#And yes--that gorilla is Koko

[real-team-luster]

Rotomblr denizens, do any of you remember the Rillaboom in a Unovan zoo who her caretaker claimed could understand sign language? I believe the legitimacy of the experiment has since been called into question, and the Rillaboom herself has since passed away, but it was a fascinating case nonetheless.

[roguekhajiit]

A debate I had on Reddit about abortion rights.

The person I'm arguing with is an active participant of the Mensa subreddit, so they already fancy themselves a genius to some extent.

Me:

No arms, no legs, no heart, no brain. Just a blood vessel pumping blood from the host to the clump of cells.

And the "But there's a heartbeat" excuse is a lie. You're only hearing the host's blood pumping into cells cause the heart isn't fully formed until 10 weeks. Additionally, the brain isn't even fully developed until 24 weeks. No heart organ, no brain, it's not a viable life outside its host body.

Them:

Yeah that's an empirical argument to deny ontology. That's not convincing to anyone who thinks there is an essence to being human that isn't tied to having arms and legs.

Me:

I'm sorry, but are you trying to use philosophy to argue whether or not someone is capable of living without a heart, brain, and lungs?

Them:

How do you determine what is human and what is not? Arms and legs? What do you call someone without arms and legs? Or a mechanic heart? You can't answer the question 'what is human' based on physical qualities only. So yes, logically you cannot answer the question without philosophy.

Me:

I think you are confusing personhood with the human species.

A person is someone who can think, breathe, and exist on their own. They have a personality and their own opinions on subjects like abortion.

A human being or homo sapiens is a species on earth that evolved enough to form social groups and cultures and, therefore, are capable of personhood. Some other more complex animals might be capable of personhood, like Koko the Gorilla. She was intelligent, learned to communicate using sign language, and even had her own pet.

I'm not discussing this subject in terms of personhood. A fetus isn't developed enough to form a sense of personhood if it can't even survive on its own at 2 months gestation.

Them:

I'm talking about the essence of what makes one a living human. As long as pregnant women before the 3rd month believe they're carrying a child, which is all of them who want to *keep* the child, I am not appealed by the argument that it's suddenly no longer a child but rather a fetus for biological/scientific/empirical reasons when there are various financial and social advantages of it being so.

The points you mention are even still different from mine.

Me:

>The points you mention are even still different from mine.

Correct because again, you fail to see the point of the argument.

You yourself say;

>As long as pregnant women before the 3rd month believe they're carrying a child, which is all of them who want to *keep* the child,

That's all fine and dandy cause it's her *choice* to do so, not yours and not the government's. But it's not yours or anyone else's place to force your philosophical or religious views on an entire nation and bully us all into following them by making your opinions a law.

Them:

It's a choice to recognise a human as a human, you're saying? So where's the end to that travesty of logic? A cat is a dog, a man is a woman, that dog is a man and that man is a dog. That's a wild world you're living in. I don't see the world that way, it defeats both logic and common sense. But it surely makes a way to justify doing whatever the hell you like doing. I won't force morality on you, but I'll tell you when it's absent.

Me:

Again, you're trying to use philosophy to argue science, and that gets us nowhere. I already stated I'm not talking from a philosophical standpoint.

You can see the world however you want. Your morals aren't always going to line up with your neighbors morals. Your neighbor might think it's immoral to eat any kind of meat. Are you gonna give up that steak dinner cause they can smell it in their living room? How would you feel if the entire government decided eating meat is a crime and, therefore, it's banned and you go to jail just for eating a hamburger. Kinda sucks when other people force their philosophy and religion on you by passing laws to get their way.

Now I know you're gonna be like, "But you can't compare pregnancies to diets!" But you're already equating philosophy with science. So, let me give you another scenario.

Do you like eggs? Eggs are just undeveloped chickens who were denied the ability to develop and hatch. Will you give up your eggs and bacon just because your vegan neighbor says it's immoral?

Since to you personhood and human are one and the same. Say aliens decide to visit earth; they have arms and legs and a brain, can speak, express emotions, and have their own culture. Are they human? Do we give them the same rights as you and me even though they weren't born on earth and are basically invading our planet? Or are they just displaying personhood?

If you say yes, they are human and deserve the same rights as you and me, then you also need to give those same rights to the "illegal aliens" that cross the border.

Why are undeveloped fetuses given more rights to life than families with children who are trying to seek a better life? Why do we value a fetus over the actual baby? Once it's born, if the mother says she needs help, she's scorned and looked down on for asking for WIC, foodstamps, and cash benefits to help feed and cloth her baby. She should have thought of that before deciding to have a baby, right? But if she decides she's unable to afford a baby, and she can't afford to take time off because the pregnancy is making it hard for her to work, she's called a murderer for seeking an abortion.

To pro-life advocates, a fetus is more important before it's born than after it's born. And you won't convince me otherwise. The same people pushing for abortion bans, banning mifepristone (a drug that's also necessary to help with incomplete miscarriages), and even simple birth control are the same people who vote to cut funding to welfare programs, free lunch programs, and to entire school districts. That's not very pro-life of them now, is it?

-------

They gave up the argument after that.

I could have converted this into a rant solely from my perspective, but I felt it would be better just to copy it as a script.

Pro-lifers are not actually pro-life. They are just anti-women and anti-choice. If they actually cared about the fetus, they would care about it after its born by passing laws and regulations that would ensure the child has the best quality of life possible and every chance to succeed. Instead, time and again, they vote against those laws.

They don't care about the fetus once it's born. Why is that? Could it be that their true goal all along is to force women back into submission because they romanticize the bygone era of the 1800s and early 1900s when women didn't hold jobs, didn't vote, and couldn't do anything without their husband's explicit permission?

I dunno, that's just the vibe I get from the anti-choice supporters. Why else would they say things like, "Stop riding dick if you can't take accountability." But then start foaming at the mouth when you remind them accountability goes both ways. When's the last time they made a child support payment?

[vampirejuno]

Mutual 1: ughhhhh I hate him I hate him so much I want to kill him and rip him apart with my teeth!!!!!! [Picture of character who is present in their url, avatar, and background photo]

Mutual 2: if another customer asks me to scan their 59 expired coupons I will dismember myself in front of them

Mutual 3: shitting again!! #diarrhea #ibs #girl dinner #student life #cottagecore

Mutual 4: poll should I move to Nebraska yes/no

Mutual 5: I need [character from children's cartoon] to vivisect me and then gently stitch me back together so I can unbecome and be remade

Mutual 6: what if we all killed our selves together. On the count of three

Mutual 7: [16 reblogs of the saw bathroom scene]

Mutual 8: baked a pie today there is still beauty in the world 😍❤️💗😌😊👍✨🥰💕👌🥺

Mutual 9: love tastes like acid in my mouth I want to rip it out of my chest but it's taken root like an invasive plant and it's covering all the walls with its vines and I'm drowning myself in pesticides and the gardener (my therapist) is shaking his head in disappointment. This metaphor has gotten away from me

Mutual 10: finally finished that little project. Not super happy with it but at least it's done [picture of 12×8ft tapestry, hand-embroidered]

Mutual 11: do you guys think they're more of a boygirl or more of a girlboy. Here's some evidence to consider [15 pictures of gerard way in mini skirts and lab coats]. Discuss.

Mutual 12: -and it's absolutely ridiculous to imply that Koko the gorilla knew real sign language when if you do even a little research you'll see that the scientists were reading too much into her responses, there was zero grammar present in her communication, they didn't even consult actual deaf people and the whole thing stinks of wishful thinking. Op should be ashamed of themselves. Also fuck Chomsky

[retroactivebakeries]

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[teasey]

2 suburban white moms talking about their kids “oh yes this is koko :)” and the second one is like “oh like the deaf gorilla?” And she’s like “No it’s short for Kokopelli in Native American folklore it belongs to a trickster god representing the essence of playfulness and whimsy :)” the other says nothing she just bites into her deviled egg and you can hear their cheap Etsy jewelry

[lilja4ever]

Yes i know koko the gorilla is a lie and wasnt actually communicating but when she was asked where do we go when we die and she signed "comfortable hole bye" that like changed me psychologically

[notaplaceofhonour]

And it’s even less shocking because Ricken was already writing propaganda for a cult! Like, yes, Lumon is obviously cult, but so is Ricken’s circle of friends followers!

Like who tf has a dozen or so friends who get together in a house church style gathering to hear you read from your self-help book full of sycophants who gush about how you changed their life & fall over themselves to make sure you know they were the one who found your momentarily-misplaced child like they saved Baby Jesus from falling out of the manger.

It’s weird.

But it makes sense from how Ricken behaves! He constantly just Says Shit™️ and can’t admit when he’s wrong. And because he’s so full of himself & emotionally immature he can’t take even the most tame or warranted criticism, he surrounds himself with sycophants.

You see enough glimpses of it in the show, but it’s even more in your face how much concentrated bullshit he is full of if you read The You You Are (which actually exists and you can read here btw) all in one go. Practically every other sentence is either a ~kinda~ true, but empty, statement dressed up to sound more impressive than it is (“Studies show that first names tend to be particular to individuals, whereas surnames are tied to families”) or complete misunderstandings of basic facts (Koko the Gorilla invented ASL, Schrödinger was a cat researcher, the roles in a bee hive are Workers, Queens, and Wasps). Ricken straight up makes up a fake Thoreau quote, & then characterizes the Thoreau Estate factchecking him as “petty barbs” and falls back on “well, it was emotionally accurate”.

And, of course, if you don’t read his book, it can’t possibly be because of any flaw in the book or a simple lack of interest, it’s because you’re ontologically the wrong type of person. Your “Youtype” is “The Coward™️”. You’re a “milk-livered swoon”. You’d be “better off a beggar” than even working for someone who threw the book out. The only thing that gets Ricken to realize he was being shitty to Mark and kind of apologize was getting his ego stroked by finding out innie!Mark read & liked his book.

Lumon is a very heavy-handed high control group, but the cult of personality around Ricken Hale, his ego, and his dismissal of those who disagree with him as The Enemy™️ have all the ingredients of a baby cult taking its first steps. It’s maybe less obvious because we haven’t yet seen it assert itself in any meaningful, genuinely destructive way, but you can even see it in some of the similarity in substance between eaganism & rickenism.

Kier Eagan has his Four Tempers; Ricken Hale has his five “Youtypes”. There are parallels between how Kier & Ricken talk about nature in a weirdly psychosexual way in the Dieter/Gaunt Bride masturbation story and Ricken’s “Every man is a virgin until he has known the touch of Mother Nature’s mossy flesh” fake Thoreau quote, as well as between Helena mocking the Dieter story around a campfire at the ORTBO and Flip making fun of Ricken’s Bee Revelations™️ around a campfire on their hiking trip. Each chapter of The You You Are tasks readers with essentially constructing an altar (not unlike the one Harmony has for Kier) on their vanity, and at one point Ricken even suggests his readers use a picture of his face as a totem of religiosity akin to a cross or an An-Ra scarab after describing himself & the reader as each other’s gods.

Anyway, Lumon is what a cult looks like when it gets big enough & old enough to be an institution, Ricken’s following is just what a cult looks like in its infancy, thank you for coming to my TED Talk

Ricken rlly does start writing propaganda for a cult organized around the abusive ideas of a dead white guy, and then after being challenged on that issue, immediately tries to assert his authority as a patriarch, when he’s spent so much time beforehand organizing his ego around his sensitivity and supposed intellect and apparently more “evolved” masculinity. And then is like!! Surprised and upset when it goes badly for him. And none of that is shocking because it’s clear he’s actually always been woefully emotionally immature, but man what a quick turn around huh. Little bit too real actually

[aokozaki]

Yes I'm thinking about Koko the Gorilla's "final message" to humanity, how could you tell?

[tenaflyviper]

Remembering Betty White's Legacy:

(January 17, 1922 - December 31, 2021)

Today, the world lost more than just a beloved television icon.

Though she later became known as the "First Lady of Television", Betty White put her early career on hold during World War II in order to join the American Women's Voluntary Services. Beforehand, she had worked in radio, theater, and modeling (the latter in spite of film studios telling her she "wasn't photogenic"). She drove a supply truck by day, and at night she participated in send-off dances for servicemen shipping off to war.

In 1954, she got her first nationally aired television show, The Betty White Show. During a time in which men still dominated the entertainment industry, Betty was given full creative control of her show, and even hired a female director to run it. This was long before the feminist movement began its rise to prominence.

The program frequently featured black tap dancer Arthur Duncan, to the point where he is credited as the first black series regular on a talk/variety show. Betty and the show were both heavily criticized, and threatened with boycott from many viewers in the South. Betty stood her ground, and famously replied,

"I said, ‘I’m sorry. Live with it.'”, before giving Duncan even more screen time. Sadly, repeated changes in time slots--and the resulting lower viewership--eventually led to the show's cancelation not long after.

Aside from being an entertainer, Betty was nearly just as well-known for being a pioneering animal rights activist, and was very passionate about animal conservation.

She donated to numerous animal charities (and a few human ones, too!), including:

American Humane Association

Morris Animal Foundation

Helen Woodward Animal Center

PAWS/LAPetco Foundation

SPCA-LA

GLAAD

Elton John AIDS Foundation

NAACP

Human Rights Campaign

Red Cross

American Heart Association

Special Olympics

St. Francis Food Pantries and Shelters

St. Jude Children's Research Hospital

And several others.

Over the span of her seven-decades-long career--which Guinness World Records officially certified in 2014 as the longest ever for a female entertainer--she took home five Primetime Emmys, one competitive Daytime Emmy, a lifetime achievement Daytime Emmy in 2015, and a Los Angeles regional Emmy in 1952.

She left behind so, so much more than that. From being "The First Lady of Television" to "America's Grandmother", Betty White touched the hearts of millions--both human and animal alike. She may no longer be with us on Earth, but she has many friends where she is now.

[gayluigi]

One thing I see from critics of things like gorilla ASL and animals using buttons is like “how dare you compare these animals to disabled people?!” when people talk about how these forms of communication are discounted. I don’t think it’s harmful to disabled people to say “hey, we took these methods of communication that work well with disabled people and applied them to animal behavior as an experiment, and it worked surprisingly well! these animals can tell us what they need now! that’s so cool, right?”

Like, I see that argument as offensive to disabled people, personally. You’re calling their way of communicating inferior, saying it doesn’t count as language, when for some people, yes, human beings, the only way they can communicate is through AAC devices or rudimentary sign. I know of a little girl who has a service dog through our local program who is very developmentally disabled who can only speak through AAC, and she can’t really form sentences— she just presses the picture that corresponds to what she wants or feels. Are you telling me that she’s not speaking through her AAC device? Are you telling me that her way of communicating isn’t valid? Without her device, she would be voiceless, and her parents would have no idea what she wanted, needed, or felt. Her understanding of language is very rudimentary. She can’t really hold a conversation with you. But she can express her preferences and feelings when asked, and that is HUGE for her!!!

People have such a narrow mindset when it comes to communication. Sure, Stella the dog may not be forming full sentences when she presses the buttons for “outside walk park”, but doesn’t the owner still get the message? The dog is telling you she wants to take a walk to the park, and her owner, through her experience as a speech pathologist, has given her the tools to express that desire! That’s INCREDIBLE!!

And people are like “if you know dog body language, you should know what they want just by reading their cues.” That’s all well and good, but sometimes, a dog will just stand there and stare at you and wag their tail, and you’ll have NO IDEA what they want. Do they want a snack? Do they wanna go outside? Do they need their medication? That dog cannot physically form words. Button training is a huge hassle, and I’ve never done it myself, but with my late dog, sometimes I would’ve given anything to know what was going on inside her head. I feel like buttons would’ve made her life a lot easier if I had known about them when she was little so she could tell us if we skipped a dose of her medicine or if she was in pain, since she was medically complex.

Is it language? You can argue about that until you’re blue in the face. Is it communication? Absolutely.

And you can debate the ethics of the primate signing practices all day too. I don’t personally think those experiments were conducted particularly ethically. But they did teach us that these beautiful creatures are far more intelligent than we previously gave them credit for! I think that counts for something! A generation of kids fell in love with gorillas after reading Koko’s Kitten and learned that these incredible creatures are capable of complex thought instead of only being brutal beasts! I think that’s pretty phenomenal.

Koko the gorilla didn't know ASL but, like, you could say that without invalidating the existence of speech-supporting signs

[ihatebnha]

Yesss! Men do need to love animals! All Might like all animals, but especially the huge, fluffy dogs and cats, like Samoyed dogs and Maine Coon cats! Present Mic especially love talking birds like parrots and Mynah birds. Stain occasionally feed stray cats and dogs, and is quite fond of domestic rats because of how social and smart they are. Spinner will never admit it, but he has a soft spot for reptiles and barely can stop himself from gushing when he see cute geckos, turtles, snakes, etc.

*crying* yes... yes.............

Crying at the thought of All Might going nuts when he see dogs... even tho he has preferences, he can't help but giving all of them the ol' watermelon slap. I also see him looking good with little wiener dogs and corgis who wag their little butts at him... dogs probably LOVE him, too (because he's so bad at resisting puppy dog eyes at the dinner table)

Present Mic liking birds is making me laugh tho!!! looks like and LOVES parakeets, as well. anything colorful i feel like... also probably weirdly obsessed with like... koko the gorilla too LOOOL and other cute monkeys.

ALSO STAIN OMG... he's a fucking weirdo but i definitely imagine in a normal!au he's that guy who's like... always talking about how cool rodents are. probably even has a few that he plays with all the time and carries around LMFAOOO... but yes absolutely takes care of strays...

and spinner... YES!!!! ofc he's nice to ALL animals bc they are his Kin but especially in regard to what u said. gets into so many heated debates about the proper care of them and probably is obsessed with you if you have one. it's berry sweet, honestly.

ANYWAY... i was mostly thinking cats and dogs, but this was perfect anon, so thank u!!! thinking about this topic makes me all fuzzy inside tbh <333

[marlynnofmany]

I have been sick and in my bed for a couple of days, but have been saved from being completely miserable by reading A Swift Kick to the Thorax. Thanks for writing it and putting it out there. Such a fast paced, fun adventure! So many marvelous characters, but if I had to choose a favourite? My heart belongs to Dragon! 🥰

Thank you! I'm sorry you're sick, but so glad you're enjoying the book. And yes, Dragon has a special place in my heart too. I read Koko's Kitten at a young age, and have thought highly of gorillas ever since. One of my friends even went on to work with Koko, and I checked with that friend to make sure I was writing Dragon right. He deserves the best!

[meggtheegg]

💞✨

what was your first special interest?

Animals, in various forms. I was a very strange kid who desperately wanted a taxidermy bison head because my grandparents took me on a trip to Yellowstone and I thought they were the coolest animals ever, and then my favorite restaurant had an animatronic singing bison head, so little me’s brain just went “yes. this is a thing I need in my life.” I apparently used to go on ebay and print pictures of bison heads out to show to my teachers. then the animatronic one at the restaurant glitched out while I was eating there and it was an immediate 180 because in that moment I realized taxidermy was actually dead animals and not magical singing creatures that could be my friends, and it turned from a special interest to a massive phobia that haunted me well into middle school. At the same time that I was printing out pictures of taxidermy, I was also obsessed with a book series about kids whose parents like owned a vet clinic and my amazing parents found the one kids’ vet simulator game for windows xp and I played it every moment I was on the family computer. Then, I discovered Koko the gorilla, and though I remember very little from that phase, I reconnected years later with a girl who went to my school at the time, and when I reminded her of who I was, she said “oh my gosh, you were the gorilla girl!” So, yeah

do you own any stim toys?

I have some stress balls and one squishy, somewhere, plus some of that “crazy aaron’s thinking putty,” but nothing that’s strictly designed for stimming. My little brother does, though, because he was diagnosed at a really young age and got a ton of stim toys that I was constantly stealing from him. most of them are gone, by now, but there are still a few things he has left over.

[baeddel]

no-rx

i think the use of grammaticity here is itself kind of problematic especially with the discursive affordances

no-rx

frankly dogs are already grammatical creatures in any sense we should expect them to be. a bigger red flag in that discourse for me was [does "sad" mean "how sad"]...

no-rx

i might be being outrageous tho

right, yeah I get what you mean. Among linguists, a position like Chomsky held that language is unique to humanity is now in the extreme minority, the most prominent I think is that our language evolved out of pre-human linguistic structures used by our ancestors. Animals communicate with each other in tremendous detail, and straightforwardly understand one another, and we do not find this surprising. The problem that this kind of discourse encounters is that theres a presumption that speaking the language humans do requires some extremely high level of intelligence, that it is a special unique privileged position that we either should not assume animals have (so its a hoax etc) or we should assume animals have (because we have cognitive biases about how special we are etc) - either way familiar human languages are awarded a special position that it probably shouldn’t have.

So my concern with saying the dog understands and uses grammar is that it makes us think a certain way about grammar, or the grammar we use, that we assume that if a dog can communicate something to us it is capable of something surprisingly intelligent, etc. but dogs communicate to us all the time, for example with ‘gaze alteration’ (they look at you, look at what they want to show you, look back at you, etc... my dog does this all the time with the fridge and he is saying: get me ham!) We already find a highly sophisticated form of communication between human and dog, developed as much by dogs as by humans.

but yeah, re: “how sad” etc... My biggest issue w/ some of this discourse is that the ‘skeptical’ position is like, okay, sure, they can say it, but do they understand it? One reblog said “this is just the Chinese Room, we did this already.” Its kind of correct to connect it with the Chinese Room but we have definitely not done the Chinese Room already, for some reason people who hear about it think it proves something but its really not solved... (And is there a thinker more degraded now than Searle?) [For those who don’t know, the ‘thought experiment’ goes like this: a guy who doesn’t speak Chinese is in a little room and people give him instructions about what Chinese word they want. He reads the instructions, goes and gets the word and gives it to them. Despite being able to use Chinese, he doesn’t understand Chinese.]

My favourite objection to the problem goes like this: the guy in the Chinese Room actually does understand Chinese. This sounds totally crazy and it takes a lot to explain I think lol but you can sort of see that in terms of the dog. Say you teach the dog to say “bye”, and you teach it to use it whenever someone leaves. It understands “bye” as “the thing you do when someone leaves”. Does it understand what “bye” means? I feel like we have to say yes, it does. What do I understand by “bye”, other than what I say when someone leaves? I don’t have some kind of deeper true understanding of “bye”, I simply know its place in the structure of everyday life, ie. I know how to follow the instructions and get the right Chinese word. In what deeper sense can I be said to understand the word “bye”? So the dog and I understand “bye” in just the same way. If we accept this it starts to destabilize a lot of the common sense objections to the dog’s understanding (and to an A.I.’s understandng).

This leads us to wonder: in what sense could Clever Hans not count? We might see this as a problem for this position or we might not.

I will say though, this kind of thing, I try to be careful because of Koko the Gorilla & stuff like that... Most people don’t really know this about Koko but she was like, chronically sexually abused by her handler, and her handler used her to sexually harass her female employees. And the work she was doing was ethically compromised in a lot of ways besides. But she got kind of a big reputation because she had this talking Gorilla, which she marketed in a kinda sensationalist way... In the 70s, in the middle of the ‘linguistic turn’ in philosophy and in academia in general, you had a lot of these experiments to try and teach different animals how to speak a human language, and they all ended in these really bizarre catastrophes. Why should this be the case? I don’t really know, but perhaps there is just something wrong about trying to force a familiar model of communication onto another animal. So seeing just this kind of experiment repeated (by a speech therapist, no less) and made into like an instagram thing, yknow... I’m not saying its wrong necessarily, my mum puts as much enthusiastic content about our dog on instagram after all, and I am always trying to find ways to communicate more effectively with my dog, but its hard not to associate it with that stuff...

[anhedonia2]

am i crying about koko the gorilla and her kitten named all ball? Yes

[blues-sevenfold]

Sliders Multiverse 2: Apocalyptic Worlds

Wild Universe: This world was briefly visited by both Sliders #2 and Sliders #1, where both groups stayed for a few hours. As neither group exactly set out to scout the entire planet - it is unclear whether an apocalypse of human and/or other intelligent life has occurred centuries or millennia ago, or if intelligent life has simply never evolved. Either way, it doesn’t look like a post-apocalyptic world - as everything appears to be wild nature. The only sign of intelligent life that was ever found was when Sliders #1 found a car belonging to Jimmy Reed of Sliders #2, who had visited the world about two weeks prior.

Nuclear Winter Universe: This was the first world visited by Sliders #1. Due to increasing tensions with the Soviet Union, all of humanity (including Jimmy Reed) was obliterated back in 1965. However, other animal life continues to thrive - as some have even evolved to adapt to a nuclear winter climate.

Ultimate Plague Universe: The first of three similar universes, all of humanity succumbed to the plague pandemic back in 1978 - having left absolutely no human survivors. More than likely, an asteroid will hit the Earth in 2008 - and more species will be obliterated. This world was visited by Sliders #3.

Plague Universe: This is the second of three similar universe, which was visited by Sliders #2. About 10% of the human population have survived the plague pandemic of 1978. Jimmy Reed and James Baker were two of the survivors. Of interesting note, John Lennon was the only surviving Beatles member while John Bonham was the only surviving member of Led Zeppelin. As all the other nine would-be parents (including, yes, the elder Brian Haner) of the Avenged Sevenfold members succumbed to the plague, none of the Avenged Sevenfold members were born. After sliding much of the remaining human population into the more idyllic Uplifted Animal Universe, the asteroid impact obliterates what all remains of the human population and other larger animal species.

No-Asteroid Plague Universe: This is the third of three similar universes, which was visited by Sliders #3. About a month ago, a group of scientists have opted to take the risk of blowing up the asteroid - figuring that they really had nothing to lose. In prime Plague Universe, they had elected against the idea - figuring that it was safer to just take a chance with the asteroid. Anyway, the plan ends up working - and humanity is, once again, safe. The sliding technology is then retooled for use as a medical device, similarly to that of Zelda Baker Universe.

Notes:

Jimmy Reed was not only still alive in 1978, due to a lifestyle change decision that he made back in 1963, but he was one of the 10% to survive the plague pandemic. His wife wasn’t lucky - and, of his offspring, Jimmy Jr (Boonie) and Rose were the only survivors. Some grandchildren have also survived. Jimmy does his best to look after his remaining family. Overall, he’s a very loving and doting grandfather - although there are two things that he is fairly strict about: Making sure that his grandchildren dress appropriately for the weather, as well as making sure that they practice sanitary hygiene. After all, he really cannot bear the thought of losing anymore of his family. He does pass away in 2003, however.

The point-of-divergence between (Prime) Plague Universe and No-Asteroid Plague Universe occurs in May of 2008. As some portions of Plague Universe was duplicated to ISOT Mosaic Universe in April of 2008, this was before the point-of-divergence have occurred.

Larger portions of explicitly No-Asteroid Plague Universe are also duplicated from 2107 into ISOT Mosaic Universe. By then, the world has become a bona fide solarpunk society. Other primate species and certain bird species have reached significant human-level intelligence. Alex the Grey Parrot, Koko the Gorilla, and Washoe the Chimpanzee all were being worked with prior to the plague of 1978 - and, not being human, the three of them (with their allies) have all survived the human-only pandemic. By 2108, communication with dolphins and seals have also become possible via psi and vibration waves. Psionic abilities (including psychokinesis) have also become common by 2107.

Avenged Sevenfold becomes a popular rock band a century later, as all five members (and Matt Baker) were all born exactly a century later. Keep in mind that not one of them have existed on this world a century prior. Jimmy Reed is reincarnated to one of his descendants on September 6th of 2077 - where he bears a striking resemblance to his older incarnation, aside from his emerald green eyes. By the age of twenty, he is able to recall his prior life with relative clarity. It’s possible that he also might’ve had an intermediary incarnation.

That being said, neither Jimmy Reed nor any Avenged Sevenfold members are duplicated to ISOT Mosaic Universe from 2107.