#Building the Utopia

[tamisdava2]

Young Ilana and her fiancé :)

Look how happy they are, they will make perfect family. What could go wrong?

[thehmn]

Here’s some inspiration for anyone who wants to write a green utopia or something that symbolize the rot under the surface.

I visited Stige Island today. It’s not really an island because it is connected to the mainland by a small road but the name stuck.

It is an artificially constructed island that was turned into a dump which made it grow bigger and bigger as more trash was piled on top.

Eventually the dump was closed down by covering it in a thick layer of dirt which is why the island is full of hills and bumps. A web of paths were created and the landscape was dotted with playgrounds and picnic tables and today it’s an incredibly popular place for the locals to relax.

Unfortunately most photos online show the island in its early sorta barren state because today it has become a haven for all sorts of plant and animal life skittering around in the dense bushes. It’s a wonderful place to go birdwatching, fishing or pick berries.

But the trash is still down there creating methane gas. What did the city do about that? Harvest it for energy of course! So when you walk around the island you’ll see pipes and what appears to be manholes that are part of this sophisticated system.

You can look at it in two ways. To me it’s a wonderful solution to turn this former dump into a beautiful green area for wildlife and people to use while also using it for energy, but the idea that something fire related could happen and blow the entire thing up and unearth the dirt of the past is pretty tempting.

[lanschpaket]

Appreciation for our lord and savior! Do you have a little time to spare to talk about our lord and savior Arcane Jesus Viktor? Vander apparently rejected him and his truths

[moonwoodhollow]

let's see if I can finish this before Valentine's Day!

[astracora]

A Mandated Holiday Break - Chapter 7

Characters: Sylus x gn!mc (poly lads)

Warnings: None

Word Count: 1554

Written: 22nd December 2024

Notes: Post-relationship Sylus/MC-centric but poly LADs, with my personal pov of the game and lil headcanons littered in.

Chapters: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11

Masterlist AO3

He's been relegated to picking up supplies. You'd thrust a list at him that morning, and he'd almost seen a tail behind you, flicking and curling like a question mark.

It isn't the first time you've had him wrapped around your finger, requesting his assistance. Normally you only ask when you're sick, desperate for supplies and he's available. (He'll always be available.)

Still, this time you've handed him a list for crafts, shoved him from his own base, and you peppered his face in kisses before he can even respond or argue. 

Not that he would, but he wishes you would at least come shopping with him. He's found himself enjoying the domesticity of you puttering around aisles while he pushes a trolley. If he takes his eyes off you, you'll steal the trolley and go skidding down an empty aisle.

Which is how he stands now, in the living room of his base, hands full of arts and crafts supplies, while he stares at a tree he doesn't remember buying.

It's twinkling with lights half done, but otherwise it bears no decoration. The twins are balancing on each other's shoulders trying to throw the multicoloured flashing lights up towards the top of it. You're there underneath, ready to catch them if them.

He's pretty sure someone's going to end up with a broken bone. (Which he does not want to explain to the doctor.)

With a flick of his finger, black and red swirling mist quickly remove lights from hands and twist them around the top of the tree. Gently, and carefully.

He's only slightly smug, smirk in full, when you turn to him in surprise. He's even more smug when your face instantly warms, eyes twinkling at him.

If he were really a crow, his feathers would poof up and he'd preen. Instead he wipes his hand on his shirt collar and extends the bags he's holding, "For you, kitten."

Your whirlwind of activity rushes over, the twins wobbling before they manage to detangle themselves, grabbing at the bag and pulling them to the floor. Separating things out.

He watches absently, but you're focused and tapping on your chin as you think, so he abandons you to your considerations to make himself useful. Warm drinks in hand before he returns to you.

Sylus finds you showing the twins how to fold and make ornaments with coloured paper. He hesitates at the door, if you had wanted ornaments, why did you not just ask for them? He could have ordered any number. Any colour. Anything you wanted.

He's again unsettled by a strange uncomfortable dissatisfaction, you do not make it easy to provide for you. To satisfy every desire. He wonders how you became someone who holds them so close to the chest, scared to want, all over again. He offers hot chocolate to the twins, and frothed coffee to you, (the smell never gets better), before sitting next to you on the floor, cross legged and curious.

You look over and grin, and for a second he sees ears tilting forwards in mischief, pupils blown and ready to pounce. "We didn't have a lot growing up, so me and Caleb would make ornaments for the tree with Gran. The twins wanted to try..." there's a question there that you want to ask but you can't quite... get the words out.

He can read you well enough to know the hesitation, and he leans in, voice low, fingers brushing your cheek, "Show me."

Sylus prides himself on learning, he's good at picking up skills, but he cannot be said to be creative. He is, however, good at following steps. He does, however, enjoy trying.

It's not a new skill that will be useful for anything other than moments like this, but truthfully if he only ever learned skills for moments like this, he'd be a happier fiend than he has any right to.

The twins decide to get pens and decorate the shapes he folds, while you sit nearby fretting over a new challenge. He finds himself looking over and peering but you catch him and point at his hands in an unspoken order. Focus.

He chuckles, only you would dare to order him about, and only you would gain his obedience as he follows your orders.

As they end up with a pile of... he's not sure he'd call anything he and the twins have made art, the fish would surely have something to say if he tried, he already dreads the upcoming conversation, but you're thrilled and excited as you come over to look. Picking up paper baubles and stars that the twins have drawn silly faces on.

There's a happy flush to Luke and Kieran's face as you wholeheartedly approve, and he swallows a lump in his throat that he doesn't really understand. Yet he wants to cry, he thinks, and he's not really sure why. Or what caused it.

He doesn't linger, doesn't have time, as you're pushing him towards the tree, "You get the top, Luke, middle, Kieran, bottom." Then you're running off.

He's starting to think the holidays are a little too much trouble... (Warm, vibrant, comforting.) That lilting voice that sounds like yours again.

Your soul is always so noisy, he muses, warmed and placated.

They're almost done when you come back, this time you're not as energetic. There's waves coming off you, nerves and anxiety rippling under skin. He pauses, where he's about to hang a star, and looks down  at you. As soon as he does you swallow, shoving a cardboard box into his arms.

Not a box? It has numbers on it?

"We-" you swallow past the nerves and push on. Ever ready to fight a monster. Even if the monster is yourself, "also used to make calendars for each other. It's late, so it's only twelve days." He catches your hand before it scratches at your arm, smoothing his thumb over your fingers and then rubbing circles into your palm. He blinks down at the thing, and sees today. He drops the star he's holding unceremoniously and presses the little cardboard flap open.

The calendar is decorated with a picture of a crow surrounded by presents. He remembers the fish encouraging your artistic pursuits, and while he's not sure if it's good, he never seems to be sure if it's good... he knows he likes it.

Inside is a hand wrapped chocolate and a small note.

Day one - A reminder that I love you, and appreciate you always, thank you Sylus.

You're still fidgeting, and at this point the twins have peeked their heads over to stare at his bounty. The longer he stares, the more he realises he has to speak, has to respond but his throat feels closed and his chest is so tight. It hurts. It hurts.

"If it's stupid you don't have to-"

He drops his calendar and he presses you into his chest. He's sure if he were better practiced in his emotions he'd cry. Instead he just encompasses you in his body, squeezing and holding and drowning in you. He nips at your cheek, hand squeezing your face, he wants to bite and chew and claw and scratch.

He can't understand and he doesn't want to hurt, but he breathes you in. Relieved he has no tail to betray him, wagging furiously. You're giggling at his reaction, trying to pull away from his rough handling, calling his name out like knives in his heart, and he finally kisses you. Over and over and over. Tasting his name on your lips and your love in his heart.

Then he startles, pulling away quickly to see that thankfully the twins had caught his gift, the note and the chocolate. Placing it on the side. They're giving him a look like he's a fool, he might be, because he has an evol that can move things for him. Instead his foolish body betrayed him.

"Hunter! Do we get one?" Luke calls, pouting, and you keep a hold on Sylus' hand. Grounding him as he looks at your note over and over, pressing your thumb into his wrist, and smoothing his rapid uneven heartbeat there.

Still you extend a makeshift calendar to the twins, one each, identical except for the names. He can tell that you'd been careful to match every line. "Of course."

He absently notes that you've left four more on the side. The fish, the doctor, the prince and an untouched one for your family. The note is finally placed in his pocket, right over his heart, where he knows he'll keep it until it's worn and unreadable. Not that it matters, because he'll remember it always.

As you watch him smooth his fingers over it, you laugh, "You know there's eleven more days of those right?" Your nerves are still simmering, he can tell, but you're thrilled for his reaction and eased with his earnestness and joy. He lets your words settle and then darts to the calendar on the side, he hears the twins opening theirs but barely cares.

You panic when you realise he's going to just tear the thing open for more of your feelings recorded in pretty stationary paper, before you throw yourself at his back, "Sylus! No! They're for other days!"

[ericvilas]

I read a post about AI about how "oh it's just doing statistics on patterns so it's not really intelligent, look at this type of error it makes" and I thought it would be rude to reblog directly so I'm making my own post:

AI makes mistakes in the ways humans do. The way humans, like, create abstract thoughts, and weird bias and prejudice get into those thoughts, and this is why AI training needs to be very careful to not replicate human bias and frequently stumbles in this pursuit.

Like, yes it doesn't do everything humans do but it does some of the things, and isn't that wild? That we can create a machine that can create abstractions like humans can? That's incredible to me, like we have figured out how to make abstraction machines, and what is thinking if not abstracting!

This kind of error, of assuming that "object A must belong in category X because it is seen in the same kinds of contexts that I have learned things in category X belong in" is a very human mistake! AI falls for optical illusions, it often makes mistakes similar to the ones freshmen get wrong in exams, it is able to capture vibes and that's unsettling and weird and wonderful!

We have a machine that can probe a form of human pattern recognition that we've never been able to see before! And humans are masters of pattern recognition, it's our greatest quality. And we're being crept on by computers in this one aspect, like we were in so many others at different points in history.

[morlock-holmes]

I didn't say I think "dominant" culture values rational systems (and what dominant culture do you even mean), just that rationalism falls way short on its claims to do so. And I dunno, this is personal, but I can't agree that the subculture that told me "actually you should reframe your entire life around your scrupulosity" is much of an improvement, even if the bar is extremely low. Not when that subculture is full of all the kinds of social manipulation and cruelty it claims to be above.

I'm making very narrow claims that don't really have anything to do with what you're talking about here.

I have trouble communicating how much even high functioning autistic people have struggled with things that allistic people "just know", (a phrase I've heard again and again when interrogating allistic people).

Here's an example, which I believe I heard as a real life example although I can't recall where:

You have issues with the texture of clothing and there are only a few dress shirts you have that you can stand to wear. You have a sudden nose-bleed on one of your shirts and get blood all over the collar and down the front.

You launder the shirt but the blood stains have set in and are still very visible.

Should you wear that shirt to the office?

Most allistic people already know that the answer is, "almost certainly not."

An autistic person is likely to go through this process:

I have no idea if I should wear that shirt to the office or not, so let's figure it out.

Well, I have laundered the shirt so it is clean and sanitary, the stains are just visual blemishes.

All the social messages I've heard since I were a kid say that you can't judge a book by its cover and that looks don't matter, it's what's inside that counts.

And, I have a desk job, I wasn't hired to look a certain way, but rather to produce a certain kind of work, and wearing this comfortable shirt makes it easy for me to work without being distracted by uncomfortable clothes.

Therefore, logically, I can't imagine that anybody at the office will object to my wearing this shirt.

That last sentence is key, and I really want you to focus on it. You **aren't** thinking, "Well, maybe the button down drones at the office think this is a problem, but I know better than they do."

No, you aren't thinking that at all. You're thinking, "I put together the clues so I'm sure everyone at the office will feel the exact same way as I do"

And when they don't, it's a shock.

Now, I want you to further imagine that this is how you reason about other people and the world, but through some cosmic joke you've ended up at an employer where dressing right is incredibly important.

You'll get yelled at by your boss if you wear the wrong thing and your coworkers will turn on you. But there's no published dress code, you're just supposed to "just know" what an employee should wear.

But look at your reasoning above! You *don't* "just know" what the fashion is. Imagine you eventually say, to your boss and some coworkers, "I'm starting to get really stressed about not knowing what to wear to work, I really want to wear the right thing and be part of the team but I don't know how and I'm getting stressed out."

Immediately everybody turns on you. Your boss calls you into his office to ream you out. Your coworkers start a petition to fire you because you're obviously trying to undermine the valuable work culture that they have worked so hard to create. Concerned work friends pull you aside and go, "Jesus, are you crazy? We all stress out about what to wear but you never say it in public!"

Think about what that might feel like.

Now imagine you get fired and at your next job the boss is like, "Hey, the dress code is pretty important here, here's a list of what we expect. Sometimes some stuff is kind of on the edge so you won't know, but it's always fine to ask me if something is appropriate, and if you accidentally wear something that's on the wrong side that's fine, I'll let you know and we'll work on getting you some more appropriate stuff, but you won't get in trouble."

I want you to really think about what it would feel like, as an autistic person, to be at that second job after decades working at the first. To suddenly know you could ask questions or make mistakes at something that doesn't come easily to you after so much time in an environment where you're told that this stuff comes easily to everyone and people only *pretend* to be bad at it to get away with things.

What you're doing is coming in and going, "Well, that second job might be bad for other, unrelated reasons."

I will completely grant that, you're utterly correct. That second job might be terrible for a bunch of unrelated reasons.

But I'm never going back to that first job.

[welcometogrouchland]

Oz brainrot struck again. Imagine for a minute we are fusing wicked the musical canon w/ 1939 movie canon and maybe some book canon for flavour. Elphaba could've avoided the whole melting situation w/ Dorothy and co by simply monologuing at them doofenshmirtz style. And while I can't recall if Fiyero/scarecrow and Bok/the tinman have their memories in tact (I think it's different between wicked the book and wicked the musical???), imagine for a second they do. You are 11 year old Dorothy Gale.

What do you do with all that information?

You're not going to kill the witch anymore you think bc you're pretty sure the wizard is using you as a puppet in a fascist police state. You could go to Glinda bc she was tight w/ your captor/new ally(?) at one point but she also seems to be deeply suckered in by said fascist police state. Could you change her mind? It seems like she mostly has a complex about social standing and individuality, maybe now that there's more of you she'll help you kill the wizard? Make it a girls trip!

...But do you even want to kill the wizard?? You're 11! you don't really want to kill anyone! but the mean green lady seems VERY adamant about that route. Also circling back to the comically sad life of said mean green lady- not only has she shagged one of your travelling companions (WHO USED TO BE A MAN????) but one of your OTHER travelling companions (also used to be a man but that's less surprising maybe) is her ex-brother-in- law who probably teamed up with you only bc he seemed to have hated his bitch wife (rude??) and his in-laws and your OTHER other travelling companion was rescued by the mean green lady as a baby and is also a part of an oppressed ethnic class in this world. And is a lion. Supposedly there was always a lion but who could trust any of these sickos with information at this point?

You are Dorothy Gale, you're 11 years old and trapped in an unfamiliar world and have come to the frightening realisation that you are the only adult in this fuck ass evil castle and potentially in all the land.

You're asking Aunt Em for a raise after all this. You weren't paid before. But you will be asking for a raise.

[diamondstripe1]

EVERYONE GET UP AND TELL ME WHAT YOU DEFINE AS UTOPIA!!!

i love hearing about visions for an ideal world, it gives us a blueprint to look back on when we're in the position to move forward!! SO tell me all about your vision. tell me how your society functions, how everything looks. tell me about the potential celebrations and holidays that would sprout from it. tell me what things there are to do. tell me what things you'd erase from this current world. tell me about the places, tell me about the shops and the areas that just exist for fun. tell me about the entertainment, the hobbies, the groups. TELL ME EVERYTHING!! I WANNA KNOW THINGS!!!

[imminent-danger-came]

I'll never get over the fact that MK trades his friends for power to save his friends. What's wrong with him

[whereserpentswalk]

The way a lot of scifi writers view utopian societies is so weird. Like, I've almost never seen one done right.

I just saw someone praise a scifi civilization for being subversive by not being seen as evil. And they talked about how nice it was to its client states, and how it made sure to take its time assimilating them into its superior culture. Like, my guy, your utopia is engaging in active colonialism.

Most utopias fail from a left wing view of society. Because the idea that there is one true perfect state that anyone trying to change is evil, and that other societies must change to be more like by virtue of being diffrent to them, is an inherently right wing idea.

[feelingsbyrne]

marshallcore collage

[captainjonnitkessler]

So many people insisting "the ends will justify the means" without ever asking whether the means have literally any chance of achieving the end in the first place

[asha-mage]

Ishamael should have done what I do when I am overcome by existential despair: buy some Taco Bell then pet cats until the world feels bearable again.

[tanadrin]

Landlords are different from other jobs though, in that their income comes mostly from rents, in a way it doesn’t for say, entrepreneurs.

yes, and landlords as a drag on the economy has been pointed out by economists foundational to the field, like ricardo and smith, but as long as you have private real property of any sort, and as long as leasing that property is legal, you will have some quantity of landlords in your economy

the question is, what specific negative outcomes are you looking at and wish to avoid? because only once you begin to identify those can you begin to make real policy decisions. is not enough housing being built? are rents rising too fast? is it too hard to enter the property market? do you just want to increase the rate of home ownership? these are all, like, operationalizable. you can do something with them.

"landlords are parasites" isn't, really. it has a negative effect in both directions: it raises the hackles of anybody who owns property (which, again, unless you're in favor of mass expropriation and/or collectivization of housing, is something a nonzero number of people in your society will own), and it doesn't suggest any specific policy solution, besides "do things which hurt landlords' interests."

but hurting landlords doesn't actually necessarily help everybody else! there are lots of ways to make life worse for random groups of people that do not, in fact, help society at large. and the policies that do in fact make a difference very often aren't, like, satisfying as revenge. they're boring, unsexy stuff like improving tenant protections, or encouraging tenants' unions, or building social housing, etc., etc.

[egipci]

One-day flash event tomorrow on @dadfuckerfest — yes or yes?