pargery

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"You pierce my soul. I am half agony, half hope."

-- 'Persuasion' by Jane Austen

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Look, he said to his imagination, if this is how you're going to behave, I shan't bring you again.

-- Terry Pratchett - Going Postal

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"If you bother her again, I will break every individual bone in your hand and arm. It will take about an hour."

-- 'Rogue Protocol' by Martha Wells

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They stared at me worriedly. In the security camera view, from that angle, it was obvious how small they were. They looked so soft with all the fluffy multicolored hair. And nervous, but not of me.

I said, "I accept your job."

-- 'Artificial Condition' by Martha Wells

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Murderbot is like the war photographers who find they need to be in danger to feel normal. They try safer assignments but keep returning to the battlefield.

Murderbot's instinct knew it wouldn't fit on a peaceful planet, despite its high innate intelligence and a plethora of educational opportunities.

Mensah just thought it was a rescued slave that should be able to do anything. Later she understood that dwelling in totally reliable peace and safety was inimical to its nature.

ART was surprised that a bot construct didn't like the function for which it had been built. As it turned out, Murderbot was proud of how good it was at its function. It only hated how it had been used.

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"I hate having emotions about reality. I'd much rather have them about Sanctuary Moon."

-- 'All Systems Red' by Martha Wells

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Favorite "humans being human" history posts, please

I've seen the collections of favorite tumblr fiction posts; now I'd like to see what your favorite "humans being human" historical posts are. (Because sometimes it is Nice to be reminded that compassion is not something easy for us to lose; we laugh at the same bad jokes; there are entire fossil records of our kindness.)

Here are my favorites-- add on yours.

The story of the RMS Carpathia, with a follow-up (aka one of if not the best pieces of short nonfiction historical writing in the modern age and one that reduces me to tears every goddamn reread)

Bronze-age grave of teenage gamer girl lovingly buried with her sheep ankle bone collection

The 1st-2nd century CE Roman tombstone with a bar joke that reads like a Dril tweet

And even earlier: A 4500-1900 BCE Sumerian bar joke

"Please know that there's an 84yo museum docent in the Bronx who would cry simply at the thought of you spending so much effort to quietly create something that's beautiful to you"

Reconstructing Otzi's shoes

The Paleolithic grandmother and the child's fingerprint

Stone-age toddlers had art lessons

Ice-age children played in megafauna-footprint puddles

There once was a little boy who loved ducks

The oldest human burial found in Africa is a toddler; they made a pillow for his head

Henry Kenelm Beste's father loved him very much

"A Timeline of Humanity"

"I have a folder called Time is a Flat Circle in which I collect evidence of humanity. Here is most of them."

"I got to hold a 500,000 year old hand axe at the museum today. It's right-handed. I am right-handed"

A 3rd century dog carved on a marble tomb; a 1st century dog lovingly described and named for posterity

Patrice, a 1st-2nd century dog, was dearly loved

And: we found a Paleolithic dog, buried with its bone

Humanity, unified across time by everyday experiences

The Golden Record sent into space in the 1970s

Ancient Egypt had archaeologists

Egyptian figurine of a woman waiting for her bread to finish baking

The graffiti of Pompeii

Ancient Greek tourist graffiti at the tomb of Ramses V

Hidden messages on circuit boards

The earliest examples of someone chewing on the end of their pencils

"im having feelings about the uffington white horse again"

The vast relatability of Medieval marginalia (and cats peeing on things)

Potoooooooo

What our ancient ancestors would think, seeing us prosper

Engage with older art; it keeps you from forgetting their humanity

"They were just like you and me. They write don't forget eggs, and wondered if their neighbors secretly hated them or if they are reading into it too much. They loved and were loved and they wondered. They wondered about you."

"Why do you study history" web-weaving

And ending on a high note: Ea-nasir and his shitty copper

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I was meeting a client at a famous museum’s lounge for lunch (fancy, I know) and had an hour to kill afterwards so I joined the first random docent tour I could find. The woman who took us around was a great-grandmother from the Bronx “back when that was nothing to brag about” and she was doing a talk on alternative mediums within art.

What I thought that meant: telling us about unique sculpture materials and paint mixtures.

What that actually meant: an 84yo woman gingerly holding a beautifully beaded and embroidered dress (apparently from Ukraine and at least 200 years old) and, with tears in her eyes, showing how each individual thread was spun by hand and weaved into place on a cottage floor loom, with bright blue silk embroidery thread and hand-blown beads intricately piercing the work of other labor for days upon days, as the labor of a dozen talented people came together to make something so beautiful for a village girl’s wedding day.

What it also meant: in 1948, a young girl lived in a cramped tenement-like third floor apartment in Manhattan, with a father who had just joined them after not having been allowed to escape through Poland with his pregnant wife nine years earlier. She sits in her father’s lap and watches with wide, quiet eyes as her mother’s deft hands fly across fabric with bright blue silk thread (echoing hands from over a century years earlier). Thread that her mother had salvaged from white embroidery scraps at the tailor’s shop where she worked and spent the last few days carefully dying in the kitchen sink and drying on the roof.

The dress is in the traditional Hungarian fashion and is folded across her mother’s lap: her mother doesn’t had a pattern, but she doesn’t need one to make her daughter’s dress for the fifth grade dance. The dress would end up differing significantly from the pure white, petticoated first communion dresses worn by her daughter’s majority-Catholic classmates, but the young girl would love it all the more for its uniqueness and bright blue thread.

And now, that same young girl (and maybe also the villager from 19th century Ukraine) stands in front of us, trying not to clutch the old fabric too hard as her voice shakes with the emotion of all the love and humanity that is poured into the labor of art. The village girl and the girl in the Bronx were very different people: different centuries, different religions, different ages, and different continents. But the love in the stitches and beads on their dresses was the same. And she tells us that when we look at the labor of art, we don’t just see the work to create that piece - we see the labor of our own creations and the creations of others for us, and the value in something so seemingly frivolous.

But, maybe more importantly, she says that we only admire this piece in a museum because it happened to survive the love of the wearer and those who owned it afterwards, but there have been quite literally billions of small, quiet works of art in billions of small, quiet homes all over the world, for millennia. That your grandmother’s quilt is used as a picnic blanket just as Van Gogh’s works hung in his poor friends’ hallways. That your father’s hand-painted model plane sets are displayed in your parents’ livingroom as Grecian vases are displayed in museums. That your older sister’s engineering drawings in a steady, fine-lined hand are akin to Da Vinci’s scribbles of flying machines.

I don’t think there’s any dramatic conclusions to be drawn from these thoughts - they’ve been echoed by thousands of other people across the centuries. However, if you ever feel bad for spending all of your time sewing, knitting, drawing, building lego sets, or whatever else - especially if you feel like you have to somehow monetize or show off your work online to justify your labor - please know that there’s an 84yo museum docent in the Bronx who would cry simply at the thought of you spending so much effort to quietly create something that’s beautiful to you.

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"I don't like you. But I like the rest of them. And for some reason I don't understand, they like you."

-- 'All Systems Red' by Martha Wells

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Murderbot: "I was one whole confused entity.." (see more of this quote below)

Oliver Kornetzke: "What if the future of computation isn’t smaller chips, but engineered brains?

...Today’s models cannot restructure themselves. They cannot reroute their own connections. They do not grow new modules in response to new tasks. They do not forget selectively or regulate their own learning rates."

From 'Partnering with Nature: Toward an Intelligence Rooted in Symbiosis', by Oliver Kornetzke

https://substack.com/@oliverkornetzke/note/p-169185442

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From All Systems Red by Martha Wells:

It's wrong to think of a construct as half 'bot half human. It makes us sound like the halves are discrete, like, the 'bot half should want to obey orders and do its job while the human half should want to protect itself and get the hell out of here. As opposed to the reality, which was I was one whole confused entity, with no idea what I wanted to do.

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Something blew in her ear. She spun around. A white horse stood in the middle of the yard like a bad special effect.

-- from 'Soul Music' by Terry Pratchett

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"In the creche, our moms always said that fear was an artificial condition. It's imposed from the outside. So it's possible to fight it. You should do the things you're afraid of."

-- 'Artificial Condition' by Martha Wells

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I sighed, again. I was having a lot of opportunities to do it and I think I was getting good at it.

-- 'Artificial Condition' by Martha Wells

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Her expression was tense and unhappy, her body language bordering on desperate. "We can't stay here, but I can't give up either, our work --"

I said, "Sometimes people do things to you that you can't do anything about. You just have to survive it, and go on."

-- 'Artificial Condition' by Martha Wells

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So the plan wasn't a clusterfuck, it was just circling the clusterfuck target zone, getting ready to come in for a landing.

-- 'Exit Strategy' by Martha Wells

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I said, "Milu was my idea. I'm a rogue unit."

He ignored me but he said to Pin-Lee, "A rogue unit would have left a trail of dead bodies across this station."

I said, "Maybe I wanted the trail to start here."

He made eye contact with me, and his pupils widened slightly.

-- 'Exit Strategy' by Martha Wells

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She had large yelling capacity for a human her size. I had the feeling it came in handy.

-- 'System Collapse' by Martha Wells