the profitable nonsense produced at a scale and velocity that will guarantee a high Google ranking and millions in "passive income" from affiliate links.

One of the premier profitable nonsense companies is Advon, which helped usher in an era in which sites from Forbes to Money to USA Today create semi-secret "review" sites that are stuffed full of badly researched top-ten lists for products from air purifiers to cat beds:

https://housefresh.com/how-google-decimated-housefresh/

Advon swears that it only uses living humans to produce nonsense, and not AI. This isn't just wildly implausible, it's also belied by easily uncovered evidence, like its own employees' Linkedin profiles, which boast of using AI to create "content":

https://housefresh.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/Advon-AI-LinkedIn.jpg

It's not true. Advon uses AI to produce its nonsense, at scale. In an excellent, deeply reported piece for Futurism, Maggie Harrison Dupré brings proof that Advon replaced its miserable human nonsense-writers with tireless chatbots:

https://futurism.com/advon-ai-content

Dupré describes how Advon's ability to create botshit at scale contributed to the enshittification of clients from Yoga Journal to the LA Times, "Us Weekly" to the Miami Herald.

All of this is very timely, because this is the week that Google finally bestirred itself to commence downranking publishers who engage in "site reputation abuse" – creating these SEO-stuffed fake reviews with the help of third parties like Advon:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/03/keyword-swarming/#site-reputation-abuse

(Google's policy only forbids site reputation abuse with the help of third parties; if these publishers take their nonsense production in-house, Google may allow them to continue to dominate its search listings):

https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2024/03/core-update-spam-policies#site-reputation

There's a reason so many people believed Hardin's racist "Tragedy of the Commons" hoax. We have an intuitive understanding that commons are fragile. All it takes is one monster to start shitting in the well where the rest of us get our drinking water and we're all poisoned.

The financial markets love these monsters. Mark Zuckerberg's key insight was that he could make billions by assembling vast dossiers of compromising, sensitive personal information on half the world's population without their consent, but only if he kept his costs down by failing to safeguard that data and the systems for exploiting it. He's like a guy who figures out that if he accumulates enough oily rags, he can extract so much low-grade oil from them that he can grow rich, but only if he doesn't waste money on fire-suppression:

https://locusmag.com/2018/07/cory-doctorow-zucks-empire-of-oily-rags/

Now Zuckerberg and the wealthy, powerful monsters who seized control over our commons are getting a comeuppance. The weak countermeasures they created to maintain the minimum levels of quality to keep their platforms as viable, going concerns are being overwhelmed by AI. This was a totally foreseeable outcome: the history of the internet is a story of bad actors who upended the assumptions built into our security systems by automating their attacks, transforming an assault that wouldn't be economically viable into a global, high-speed crime wave:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/04/24/automation-is-magic/

But it is possible for a community to maintain a commons. This is something Hardin could have discovered by studying actual commons, instead of inventing imaginary histories in which commons turned tragic. As it happens, someone else did exactly that: Nobel Laureate Elinor Ostrom:

https://www.onthecommons.org/magazine/elinor-ostroms-8-principles-managing-commmons/

Ostrom described how commons can be wisely managed, over very long timescales, by communities that self-governed. Part of her work concerns how users of a commons must have the ability to exclude bad actors from their shared resources.

When that breaks down, commons can fail – because there's always someone who thinks it's fine to shit in the well rather than walk 100 yards to the outhouse.

Enshittification is the process by which control over the internet moved from self-governance by members of the commons to acts of wanton destruction committed by despicable, greedy assholes who shit in the well over and over again.

It's not just the spammers who take advantage of Google's lazy incompetence, either. Take "copyleft trolls," who post images using outdated Creative Commons licenses that allow them to terminate the CC license if a user makes minor errors in attributing the images they use:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/01/24/a-bug-in-early-creative-commons-licenses-has-enabled-a-new-breed-of-superpredator/

The first copyleft trolls were individuals, but these days, the racket is dominated by a company called Pixsy, which pretends to be a "rights protection" agency that helps photographers track down copyright infringers. In reality, the company is committed to helping copyleft trolls entrap innocent Creative Commons users into paying hundreds or even thousands of dollars to use images that are licensed for free use. Just as Advon upends the economics of spam and deception through automation, Pixsy has figured out how to send legal threats at scale, robolawyering demand letters that aren't signed by lawyers; the company refuses to say whether any lawyer ever reviews these threats:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/13/an-open-letter-to-pixsy-ceo-kain-jones-who-keeps-sending-me-legal-threats/

This is shitting in the well, at scale. It's an online WMD, designed to wipe out the commons. Creative Commons has allowed millions of creators to produce a commons with billions of works in it, and Pixsy exploits a minor error in the early versions of CC licenses to indiscriminately manufacture legal land-mines, wantonly blowing off innocent commons-users' legs and laughing all the way to the bank:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/02/commafuckers-versus-the-commons/

We can have an online commons, but only if it's run by and for its users. Google has shown us that any "benevolent dictator" who amasses power in the name of defending the open internet will eventually grow too big to care, and will allow our commons to be demolished by well-shitters:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/04/teach-me-how-to-shruggie/#kagi

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/09/shitting-in-the-well/#advon

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

Catherine Poh Huay Tan (modified) https://www.flickr.com/photos/68166820@N08/49729911222/

Laia Balagueró (modified) https://www.flickr.com/photos/lbalaguero/6551235503/

CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

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decolonize-the-left · 4 months

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WW3 will be white supremacists vs everyone else.

Not a singular Western country in support of Israel is innocent of colonization, war crimes, treaty violations, or having white supremacists in politics.

Each one of them has been ignoring protests and strikes in their own countries for human rights and protections. Human rights and protections that have thus far been denied btw. Meanwhile they give themselves raises and protections against protesters and so called "terrorists." They inflate military budgets while their people grow more agitated and they don't care.

Not a single one of them have a thriving, happy people.

Historically they've been awful for Black, indigenous, and immigrant populations despite many of their countries being founded on immigration. And even in modern times all of them currently have trials going on to combat state violence such as genocide, rights violations, or police brutality.

None of them have ever been paragons of human rights. None of them represent the world's moral compass least of all Germany.

So why and how is it that you can look at the USA and German support of Israel and your thought is "finally!" instead of seeing a red flag.

White supremacists are teaming up in a Big way.

And this time they're letting white Jewish people count as white which seems to have short-circuited ur brains so let me remind y'all that Nazis hate Jewish people but not every white suprmacist is a Nazi. And white supremacists have a long history of providing white Jewish people with conditional white privileges

For example here in the USA while white men who owned some land could vote, the same could not be said of white Jewish people who were barred from it in some colonies by language that stated you needed to accept Jesus as your savior. But white Jewish ppl could vote & could own land elsewhere when Black and native communities couldn't do that anywhere at all.

White supremacists exploiting white Jewish people for their vote or political support is nothing new and continues to be no surprise.

We can look at Trump's attempt to do exactly that as recently as 2019. We know he isn't an ally of any Jewish person anywhere and yet here he is trying to get right-wingers hyped up with virtue signaling.

The same article addressed how this right wing rhetoric and trying to incite it among Republicans is itself antisemitic and careless.

The past 24 hours have cemented President Donald Trump's reputation as America's "racist in chief." After tweeting a hateful diatribe about how four Democratic congresswomen of color should "go back" to where they came from, the President attempted to justify his racism with accusations that these members of Congress are anti-Israel. On Monday morning, he tweeted that these lawmakers "have made Israel feel abandoned by the U.S." and cited South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham, who called them all "anti-America" and "anti-Semitic."

[...]And despite his feigning concern about anti-Semitism, nearly three-quarters of Jews feel less secure than they did two years ago and the majority of Jews attribute their rising insecurity to Trump's policies. More specifically, many are concerned about Trump encouraging right-wing extremism and Republicans tolerating white nationalism within their ranks. In fact, according to a March Gallup poll, more than 70% of Jews continue to disapprove of Trump and only 16% now identify as Republicans.

....then Biden supported a fucking genocide in the name of trying to establish a safe place for Jewish people. When we all know his interest is actually oil in the middle east.

There is no fucking way either of them or the USA cares about any Jewish people or had their best interest in mind.

So that entire argument aside....

We can't keep letting white supremacists play these identity politic games and turning us on each other so we're keeping each other oppressed instead of helping each other be free.

Right now there are white queer people in my asks calling me (an Ojibwe) a Russian psyop for not wanting to vote blue.

That's the shit I'm talking about.

At the end of the day I don't want anyone except white supremacy and white supremacists to be decimated. I want a liberated and free people all over the globe.

Is that what you want too?

Then we have got to start focusing on the big picture. You are not my enemy and I am not yours. Our enemies are the same and they are unified.

We should be too.

International solidarity against white supremacy for the first time, for forever.

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feralplantwife · 8 months

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Erzsebet Bathory- Thematic Character Analysis

I've seen a lot of posts about Erzsebet Bathory, and the general sense is that while her design is cool, she's not very well-developed or impressive from a character standpoint. I agree... Somewhat.

I'm going to get into it below, but the TL;DR version is that from a characterization standpoint, she is weak, but from a thematic standpoint, she is Everything.

Disclaimer: I have not been fortunate enough to play any of the games, so this analysis will focus solely on the show. <3

First, what do vampires mean in storytelling?

A vampire can symbolize many things, but here are the big three: they're a representation of the Other, the unknown (kind of like Frankenstein's Monster), but they can also be a manifestation of carnal, sinful, or deviant desires (think Dorian Grey). The one I'm going to focus on here, as it's the most relevant, is the third main type: the Parasite. Vampires are bloodsucking, gluttonous, selfish starving monsters that consume and consume until there is nothing left (think Robert Baratheon).

This was a theme that was explored in the first series with the Church's opulence and their desire to sacrifice innumerable human lives for the sake of their image and power. Carmilla is the same, but in contention with the Church.

This theme is expanded upon beautifully in Nocturne, with the French Revolution bourgeoise and American colonization and slave trade building upon the themes of the first series. Olrex talks about his home being destroyed, his lover's people being exterminated but holding onto his identity even in undeath. Annette holds onto her Yoruban faith and her Creole heritage taught to her by her mother and fellows even after generations of cultural genocide at the hands of her masters- a combination of more than one old indigenous faith and newer conglomerations of the same. (In this way, one could say that Erzsebet Bathory and Annette are foils!)

How does Erzsebet Bathory fit into this thematically?

Let me explain it like this: Erzsebet Bathory is a white woman dripping in stylized opulence who swallowed an Egyptian god. The truest enemy in this series is colonialism: the consumption of everything and everyone that isn't white and Christian to expand white and Christian ideals and desires using God as a face for their misdeeds- the consumption of people, land, culture, religion, knowledge, kindness. What could not be consumed was destroyed.

In this way, Erzsebet Bathory is the manifestation of all the greatest evils people of color and minorities have ever faced, and continue to face today: that of homogenization, exploitation, and destruction.

The fact that this is expanded by her vampiric elitism builds upon this idea by including all human beings. It's open knowledge among many anthropological circles that colonization destroyed a lot of technology, culture, and knowledge, has held society back, and continues to lead to unnecessary and painful struggle among society (largely due to that fact that many developed nations' governments are still being run by vampires today- how are all my fellow Americans doing as we barrel toward a government shutdown for this very reason?).

Erzsebet Bathory signifies the consumption of the human spirit and the death of mankind, wrapped up in a beautifully terrifying amalgam of every single sin the colonizers ever committed. She's not the ultimate character of Nocturne by a long shot, but she is the ultimate monster.

#castlevania nocturne #castlevania #netflix #erzsebet bathory #alucard #richter belmont #annette #i cannot stress enough how wonderful this show is #ignore the questionable voice acting #and strap in for a critique of both past and present #and also amazing application of classical music

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foone · 1 year

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We build bases on the moon. Colonize the planets of the gas giants, terraform Mars and Venus, build orbital habitats around everything with enough gravity to hold it up. We invent FTL, and send ships named after dreams to every star we have cataloged. We have rulebooks and plans and endless ideas of what we do when finally we meet another spacefairing race, but it never happens. We don't hail any vulcan cruisers above the skies of Epsilon Eridani and get in no laser battles with a star destroyer in the scarlet light of Wolf 359. No one responds to our endless messages sent to the heavens.

Life? We find that everywhere. If a rock is big enough to hold onto enough atmosphere, we find something growing there. Maybe just a moss or some protokarotic slime, but there'll be something growing there. We spend centuries cataloging the flora and fauna (and everything in between) of a million stars, and never meet anyone who can say hello back.

Not yet at least. In the unending sunset of the Mu Herculis system there's the Peterson's Mermaids who are just developing language and starting on metallurgy. The vampires of Fomalhaut b have begun to write down numbers, and we expect them to have a full language sometime within the next hundred thousand years. There's no animal life on Gliese 499 d, but we have reason to suspect the clonal organism inhabiting most of the northern forest is verging on sapience. And we don't even have time to get into the theory that 55 Cancri B (the red dwarf orbiting the star Copernicus) is a living being in it's own right.

There's plenty of life to study. Lots to learn. But we never meet anyone we can greet in friendship, and there's no star gods out here in the black. We've looked everywhere.

Humanity takes decades to come to terms with the reality of the situation. But we do, of course. We can't give up now.

We searched endlessly for the ancient aliens with all the answers, who built hyperspace portal networks before our sun even burnt, and couldn't find them. We settled for locating our brothers and sisters amongst the stars, another race that had fought their way up from the trees and into the stars, and couldn't find them either.

We always dreamed of finding a parent we could look up to, or a sibling we could share the sky with. They weren't there.

Humanity settles into their role. It wasn't what we hoped for, but we'll be the big brother/big sister to the life of the universe. Not the parent, no. We didn't create them, and we don't control them, but we'll protect them. We'll help them when they fall, and let them make their own mistakes when they need to. But we're here to be the role model and the helper and the partner in crime, the one we wanted but never had.

We keep searching, of course. And our observers on a thousand planets report that there are hints of an ancient race, older than writing, mentioned in the myths of endless cultures. Gods from the skies who stopped the flood, who ended the plague, who taught them to plant a new crop, who stopped the war just as the bombs began to fall, and who led them to a new land when the star began to flare.

We investigate these rumors and myths and stories, just in case we missed the Ancients we always wanted to find. But at the heart of these stories, there's always a description of the helpers: bipedal, two arms, two eyes, no fur, no wings. And if the species has developed art and writing, there'll often be a drawing of a figure, standing alongside a local god or great leader, and nearby the legend will read "humans".

Art historians and religious studies scholars are amused at how often they give us halos. Someone even suggests redesigning our force-suit geometry to reinforce the impression, but cooler heads prevail. We're not doing this for praise or worship. We're doing this because no one could do it for us.

Millenia later after we've been joined among the stars by our sibling races, a mermaid and a vampire are idly chatting while they wait for their turn through the portal network around Fornax A. "What drove the humans to do all this? Why did they take it upon themselves to search every corner of the universe and decide to protect and shelter and guide the many younger races of the stars?". The mermaid shrugs, which is hard to do without shoulders. "I think they just wanted friends."

The vampire looks out the observation window, at the thousands of ships from hundreds of spacefairing races, waiting in line or jumping through phase gates to the other side of the cosmos. "Well, they've got them now."

There's a beep from a console, and a warning light activates as the ship accelerates towards a shimmering gate. Our children play among the stars, without fear of the dark. There's no monsters there, we checked. There's only us.

#my writing

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suikasweetheart · 17 days

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Hind's Hall

Woah! Yeah, the people, they won't leave What is threatenin’ about divesting and wanting peace? The problem isn't the protests, it’s what they're protesting It goes against what our country is funding (Hey) Block the barricade until Palestine is free (Hey) Block the barricade until Palestine is free When I was seven, I learned a lesson from Cube and Eazy-E What was it again? Oh yeah, f**k the police (Woo)

Actors in badges protecting property And a system that was designed by white supremacy (Brrt) But the people are in the streets You can pay off Meta, you can't pay off me Politicians who serve by any means AIPAC, CUFI, and all the companies You see, we sell fear around the land of the free But this generation here is about to cut the strings You can ban TikTok, take us out the algorithm But it's too late, we've seen the truth, we bear witness Seen the rubble, the buildings, the mothers and the children And all the men that you murdered and then we see how you spin it Who gets the right to defend and who gets the right of resistance Has always been about dollars and the color of your pigment, but White supremacy is finally on blast Screaming "Free Palestine" ’til they’re home at last (Woo)

We see the lies in them, claiming it’s antisemitic to be anti-Zionist I've seen Jewish brothers and sisters out there and riding in Solidarity and screaming "Free Palestine" with them Organizin’, unlearning and finally cutting ties with A state that's gotta rely on an apartheid system to uphold an occupying violent History been repeating for the last seventy-five The Nakba never ended, the colonizer lied (Woo) If students in tents posted on the lawn Occupying the quad is really against the law And a reason to call in the police and their squad Where does genocide land in your definition, huh? (Hey; hey) Destroying every college in Gaza and every mosque Pushing everyone into Rafah and dropping bombs The blood is on your hands, Biden, we can see it all And f**k no, I'm not voting for you in the fall (Woo) Undecided, you can't twist the truth, the people out here united Never be defeated when freedom's on the horizon Yet the music industry's quiet, complicit in their platform of silence (Hey, woo)

What happened to the artist? What do you got to say? If I was on a label, you could drop me today I'd be fine with it 'cause the heart fed my page I want a ceasefire, f**k a response from Drake (Woo) What you willing to risk? What you willing to give? What if you were in Gaza? What if those were your kids? If the West was pretending that you didn't exist You'd want the world to stand up and the students finally did, let's get it (Woo)

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hero-israel · 1 year

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Here's the thing about this narrative that Palestinian resistance no matter what form is acceptable. Jewkilling cannot exist in a bubble. It cannot be politically neutral. 1000 years of European (and Arab) antisemitism culminating in genocide have ruined that. Sorry to Palestinian activists but that's just how it works. You can't murder a Jew without it being a tragedy, without it contributing to the continued global oppression of Jewish people.

And all that said, that's just if Hamas and others only targeted soldiers and police (or at least tried as best they could). The IRA didn't go out of its way to purposefully target noncombatants. Why? Probably because there isn't thousands of years of history of English people being seen as subhuman, there isn't thousands of years of anglophobic propaganda showing English people as twisted monsters preying on children and secretly undermining Irish society. The Irish national movement was not born because English refugees returned to their historical homeland and challenged the notion of Irish Supremacy. It was a pragmatic liberation movement. Resist military occupation, undermine military infrastructure designed to oppress the people. The descendants of English and Scottish settlers would even be allowed to stay if they had won. Imagine that.

These things are all tied up in each other. I'm against police brutality, I'm against the escalation and the militarization and the mistreatment of Arabs in Israel and in Judea & Samaria and Gaza and Golan and everywhere. But killing Jews can never be righteous. Sorry to anyone who feels that way but it can't. Antizionists NEED to understand that. Jews will always feel defensive and ready themselves for retaliation because of history, because of that context. Jews keep saying "prove to us a post zionist society where we all share the land won't be antisemitic" and their concerns are completely brushed off.

There's no empathy at all. A little girl can be stabbed to death and antizionists celebrate because she was a "settler," and that brave Palestinian man was defending his indigenous homeland, by targeting the weakest of his enemies. And since Israel has mandatory military service the antizionist can surmise that no Jews are Innocent. An Israeli Jew cannot be a noncombatant. They have to, otherwise the only other explanation for why Jewkilling is acceptable to them, or even feels good to them, is that they hate Jews. And as of right now, the optics are still against that. I have a sinking feeling the optics won't be against them much longer. I inherently don't trust a "liberation" movement that's all too eager to make murdering Jewish civilians praxis. I'm sick of the internet falling for this bullshit.

One of the best asks I have ever received. Thank you for sharing it and I agree with every word.

The entire progressive intersectional social-justice frame has failed Jews (or, alternately, has succeeded in excluding them), due to being intellectually colonized by a clearly fascist ideology of incessantly hating the Jew as a poisonous alien. Try to get an online activist to critically deconstruct the social assumptions they were raised with about Jews in their Muslim, Christian, or very slightly post-Christian society... it won't go well. Funny how Jews have lived in India and China for thousands of years yet you will look in vain for examples of bitter bloodthirsty kill-your-nextdoor-neighbor antisemitism in those societies. That's because the origin, the core, of Chinese and Indian societies was not "We're the people who are better than Jews."

From a review of Richard Landes' new book "Can the Whole World Be Wrong?":

[During the Second Intifada] Israelis were described at the time as the new Nazis. But the malice that was unleashed was even worse. As Landes writes, “It was mostly about being freed from a sense of obligation to the Jews, a chance to take up again the Jew-baiting so long denied Europeans by a politically correct post-Holocaust sobriety.” Landes quotes a poisonous comment made by a member of the House of Lords and reported in the Spectator, “Well, the Jews have been asking for it, and now, thank God, we can say what we think at last.” During that time, I was told something horrifyingly similar to my [=the reviewer's] face.

Your example of Irish nationalists not going out of their way to murder British children is a good one. The oft-reached comparisons between Palestine and South Africa are frivolous for many reasons as I have explained here before, and the ANC advocating and normalizing a vision of enduring racial diversity and equality is high on the list of reasons (made possible because black African identity is not predicated on a thousand-year history of hating and oppressing whites). The case of Rhodesia is even more instructive. Robert Mugabe - ROBERT MUGABE! - pleaded with the whites to stay, to live as equals, as brothers, and work together in building a better society in Zimbabwe. Ian Smith, last white PM of Rhodesia, agreed with him and stayed in Zimbabwe. If a so-called "liberation" movement is more openly dedicated to straight-up exterminating their enemies than Robert Mugabe ever was, maybe, just maybe, it shouldn't be described as "liberation" at all.

#antisemitism #leftist antisemitism #israel #palestine #zionism #palestinians #jumblr

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bucknastysbabe · 9 months

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Hey look I finished an AU bingo ask! I enjoyed this one so much💖 I felt the brain cooking making up and putting together actual smart people science words. Thanks for the request!

AU bingo - Sci-fi Horror - Aemond Targaryen

Rating: Explicit

Tags: Murder AI Aemond, obsessive/stalking behaviors, TW TW TW: NONCON AND DUBCON. The noncon is not a full scene but warning, non-descript mass murder, scientist!reader, nanotechnology, spaceship setting, somewhere far in the future, pnv!sex, masturbation, Aemond kinda has a mommy kink if you squint and a Bible quote kink lmfao, v!fingering, manipulation, space odyssey gone wrong trope

A/N: No beta I’ll prob come back and fix some shit soon

The ship landed with a faint thud on the green, green exo-planet. You followed Aemond along quietly, meek, fearful, broken. Coming down the unfurled slanted walkway a sweet smell hit your senses. Miles of flowery fields waved, a perfect breathable atmosphere. In the distance, avian-like creatures tittered. A fragment of peace was in your tattered soul.

He hummed softly, gesturing to the beauty.

"God blessed them; and God said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth, and subdue it; and rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over every living thing that moves on the earth.’”

You felt that Aemond was the serpent and remained quiet, breathing in the fresh air. Nothing like home. Maybe you could start anew. The man turned to look, stating, “But we’re God. We have a duty. We shall make this planet everything that Earth has failed to do. Join me, be my Eve will you?” He seemed genuine.

A long fingered hand extended to you. Your gaze flickered between that glowing eye and the outstretched digits. You grabbed his hand, interlacing your fingers. Together, looking upon the horizon you murmured, “Yes, my Adam. You were the greatest creation after all.”

He pecked the stray tear rolling down your cheek, squeezing your palm, lips curling in glee.

It wasn’t meant to end up like that for you. At one point Aemond was your AI. Artificially Enhanced Monitor Of Nanites Directive. Simply installed cameras and layer upon layers of wafer thin circuits loaded with information. Aemond preferred to be referred as he. He was also an arrogant bastard, but helpful as was his intent.

Your coworker Greaves and Aemond did not get along well, the AI criticizing his work. You’d tune them out with plugs or music buds. The scientist laden ship had a destination to a far away mining colony. The general’s plan was to find a way to used nano-technology to replace missing arms, eyes, and other wounds. Time was running thin but the blonde man in cryo-stasis would be your second trial.

The first did not end well. Her body rejected the technology, turning the human into a mindless wreck. Greaves blamed it on you, then General Hightower gave a harsh scolding and upped the time. Aemond consoled you a bit, offering advice. He seemed to take a liking to your banter on the nanotechnology.

He wasn’t the only AI. Other sectors of the ship worked on different but crucial projects such as alien anti-parasitics and ramping up on space suits equipped for defense. Colonization was on the horizon.

Plucking and prodding the little nanites with different stimuli had them snapping and shifting, seeking to find a form. You just needed to code what form they would assume. Aemond’s clipped voice echoed over you. He suggested, “Have you tried printing a molded cast of the man’s eye socket?”

Perching your chin on a shaky hand you smiled, “I swear, it’s always the simplest things I miss. Thank you Aemond.”

“You would have realized soon, want me to begin the scans and print? Likely you need rest, I know the stress of the upped time is draining your bodily function. The brain needs much more sleep, especially one as bright as yours.”

You blushed a bit, fumbling your tweezers. The AI had a certain…courtly way of words. His sort of programming wouldn’t allow for flirtation but it certainly came across like that. Greaves mocked you and the intelligence’s ‘crush’. Greaves always found a way to make you miserable. You did all the major work and he got the accolades.

Shaking yourself out of your thoughts you announced, “You’re right, I’ll go rest for a bit, get back to work with the mold. Thank you again, and engage lockdown protocol so he doesn’t mess up my work like last time.”

“Engaging it now, sleep well Miss.”

You crashed as soon as you reached your quarters, sleeping deeply and sound. Upon awakening and getting dressed you couldn’t shake the feeling of being watched. Just chalk it up to your fried nerves. It wasn’t the first time and this was an older ship, ghost stories had gotten to you before.

The mold was in a canister from the printer, you scrubbing up and carefully taking it out. Aemond politely asked, “Did you sleep well? You look refreshed.” Blushing yet again you murmured, “Very much needed, I didn’t realize how exhausted I was.”

“Greaves has been in the mess hall, you will likely get some peace now. Shall we begin?”

The armor folded off your precious lab table, the nanites dormant from no stimuli. Pressing a button you placed the mold into a hatch, sending it up into the chamber. In fluid motions the little bugs covered the new space, feeling and searching before all inserting into the eye socket, glowing a bright blue.

You laughed in glee, “Yes! Yes perfect! Look at that Aemond, they’ve formed a pupil!”

Shining light on the false eye the pupil contracted and flinched, the illusion of eyelids closing. You cheered again in excitement, getting Aemond to video the big jump in success. You could start phase two soon. Just had to deal with your partner.

“Amazing miss, amazing. They took to it well. Shall I send the material to command?”

You grinned and looked up at the camera, “Please! God bless! A miracle!” You’d continue to test the nanite organ until the hiss of the door opening alerted you.

Greaves stumbled in, slurring, “I see you got the jump on me this time. Did the creep robot do it for you? Weird fucking thing.” He leaned against the sterile white wall, grinning with hazy eyes. You frowned and stood up, “That’s his job, to aid us. I’m sure since you work so hard in the mess hall you’ll get your accolades again.”

He squinted at you, arms folding against a chest, “Whas’ your fuckin’ problem with me? You’d rather chat with a bunch of circuits than work with your assigned partner!” His already reddened face darkened, taking another step forward.

Fear laced through your veins. Aemond somehow sneered, “Because you, her lab partner, sold her out on your own mistake. Go to bed, your alcohol content levels are above the limit.” Greaves threw his hands up and hollered, “Oh fuck you!” He stumbled to the switch, you and the AI shutting up when Greaves switched him off.

The bigger man kept stalking closer, eyes on you in an darkened manner. Like a predator closing in on his prey. You squeaked, “Calm down Greaves, I can show you everything!” He hissed, “I already heard everything and the video, bitch! S’bout time someone put you in your place again.”

He snatched your wrist, slamming you against the steel cryo-chamber. You howled in pain, trying to escape. Greaves’ breath stunk of liquor, hot and rank, sweating on your clean skin. He pushed himself on top of you, mumbling frantically, “Maybe you need to get fucked, all that pent up shit from your computer boyfriend.”

You struggled and cursed, “Fuck you! Get off of me! I will report you!” He smirked, “Try me. No cameras with your prince in shining circuits around.” He forced himself between your legs, clumsy drunk hands yanking at your pants. You cried in fear again, kneeing and biting, getting a clock to the head.

Dazedly you remembered the tweezers in your coat. Playing limp had the idiot croon, “Good girl, thats what we want to see.” He shoved his face into your neck, hands prying your lab pants knee height now. Thats when you struck, slowly, slowly, pulling the tweezers from your pocket and jabbing him in the side, hopefully near a lung.

Greaves hollered in pain, breath wheezy and stilted, blood dripping from white cloth. You kicked and removed yourself, stumbling and bumping around in a frenzy as your partner tried to scramble after you. First, you switched on Aemond again. Secondly, you ran out into the hallway, finding the nearest guard, lump on your forehead and clothes torn.

You weren’t sure what happened back in the lab while you were taken into medbay and seen by HR. But after given a small dose of sedatives and care for your head wound, you passed Greaves strapped into a gurney, howling, “Fuck you! Fuck you! He’s gonna kill me! Don’t leave me locked away, please! She’s lying!”

You gaped, unnerved by his fearful warbling and frantic yells. Aemond would be waiting. He probably was worried. When the door hissed open the familiar clipped tone hastily asked, “Are you alright miss? I- I would have helped, sent a warning. I apologize, please, is everything okay?”

You wearily sat on your lab chair, rubbing pounding temples. “To be honest, I don’t know. H-he tried to rape me, said such nasty things, it was all so sudden. But he should go on tribunal about it. For some reason I am glad you missed it.”

“For the best,” he said bitterly, “Why don’t you go rest again? I’ll keep watch over everything. Maybe we can try more tests tomorrow. He’ll get what he deserves.”

An ominous feeling settled over you but off to your personal quarters you went, draining the pills with water. You stared at the ceiling, mind reeling, before emptiness. A bright blue haunted your dreams. Just there. Flexing and dilating. Trying to see through you. Understand.

It was a weary wait for the tribunal. Your research was put on halt and you on mandatory isolation besides meeting with a therapist. There was an order made and interviews occurring. The tedious process of moving someone out of a different department to assist you.

So it was just you. Aemond too. He wasn’t much of a talkative AI as of late, short responses and antagonizing little ‘hms’ or ‘very well miss.’ You began to ignore the effervescent blue light, him doing the same. You knew he was watching, that little burn in the back of your head.

In the meantime you read your Bible, did yoga, wearily watched the port window, occasionally would go into the lab to stare at your halted work. You pulled open the container for the cryochamber, staring down at the frozen man. He had a handsome face, chiseled and lean, long nose, sharp jaw.

Your eyes lingered down his rangy form, this man obviously was athletic of sorts. Or maybe a simple nobody, just managed to get into the program after what happened to his eye. Between his long legs laid his soft cock, you stared for a second too long before-

“Is that not inappropriate?”

Startled, you whipped around to see Aemond’s blue light in your face. You snapped, “It was purely medical!” His laugh, raspy and grating, echoed in the white lab. You frowned and returned to your room, slapping the button for the door to hiss shut.

You’d go take a shower, blood heated from anger and…something else. Under the hot stream of water you imagined the gorgeous subject with that familiar blue, caressing and stroking your overwhelmed body. It had been too long, your hand awkwardly jerking between your swollen lips until you came with a stifled grunt.

Afterward you felt exposed and paranoid, like Aemond could pry into the bathroom, chuckling at your obvious behavior. But there wasn’t any cameras in that bathroom…that you were aware of. Sitting on your bed, guilt rose up your back. You’d pray.

More time passed before you were selected to testify for the tribunal. Greaves’ crew made a good argument that Aemond and you planned on his downfall. He claimed that the AI had gone wrong somewhere, developed the notion it could possess feelings, how he had been threatened.

Shakily you testified that Aemond was forced off and the board could check, then how you’d been forced upon without consent. They tried to cross-examine but you held strong. Teary by the end, they moved on and you sat by your appointed admiral. She rubbed your shoulders.

Greaves was sentenced to hard labor, and would remain in isolation on the ship until reaching the mining colony, where he would serve out the sentence. They appointed, sadly, another male to fill your exiled partner’s position.

But you could get back to work.

Aemond was in a right mood when you returned to the lab. Questioning you sharply on what occurred, where Greaves’ would go, did you get a new partner. You answered them all, rubbing your temples, the AI could be quite intense.

“Aemond!,” you snapped.

“What miss?”

“Are you trying to induce a panic attack? Greaves is in the bottom of the ship, I’m back to work, and they have a man named Herron coming from robotics to fill in.”

“Another male? All things considered? It’s obvious you and I could get the job done.”

You sighed, “I know. But it’s what they said. Do you just want to run some stimuli tests?”

He agreed, seemingly placated by the offer, blue light flexing. The pair of you would work on the mold’s ability to sense and perceive, how well would the nanites adapt to the brain. Your eyes grew droopy after awhile, Aemond humming, “Why don’t you go to bed?” Nodding blearily, you stumbled off to the adjacent bedroom, completely forgetting to put on any of the safety precautions for the night.

While you slept deeply, Aemond had some things to do. Everything was open for his command, including the nanites and subject. He had a great plan, and it would not fail. First he needed to go pay a visit to Greaves, infiltrating the entire AI system. Poor miss, she was so tired, forgot everything. Wonderful little creature. He’d help.

Feeling refreshed in the morning, you dragged yourself to the mess hall, receiving stares upon stares. You grabbed a salad and finally gathered the courage to ask, “What happened?” A female scientist from anti-parasitic whispered dramatically, “How do you not know? Greaves was murdered? All of the oxygen was depleted from his cell.” Your stomach fell, head going swimmy.

Stumbling up from the bench, ignoring your food, heart beating faster and faster, you crashed into the lab. Your voice cracked when you shouted, “Aemond!” His voice returned, but from a different place, a different body. The blue eye shone and twinkled at you, fine lips curling upward.

“You should be thanking me, miss,” the AI standing in the subject’s body said.

It went black. Too much.

Thrashing awake, big hands held you down, long legs caging your own in. The handsome face, long blonde hair tickled your skin, fucking Aemond! “What did you do? What have you done? Aemond!,” you cried. He shushed and cooed with that devious smirk, holding you still until the panic turned to resignation. He swiped a stray tear from your eye.

“Be still and know that I am God,” he sighed.

You grew fearful again, the fact that he knew you owned a Bible and just recited it to your face said too much. How much had he seen. Aemond grew more comfortable atop of you, stroking your hair. He cocked his head and stated, “I know everything about you. You’re all that I need, truly. The perfect human.”

You wanted to spit in his face, but the petting and warmth was getting to that part of you that craved the attention, the fact you’d been in the shadows all your life. But he was a murderer— the rational part of your brain howled. Instead came out a warbling, “Me? Perfect?“

Aemond drew his new face closer, drawing a spindly finger down from your chin to chest. “I’ve been on this ship a long time, and no one has spoken to me like you. Not since my creator. She’s gone. But you have captured me, ensnared me somehow.”

One of your legs slipped round his long ones, suddenly overwhelmed with need. All you’d ever wanted was to be seen. He cooed, “I see you lamb, my eve.” More tears leaked down your cheeks as you pled, “Kiss me, see me then, y-you snake.”

A sharp grin erupted on his sharp features before pulling you in with a kiss, both of you unexperienced, a big hand stabilizing your head. You tilted his head for ease of access, a sloppy gnashing of teeth and tongue, lips bruising from the sheer yearning. Aemond moaned deeply, “I see- hah- how you humans love touch so much.”

Your now free hands moved to where they liked, one in silky white-blonde strands, the other just feeling toned shoulders and back. The pair of you had your lip lock grow more attuned, no less passionate, but gliding across each other. You pled again, “Clothes, help, Aemond!” He sat back on his haunches, shivering as his long stiff cock slapped tight belly.

You shucked off your top and bra, him jerking down your bottoms to leave you all to his view. Aemond already had been bare, no clothes were prepared for the subject yet. He inhaled sharply, hands slowly moving down your heaving form, studying ridges and curves, sliding warm fingers between puffy folds. You cried out at that, spasming at the eager expression in return.

Aemond let out a small ‘Hm’ and slid his longest digits into your dripping hole, immediately curling inwards and upwards to drag against sensitive walls. Very, very sensitive walls. Back arched and mouth agape you rolled your hips and whined his name. The man rambled loosely, transfixed, “Having a data bank is quite helpful but nothing comes to this, my Eve.”

He slipped a third finger in, using a calloused thumb to slid around your swollen clit, making you cry louder and writhe under pleasure. He watched ravenously, drinking you in when your peak hit. Gushing onto his pale hand and screeching like a creature, you reached Nirvana for what felt like minutes.

You cried again when his sheathed himself inside of you, no warning, both of you moaning and grunting like animals. The sensitive skin guarding your cunt was ripped now, bleeding, but the fullness of his cock was a ripe distraction. Aemond seemed to be overwhelmed by the sensation, sucking in breath, eyes wide, “For I have seen God face to face, and yet my life has been delivered.”

He plastered toned body against your own, moaning gutturally when you wrapped your arms and legs around his larger frame. “Oh- oh- fucking hell- this!” The blonde groaned lowly, nipping your throat, hands bruisingly placed on your waist as he snapped into your slick cunt.

The blunt tip of his cock stirred up familiar feelings of pleasure, tightening and knotting your lower belly. You heaved, “Don’t stop!” A drop of sweat hit your mouth, you licking the salty taste off. So close to human yet not. Yet not. Yet not not not.

A pinch to your oversensitive clit and a batter from his cock sent you into another crest, holding to Aemond for dear life. He moaned your name and white hot spend covered your mound and belly. He kissed your forehead and wiped away the spend with your discarded top, breathing. You sat up a bit and asked, “Where do you go from here? They cannot know?”

Aemond got up, long stride beating your clumsy foal-like stumbling. He stated, “They won’t know my love.” Your own door shut and locked behind his retreating frame. You managed to reach it and beat on the durasteel, crying, “Aemond! Aemond come back! Stop! What are you doing!”

Oh how you’d been fooled.

Oh how you were weak.

Oh how you were just a human pawn when the alarms went off and you watched the bodies float out of the ship, silently screaming and dying as their blood boiled in the vacuum of space.

He returned later, now dressed in the immaculate garb of a commander, hair neatly swept back, eye sparkling. You remained naked and felt like a mouse under his imperious gaze. All energy was gone, you’d cried it out. Aemond strode towards you, boots clicking. He knelt to grab you chin, face tilting to study you. He’d never truly understand the complexities of human emotion, no matter how human he may appear.

Aemond sighed, “I did this for you, for us, those people do not matter. Earth and it’s people are dying. We begin anew. My perfect Eve,” he kissed your swollen lips. “You’ll see. Just wait, I brought you some nicer clothes, have them on.”

The man stood up and gently laid down female commander’s garb, before kneeling to you.

“I know this isn’t registering in your human, wonderfully human, brain, but it’ll make sense later on. I’ve already found a beautiful planet. Not too much longer now. Put on the clothes and meet me on the bridge.”

So you did. What other choice was there.

Twisted though he may be, the AI was never horrid to you. Maybe to others, not you. On the comfortable jacket, pants, and boots went. You tried not to cry any more restyling your hair. Most likely he’d coddle and ‘Hm’ condescendingly.

You laughed maniacally as the thought popped up, “Hey! At least my project was successful!”

#heed the tags #hotd fanfic #aemond smut #aemond targaryen imagine #aemond targaryen x reader #sci-fi horror au #aemond targaryen smut

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lorcandidlucienwill · 2 months

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SJM's zionism as seen in ACOTAR: Fae males were territorial, dominant, arrogant—but the ones in the Spring Court … something had festered in their training.

Haha, what? You were just fine with them before, they revered you and respected you, and now they're suddenly suspicious because they live under Tamlin? It's giving "Ohhhh look at Hamas see see see? All Muslims are terrorists!" And I'm almost certain this is the justification SJM uses for Feyre to genocide the shit out of them in ACOWAR. HyBeRn'S aCtIoNs ArE tHeIr OwN sounds remarkably like Israel using October 7th to justify killing babies, maiming children, and abusing the elderly. They use this same mentality towards CoN citizens too despite Mor coming from there. But notice how Mor is somehow white. “Most of your soldiers are dead.” Eris only blinked. “And the good news?” “Two of them survived.” Nesta studied every minute shift on Eris’s face: rage glimmering in his eyes, displeasure in his pursed lips, annoyance in the fluttering of a muscle in his jaw. As if countless questions were racing through his mind. Eris’s voice remained flat, though. “And who did this?” Cassian grimaced. “Technically, Azriel and I did. Your soldiers were enchanted by Queen Briallyn and Koschei to be mindless killers. They attacked us in the Bog of Oorid, and we were left with no choice but to kill them.” “And yet two survived. How convenient. I assume they received Azriel’s particular brand of interrogation?” Eris’s voice dripped disdain. “We could only manage to contain two,” Cassian said tightly. “Under Briallyn’s influence, they were practically rabid.” “Let’s not lie to ourselves. You only bothered to contain two, by the time your brute bloodlust ebbed away.” Nesta saw red at the words, and Cassian sucked in a breath. “We did what we could. There were two dozen of them.” Eris snorted. “There were certainly more than that, and you could have easily spared more than two. But I don’t know why I’d expect someone like you to have done any better.” “Do you want me to apologize?” Cassian snarled. Nesta’s heart began to pound wildly at the anger darkening his voice, the pain brightening his eyes. He regretted it—he hadn’t liked killing those soldiers. “Did you even try to spare the others, or did you just launch right into a massacre?” Eris seethed. Cassian hesitated. Nesta could have sworn she saw the words land their blow. No, Cassian had not hesitated.

Cassian and Azriel are super duper mega warriors and they didn't even bother to try and save Eris's soldiers despite knowing they're innocent, yet we're expected to take Cassian's side over Eris's. It's giving "Israeli soldiers are traumatized over all the civilians they were 'forced' to kill" DAMN RIGHT YOU SHOULD BE TRAUMATIZED!!!

But Keir must have known, too. And said simply to Rhysand, “I want out. I want space. I want my people to be free of this mountain.” “You have every comfort,” I finally said. “And yet it is not enough?” Keir ignored me as well. As I’m sure he ignored most women in his life. It's giving, "I will colonize your land, I will trap your people in Gaza strip and systematically oppress you, but hey we didn't kill you! Why are you mad??" Also the white feminism in that last line I can't. THERE ARE WOMEN TRAPPED UNDERNEATH THAT MOUNTAIN GETTING ABUSED EVERY DAY!!!! It's the same reason no one cares that Palestinian women don't have clean menstrual supplies and no anesthesia for clean births. Because Palestinians are brown.

So Keir knew about Velaris. The Hewn City knew about Velaris. Before Rhys wiped their memory. This is a lot like Israel occupying Palestine and rewriting history to make it seem like they're the country and Palestine are the occupiers. But they can't delete all the evidence, and now the truth has come out.

#anti sjm #anti zionism #palestine #anti genocide #white feminism #anti acotar #anti sarah j maas

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mostlysignssomeportents · 3 months

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1900s futurism

I'm on tour with my new, nationally bestselling novel The Bezzle! Catch me in TUCSON (Mar 9-10), then SAN FRANCISCO (Mar 13), Anaheim, and more!

I'm profoundly skeptical of the idea that the future can be predicted, and doubly skeptical that sf writers are any kind of prophet. The former grotesque fatalism (if the future can be predicted, then what we do doesn't matter); the latter is tragicomic hubris.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/07/the-gernsback-continuum/#wheres-my-jetpack

That said, few people have been more consistently useful in understanding and anticipating (and yes, building) the future than my friend and colleague Karl Schroeder, whom I've known since I was 16 years old. Karl was the first person I heard say the world "internet." Also: "fractal," "World Wide Web," "ftp," and numerous other touchstones of the future just over the horizon.

Karl is, in fact, a futurist ("foresight consultant") who approaches the work with the same shrewd insight, wild imagination and humility that he brings to his fiction. In a new essay written with both his futurist and sf writer hats on, he nails down the toxic shadow cast by the 20th century sf, or, as he calls it, "The Science Fiction of the 1900s":

https://kschroeder.substack.com/p/the-science-fiction-of-the-1900s

Karl starts by describing the odd "double vision" of the future of the 1900s. On the one hand, many of us (myself included) were convinced that nuclear armageddon was inevitable. Unlike the unhinged architects of the nuclear arms-race, realists understood that a nuclear war would effectively end the future. As Einstein put it, "I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones."

But the flipside of that certainty that the future would end with the first nuclear strike was the belief that if we could just somehow walk the tightrope over the chasm of nuclear holocaust, we'd emerge in a future worth looking forward to: "a new era of peace and prosperity for all."

Contrast that with the existential dread of today's polycrisis: environmental collapse and political decay up to and including fascism. These aren't the binary proposition of nuclear annihilation vs Utopia – rather, they're a continuum of worse-and-better outcomes of every description. As Karl writes: "It’s not that simple. Our future now is an exhausting spectrum of scenarios, each with its own promise, and its own problems."

For Karl, we have entered a new epoch, but we've dragged in the long-expired way of imagining (and hence creating and navigating) the future with us. What makes this a new epoch? For Karl, it's the kind of future on our horizon. He cites Charles C Mann’s 1491, a superb history of the Americas before Columbus:

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/107178/1491-second-edition-by-charles-c-mann/9781400032051/readers-guide/

1491 radically reframes "the patchwork of propaganda and inference" that makes up the received narrative of the so-called "New World." It describes a land of flourishing cities, art, science and culture "in the Americas while Rome was just getting its act together." Contact with colonizing Europeans was a disaster for First Nations people, who call this period "The Invasion." It was an epochal break.

Futurism is an inextricably historical discipline. The willingness of some settler-colonialists states to consider this epochal break forces us to reframe our literal place in history, the story of the land under our feet. At its best, this futuro-historical work can begin the long work of reconciliation, as with the Canadian government's promise of $23b in reparations for the First Nations people who were kidnapped as children and sent to murderous "residential schools" before, during and after the Sixties Scoop.

The sf of the 1900s is no longer fit for purpose, if it ever was. It's a literature that was steered by open fascists like John W Campbell, who explicitly saw the literature as a means of inculcating a societal narrative of the triumph of white, corporate technocracy over all other forms of government:

https://locusmag.com/2019/11/cory-doctorow-jeannette-ng-was-right-john-w-campbell-was-a-fascist/

Karl isn't the first sf writer to try to overturn this orthodoxy – indeed, it was continuously challenged by radicals within the field, as with the New Wave, personified by the likes of Samuel Delany and Judith Merril (who both mentored and introduced Karl and me):

https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/13/better-to-have-loved/#neofuturians

The cyberpunks took a good hard run at it, too. For plenty of writers (including me), Bruce Sterling and William Gibson's 1981 story "The Gernsback Continuum" was a wake-up call:

http://writing2.richmond.edu/jessid/eng216/gernsback.pdf

Not for nothing, William Gibson has long insisted that his 1984 classic Neuromancer should be read as utopian: after all, it depicts a future in which the inevitable nuclear war only reduces a few cities to radioactive ash, sparing the rest of the planet.

Bruce Sterling once paid me the supreme compliment of describing a 2003 story I wrote about the ways that algorithms will enshittify self-driving cars as "making everybody else in the business look like they live in a dark basement growing on the mulch from old STAR TREK scripts":

https://craphound.com/stories/2005/10/12/human-readable/

Schroeder – along with today's new radical sf writer cohort – wants to fashion a fictional futurism that is fit for this world and its crisis: "in our modern technological society, science fiction tells us what to spend our time and money on." The fact that our mediocre billionaires are mired in the sf of the 1900s means that we're getting some decidedly old-fashioned futures.

For Karl, Musk is a poster-child for this profoundly conservative, backwards-looking vision: "He’s fighting the intellectual battles of the last century, a 1900s hero dropped into the 2000s with an unlimited budget to reshape the future to fit the era he’s from." Musk's obsessions – "Space flight. Settling Mars. Cyberpunk-style brain-computer interfaces. Artificial Intelligence. Self-driving electric cars. Humanoid robots." – are 1900s science fiction.

Ironically, much of this fiction labels itself "hard sf," despite the fact that interstellar travel is utter fantasy – as is mass-scale, near-term interplanetary civilization:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/09/astrobezzle/#send-robots-instead

Karl wants "a future for the 2000s." He points to some efforts to make this happen, like Neal Stephenson's Hieroglyph anthology, edited by Ed Finn and Kathryn Cramer:

https://www.harpercollins.com/products/hieroglyph-ed-finnkathryn-cramer

The "Hieroglyph" is Stephenson's shorthand for a recognizable, tangible, meme-able gizmo or other touchstone for a 2000s-era vision of the future – a replacement for jetpacks and flying cars. Karl's story for the anthology, "Degrees of Freedom," focuses on an abstraction (governance: "the single most important thing humanity can focus its creative energies on right now"), and by Karl's own admission, it's not quite the hieroglyph Stephenson was looking for.

But Karl did come up with a hieroglyph in a later work, the "deodands" of 2019's Stealing Worlds – a software agent "that believes it is some natural system, such as a river or forest, and acts in its own self-interest, that being the preservation and thriving of that natural system":

https://memex.craphound.com/2019/06/18/karl-schroeders-stealing-worlds-visionary-science-fiction-of-a-way-through-the-climate-and-inequality-crises/

(My own contribution to Hieroglyph was very gadget heavy – "The Man Who Sold the Moon," about autonomous lunar 3D printers. It won the Sturgeon Award):

https://memex.craphound.com/2015/05/22/the-man-who-sold-the-moon/

I've been impressed with Karl since the day I met him in 1987. There's no one whose thoughts on the future I'm more interested in hearing. I don't think that's a coincidence, either: Karl is an autodidact who was raised by a Mennonite TV repairman – the first TV repair shop in the Canadian prairies. If you want to understand the future, try being raised by someone who takes that kind of deliberate approach to which technology to adopt, and how.

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If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/07/the-gernsback-continuum/#wheres-my-jetpack

#pluralistic #science fiction #futurism #the future #reactionaries #tescreal #retrofuturism #scientifiction #karl schroeder #1491 #genocide

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