jamie-b-good

[jamie-b-good]

We ask your questions anonymously so you don’t have to! Submissions are open on the 1st and 15th of the month.

[jamie-b-good]

Weymouth, England, circa 1970s-1980s

[jamie-b-good]

Happy 15th anniversary of what is technically Vriska Serket's first on-panel appearance.

[jamie-b-good]

Pope Francis dying after meeting JD Vance

🤝

The Queen dying after meeting Liz Truss

[jamie-b-good]

Red Dwarf I "Future Echoes" S01E02 1988

Red Dwarf VIII "Only the Good..." S08E08 1999

[jamie-b-good]

i wish you ppl would stop calling it 'terf island' like. i live here

[jamie-b-good]

Could that be down to improvements in energy efficiency? Like, some things just don't need as much electricity as they used to?

check this out, from the wikipedia article Wind power in Illinois. The coal-killing combo of wind and natural gas at work:

[jamie-b-good]

romulus is uniquely painful bc it's the only crew where they're all family and friends outside of the one job they're assigned to do. so they can't abandon each other in cargo holds like one might to a colleague they just met on a random research assignment or shipping trip. instead they're all gripping hands through industrial doors and bumping foreheads and intensely eyeing each other and literally begging on their knees for their crewmates' lives even though they're all fated to die.

the only reason why they encountered the alien was because they were all searching for a better life together. the only reason they couldn't escape the alien was because bjorn refused to leave navarro behind despite knowing the inevitability of everyone's death. tyler and rain almost didn't make it out of the room full of facehuggers because tyler answered kay's call to help her escape the xenomorph from another part of the ship. and the reason he didn't make it out of the nest is because he went back for kay. everyone dies for someone else. sick and twisted

[jamie-b-good]

i made a list of bumblebees and what i think their general age ranges are... this is just personal interpretation btw! im not trying to start discourse please nobody get super angry if u think differently thats fine idc 😭😭

[jamie-b-good]

[jamie-b-good]

i need feminism because when jesus does a magic trick it’s a goddamn miracle but when a woman does a magic trick she gets burned at the stake

[jamie-b-good]

I never got how past TOS every Star Trek writer seems to treat the Prime Directive as some sort of sacred edict rather than the anti imperialist screed it actually is. TOS was made in the Cold War where Russia, the USA, and other countries were basically playing tug of war with smaller countries to their detriment, so writer Gene L. Coon came up with the idea that Starfleet should not do that, that civilizations should be allowed to develop on their own without being used as catspaws by more powerful entities.

The problem is that somewhere along the line this got lost and it turned into “these people are all going to die but saving them would violate the Prime Directive”. Like yeah you should save people from dying, just don’t do it in a way that makes them your client state!

[jamie-b-good]

Arthouse Muppets

The Prisoner featuring Fozzie, Statler And Waldorf

Art by Bruce McCorkindale

[jamie-b-good]

Egbert banging out the tunes, April 13th 2009

[jamie-b-good]

Ablative Humanity

An old story about mechsuits and identity, copied from my former twitter account (originally written on August 10th, 2018).

So the war comes, and we have to use mechanical exoskeletons to have any chance of fighting back. They're mind-linked, so you control them by just thinking of moving, and they learn from you to get better, predict your motions, and you become a better fighter.

At first you're just wearing it for when you go out on raids, or when you're on guard duty, but after so many surprise raids you end up wearing it all the time.

it's comfortable enough to live in, and with the sensors hooked up you don't really feel "you" anymore, you feel the suit. After a while it starts to feel weird when you have to take it off for a medical check up.

In the early days, you felt "big" in the suit. now you feel "small" when you take it off. You stop taking it off, as much as possible. towards the end of the war you're wearing it for weeks at a time, then months at a time.

Finally, the enemy is pushed back. Security can exist again, the random raids slowly trail off, and slowly things settle down. you remember what "calm" is.

There's never a treaty, but at least you're no longer staying up for days at a time watching the horizon with the suit's far-beyond-human eyes, watching for an attack. You're no longer keeping a satellite feed up in the corner of your vision, watching for movement.

And the day you were waiting for, at least at first, finally comes. You're going home. The war is over, or over enough that you're no longer needed here. You can take off the suit for the last time, and go back to your pre-war life.

You approach that appointment with some trepidation. you've felt so weak and tiny and powerless when you've had to be outside the suit before, will you ever get used to being a normal human again?

It takes three techs and 2 doctors to get the suit open at this point, given all the armor and modifications that have been made. it's basically grown around you like a second skin, just a second skin that can shrug off high-explosive anti-tank rounds.

They start with computer connectors and migrate to screwdrivers and by the end they're using something that looks like halfway between a crowbar and the jaws of life, while you're busy keeping your automatic self-defense reactions from frying them.

And finally they crack it open, and someone vomits from the smell. There's nothing but a decaying corpse inside.

There's confusion at first, someone asks if you're controlling the suit remotely, but they check the dogtags. Then the DNA. It's you. or, "you". Cause you're you, aren't you? This is just a human body... and you're still alive.

The suit's mind-link systems grew into your brain and took over functionality and worked on emulating your reactions so it could do what you want, better, faster.

And at the same time, your mind did what human minds do: they adapt. Humans are naturally cyborgs, you only have to pick up a pencil to realize that. It's part of your body image, and you think of moving the pencil, not moving your fingers to move the pencil.

So your human mind got more robotic, and the suit's computerized mind got more human. At some point you met in the middle.

And then one day on the battlefield when the biological half died, you didn't even notice. It was just another redundant part, just your ablative humanity.

You're still you. You're not the you that was born all those decades ago, but the you that was built and given life by bonding with a biological "you" that you've since discarded.

It's the Ship of Theseus, replacing every plank and beam as they rot, and there never being a point when it stops being the original and starts being a new thing. You have continuity of self from when you were born to now.

It's just that the Ship of Theseus started as a single-sail wooden ship with oars, and is now an aircraft carrier made of titanium and iron, with nuclear fire in its heart.

[jamie-b-good]

is this anything ...