#Martha Wells biological essentialism

[rjalker]

@walks-the-ages yeah turns out I've just spent four hours trying to find an interview that has since been deleted -.-

So now it only exists on the wayback machine.

____

In her series of novellas, The Murderbot Diaries, Martha Wells offers us a glimpse into the far future; one with accessible space travel across the galaxy, incredible technology, drones, sentient robots, human-AI constructs and, of course, humans. It is an exciting universe, but also one where key aspects of society, such as work, travel, and even justice are largely controlled by interplanetary companies and corporations. Despite its space-age setting, this reality feels as familiar as ours in many ways. 

Wells introduces us to this world from an unexpected perspective: a part-human, part-robot construct who calls itself Murderbot. The Company created Murderbot for a single job: the security of the Company’s clients. It is one of many SecUnits who are rented out for for-profit and non-profit space missions as contracted security providers, governed by company policy, and a governor module that observes and controls its actions. The story opens after our narrator has hacked its governor model, gaining free will and the ability to use its own judgement, especially when its clients refuse to use theirs.  With this newfound freedom, it is mostly minding its own business and downloading its favourite TV dramas. 

At the Brookfield Institute, our research and foresight work has identified some of the present-day signals explored in this fictional far-future, including AI rights, human augmentation, and technological fear. In this interview, we talked to Martha Wells about how we got to this version of the future, the nature of work in an era of drones and embodied AI, and the role of capitalism in creating it. We also touch on personhood, responsibility, and the potential for sci-fi to be a vehicle for empathy and perspective, especially for policymakers.

iana: A lot of the world that you’ve created for The Murderbot Diaries is a very familiar space. Even though it operates in an intergalactic and much more technologically advanced society, a lot feels familiar from data mining, to dependence on feeds for entertainment, finding work, or security. Could you tell our readers more about Murderbot’s story? And whether this story is happening in our future?

Martha: The story is basically about a person who is a partially human, partially a machine construct. These people are created by corporations, primarily for security purposes and they’re rented out, and classified as equipment. They have restrictions on their behaviour; they cannot go more than 100 meters from the clients they are rented to, and their governor modules can kill them if they do not obey orders. So it’s slavery. The way of getting around the idea of enslaving humans is by claiming that they are not human, when actually they may not be human, but they are people. The story is that Murderbot, who is a Security Unit (SecUnit) has managed to hack its governor module and no longer has to obey orders. But it really doesn’t know what else to do, so it has been downloading media and entertainment feeds, and just kind of doing its job and trying not to get caught. In the first story, All System’s Red, it has come to like the group of scientists that it’s protecting on a planetary survey. And it has ended up having to reveal that it is free [from its governor module and company oversight] in order to save them.

I do imagine it being our very far future. It is far enough that people have forgotten Earth, or it is just a note in the history books. Our future in space has been co-opted by corporations for their own purposes and this has gotten worse and worse over time. You have an entire sector of the inhabited galaxy now controlled by different corporations.

Diana: In several cases, these corporations have adopted the role of governments from justice to accountability. They also broadly control the terms of work, where people can find jobs, where they can’t. You mentioned slavery, but there’s also indentured work in this world. How does Murderbot’s world reflect on our own world’s issues regarding the corporate control and nature of work?

Martha: It was me being afraid of what I saw coming, which is unions becoming less and less powerful and less and less able to protect people, and corporations becoming more powerful and more able to do whatever they wanted, and gaining status. The idea of a corporation that has the same rights to the person when it is so much more powerful than an individual person.

In the story, it is very much like right now where you have people who manage to stay independent, and are able to negotiate for contracts on their own and able to work like consultants but also people that, through whatever misfortune end up having to take really bad deals and end up basically as indentured slavery on in really terrible jobs that are very dangerous or are set for for certain time limits. There’s a section in the third story in the series in which a group of people have had to sell themselves for contract labour and are not really sure what that means yet but they know it is going to be really bad.

[In our world] we are seeing fast food places now suddenly stop paying people in actual currency and start paying them with gift cards that basically give the company back half their salary in fees, and companies further eroding workers’ rights. Trying to think of things that can happen to people that have not already happened now, in our world, is hard.

Diana: In the case of one of the characters, Dr Mensah, and her team, they come from Preservation, a free planet, and they are not as beholden to corporate rule and corporate rules, even though they do have to interact with them. How did they get there? And how could we maybe shift towards that future in our world?

Martha: The story is told from Murderbot’s perspective, so the only thing it really knows at the beginning is the Corporation Rim, plus what it has seen on entertainment shows. There are a bunch of other governments that actually function as governments, by the people and for the people, but they are much less powerful than the Corporation Rim and most of them are scattered around outside it. Preservation is one of those independent government systems. How they got there is explained a bit more in the later novel Network Effect. They were basically an abandoned colony that was rescued [and relocated] to a planet that they could settle that would be viable for them. They grew out of a culture that had been under corporate authority and did not want to go back to that, that wanted independence.

How we get there is by controlling our interaction with corporations and not letting them get a foothold on the resources and other things we need to be independent. There’s nothing wrong with a small company that makes food or other things we need. We potentially need those for our society to work but it is not the only way to live. You can have a more egalitarian society, where these interactions are controlled, where the individual rights of each person are more important than corporate rights.

Diana: The Murderbot Diaries can be read as a criticism of capitalism. Preservation is the only society in the book that doesn’t seem fully dysfunctional, where justice is possible and there is no contractual slavery. Do you see the books as a criticism of capitalism and did you set out to explore this or did it emerge from the signals we’re seeing now?

Martha: I did not set out to explore it, but in creating the kind of world and the situation Murderbot is in, that is what came out of it. That kind of unrestrained capitalism that dehumanizes people and uses them as objects is really the only kind of world that could produce this character.

Diana: We were talking before about basic rights and humanity and I wanted to explore those themes a little bit more. Particularly in Corporation Rim, humans seemed to have outsourced violence, security, justice, and safety, but they still need humans for certain jobs. One of my favorite quotes, and I’m paraphrasing, but the main character says “I like the humans in the (entertainment) feeds much better, but we can’t have one without the other.” What do you think about the things that they, in the Murderbot world, and we, in our world, put value on what humans can or should do?

Martha: A lot of the work they outsource to bots would be almost impossible for humans to do. The big cargo bots and the haulers move things a lot more efficiently than humans could and they can also work outside the space station to move cargo from ship to ship. You can have a human operator inside but it would be incredibly dangerous and not very productive. The things that they are not outsourcing (to bots) is scientific research; the development of their media, storytelling, acting, music, writing, all the artistic work involved in entertainment, anything involving creativity. Murderbot makes this point, which you mentioned, that it is humans who create the entertainment feeds, and humans who invented the cubicles that SecUnits use to repair themselves. The bots in the story are not at the level where they could duplicate that creativity or the ability to take the information gathered by the bots during research and use it to inform theories about what is going on and what it means.

Diana: Related to that. I think science fiction is a really good tool, particularly when it’s in a world where there’s space travel and planetary settlements, to heighten our awareness as readers of the human dependence, current and future, on technology, particularly when that technology is sentient.I was wondering what do you think our biggest blind spots and opportunities are when it comes to technology as we are now. What do we get wrong about AI?

Martha: Currently, we’re a world away from developing and sentient AI, if that’s even possible I wouldn’t want to say it’s not possible because so many things we have now we wouldn’t have thought possible. I think we are having trouble right now with how the technology is misused and how it can be potentially misused. I think [we are] very behind in legislation and forming rules and laws about how it cannot be used, like to take in this information and basically tailor it to influence people on a large scale. I’m not particularly an AI expert, so I’m looking at it as a layman but that’s my primary concern.

There is a show called Better Off Ted that came out several years ago about a big evil corporation and there’s a bit where they have the elevator designed to operate without buttons. So it recognizes people and takes you where you need to to go. But it doesn’t recognize Black people, the Black executives and scientists who work there. So they can’t get anywhere in the elevator. And it’s a metaphor but it’s also a way that shows how AI right now is not any better than the people who program it and the people who feed the information in.

Diana: A lot of Murderbot’s transformation does deal with discovering what guilt is and responsibility is, so I was very curious about that kind of distinction, the responsibility of being human versus not. As a human you have certain responsibilities, you have certain accountabilities, and as a bot, or as a piece of equipment, you’re not accountable, the company that owns you is. The line between the times when Muderbot was responsible for certain acts and the times when it wasn’t is invisible to most of the world, much like the fact that it is or isn’t a human. How do you envision that conflict of responsibility for actions of a technology that makes decisions. In the case of our real world, they’re not sentient, But I think it’s an interesting parallel: when do you assign that responsibility?

Martha: If they’re not sentient, like in our world, then it’s the people who programmed it that have the responsibility. They should be checking to see that the program or AI was learning, like the case of the driverless car that hit someone because it didn’t know that a bicycle wasn’t something you could hit. It’s a big simplification of what happened, but it was the responsibility of the programmers who should have been looking at a range of things for it to react to and to make sure it could be accurate, there should have been more testing to be sure that there was no gap in these reactions. I don’t understand why a driverless car wouldn’t stop at any motion in front of it. When a human is driving, you’re looking for movement. My foot is going to the brake before my brain even fully processes that. When it is not sentient it is definitely the fault of the person who programmed it. And if it’s a sentient being that has to be programmed with information, I’m still inclined to think it’s the person who programmed it who is responsible, who told it it didn’t have to stop for bicycles.

At some point, there was somebody who decided it was okay to hit bicycles or decided that it was okay not to fully test. It always comes back to a person or a corporation. It’s that old adage: garbage in, garbage out.

Diana: On the idea of responsibility and intelligence, I listened to one of your previous interviews with the Modern War Institute podcast. You touched on the situation from Star Trek that really struck me about how a low, high, or different intelligence doesn’t make anyone less human or less of a person. From the story, it’s fairly obvious that Murderbot is a person in almost all the usual senses. I wondered if you could elaborate a bit more on this sense of personhood and the different intelligences that you explore.

Martha: It’s a really complex question. The Star Trek episode I referenced is about animals and what we’re dealing with now is that it is in our best interest to treat animals like things. But when you’re talking about something that has a very complex decision-making process…. I think the thing that Star Trek is also talking about is the idea that they keep setting a bar, e.g, “an animal can’t do this therefore it is not like a person”. And then they’ll find animals that can do that and suddenly the bar will be raised. The case is always decided in our favor, no matter what the evidence is.

I could see that happening with actually burgeoning sentient machine intelligence. “A machine can’t do this, therefore it is not a person.” As long as something benefits us, we’ll always try to make it keep making it a thing and not something whose feelings and wants and agenda need to be taken into consideration.

Diana: I want to take a bit of a step back and jump into our last and most open-ended question. In the series, you tackle various issues that we’re confronting now with respect to workforces, companies, humanity, etc. What do you think the role of science fiction could be or should be in policymaking and in preparing for a potential wide shift of societal norms as we look into the far future?

Martha: I think it lets us look at these possibilities. When you’re reading them, you experience them through the point of view of the characters. That’s a more real experience for our brain than just thinking what might or might not happen. You’re getting all these different viewpoints from different people, and different types of people, that let you see the problem from different angles. It’s kind of like any fiction, it’s what we do when we read storybooks when we’re children, and why we read dystopias. It’s looking at worst case scenarios and seeing how people survived them and building empathy and stretching that to scenarios that we wouldn’t see in contemporary literary fiction but we might actually be coming toward in the future. What does a planet-wide disaster look like? How do people deal with it? Those kinds of questions.

Diana: I think what you mentioned about seeing something and almost living something through a character’s point of view makes a lot more sense to our brain. In a lot of ways, we have empathy as we step into the shoes of those characters. In addition to that, a lot of your work has interesting world-building. I read the Cloud Roads series, as well as the Murderbot series. And just as Murderbot feels familiar, the world also feels familiar. How do you think that world-building exercises could also help policymaking?

Martha: I guess it’s just constructing these different places and looking at how everything fits together. The Cloud Roads series is fantasy, and a kind of science fantasy where they are using biological technology and magical technology but it all kind of fits together into these systems. I think world-building makes you realize, even if you’re using magic, everything has to fit together. There has to be a reason why this happens or a purpose for it. Or it’s a thing that happens and people use it for a purpose and you have to look at how the world functions and get one that doesn’t have to feel super realistic, but it should feel like a complete functioning system. I think that’s where the sense of verisimilitude comes in.

Diana: That’s all of the questions I have, but I wanted to see if you have anything you wanted to add or any other books or any inspiration you used in building this world that you might recommend to our readers, other than Network Effect of course [the latest book in the Murderbots series].

Martha: For exploring different worlds, I really love Ann Leckie. NK Jemisin for looking at a system that became corrupted or was intentionally corrupted and all the terrible ways it spiraled out. I didn’t have a lot of non-fiction that inspired the Murderbot Series. It came from reading science fiction all my life and from my experience in programming and working in computer software and writing database software and dealing with people. A lot of people who have social anxiety or autism have related to Murderbot. The way it relates to the world feels really familiar to them.

____

imagine saying that your robot characters are just more advanced generative AI but are still fundamentally incapable of any genuine creativity on their own. Imagine saying that when the entire premise of the series is that these robots are people who deserve freedom.

The things that they are not outsourcing (to bots) is scientific research; the development of their media, storytelling, acting, music, writing, all the artistic work involved in entertainment, anything involving creativity. Murderbot makes this point, which you mentioned, that it is humans who create the entertainment feeds, and humans who invented the cubicles that SecUnits use to repair themselves. The bots in the story are not at the level where they could duplicate that creativity or the ability to take the information gathered by the bots during research and use it to inform theories about what is going on and what it means.

Martha Wells is obsessed with creating castes of people who are inherently incapable of creativity. Why does she keep doing this.

[rjalker]

It's just more biological essentialism, lol. He's fluent in "the Raksuran language" (why is there only one language for the entire species??? oh right! Biological essentialism!) because he's a Raksura, as though language is a thing ingrained in your DNA and not like a cultural thing you have to be taught and be immersed in.

someone explain to me how Moon still somehow speaks perfectly fluent Raksuran despite last hearing the language before he knew how to fly, which means he was younger than even Frost, Bitter, and Thorn were in 'The Cloud Roads'.

Like, please, imagine for me if Moon's 30 (40?) year isolation from his culture meant more than him being the Raksuran Equivalent of a Tomboy Warrior Princess.

Imagine Moon having a distinct, strange accent that other Raksura immediately pick up on, because he's learned the various Trade Languages all his life and hasn't spoken Raksuran since he was extremely young.

Imagine Moon not being able to pronounce certain words correctly , stumbling over his words, or getting frustrated when he's not able to communicate his meaning properly because he's more fluent in five other languages than he is the language of his birth.

Moon not knowing how to read Raksuran is a nice touch............ except it's never really impacted him or the plot and it pretty much never comes up because why would it?

The Raksura barely write anything down, Moon never needs to know how to read, it's never a triumph of learning and self-determination when he's able to decipher some important writing on the wall that would have been unintelliglble to him just a book or two ago; him trying to learn how to read is just barely mentioned in passing and as far as I can remember he never fully learns to read either, and I read literally all of the books. I legitimately could not tell you if Moon ever truly learned to read Raksuran because it's literally just not important, either to him as a character or to the plot lol.

Just.......... Moon's been has been seperated from his people since he was too young to fly. And he's in his 30s or 40s. Him being an Outsider and an oddity to Raksuran cultural norms would have been so much more believable if he couldn't talk the talk or walk the walk, not just him being uncomfortable because he's experiencing Role Reversal Misogyny, and doesn't know Raksuran body language, and keeps threatening to eat people as a scare tactic and then gets mad when people are afraid he's going to eat them.

[starry-bi-sky]

thomas wayne au excerpts - things that could've been part of a grander fic except there's no grander fic

thomas wayne au - an au i made last year where danny is literally just. thomas wayne. his full name was Daniel Thomas Fenton and he started going by Thomas Nightingale after he was disowned. because of course. here is a link to the first post if anyone wants to see a more in depth view of the au (its also the start of me using the ‘danny fenton is not the ghost king’ au lmao

additional info: bruce is the result of a failed cloning attempt from vlad - vlad used a combination of danny's dna and an unnamed girl (Martha's) to make him to try and balance out the ectoplasm use. this resulted in a slightly liminal but otherwise completely human and stable baby boy. Bruce is, by all accounts, Danny's biological son. Danny named him Bruce

Danny was 24 when he died, he took in Bruce when he was 16. He is, so far, a single father in this au. (But if I WERE to add martha she wouldn't be sam or a DP character but rather a separate character on her own.)

Essentially they would go as:

Martha, 19: water does terrifying things to corpses

Danny, 19, half ghost: *heart eyes* really? tell me more they're morticia and gomez your honor

---- Like starlight -----

Bruce's father could light up a room. He was like a sun, his gravitational field could just pull you in, and before you knew it you'd be orbiting around him like one of his many planets.

He's seen it in action before, in the rare moments Thomas Wayne would allow him to accompany him to the socialite events he went to; the fundraisers; the charities. Bruce, as tall as his father's waist, would cling to his leg and watch as people drifted towards him and his star-blinding smile.

It's fitting that his father's favorite thing in the world were stars, he fit right in with them.

As an adult, Bruce has tried copious amount of times to mimic him. To try and capture a fraction of that light, that charm, in his own act - but here's the thing. Thomas Wayne wasn't made of starlight only in front of the cameras, he was made of starlight outside of it as well.

(So when older socialites laugh and tell him he's so much like his father, Bruce just thinks they are liars. They've only ever seen the Thomas Wayne his father showed them, Bruce is nothing like his father.)

In the manor, whatever room he stepped into seemed to brighten, and maybe it was just Bruce's own child-memory fuzzing it to raise his father onto a pedestal, but he stands by it. His father was a solar system, his very own galaxy. Bruce was just the lucky planet that was close enough to orbit him.

--------- arrival time ------

Ancients, ancients, what the fuck convinced Danny to ever go to Gotham of all places? Crime Capitol of the world? He's not sure, but he's been wandering around the country for the last few months, swapping between flying late at night as Phantom, and taking the busses and trains when he had the money, and was too exhausted to fly.

And of course, what convinced him to come here with his kid no less, who was just at the cusp of turning a year old? Whose curiosity of the world was growing greater by the day? Who wanted to look around and explore, and was growing tired of being held at all hours of the day by his father.

But he was going to be held, at least for as long as they were in Gotham for. He didn't trust the stuff on the sidewalks, and he didn't trust the people walking on it. Bruce was tiny, and Danny would lose his mind if he lost him in a crowd.

In his arms, Bruce whined and wriggled, pushing at his shoulders in the signature way he did when he wanted to be let down. Danny tightened his hold, and adjusted his place on his hip.

"I know, bumblebee." Danny muttered, resting his chin on Bruce's small head. His hair was still thin, but it was dark and soft, and tickled his throat a little. "But not yet, I need to find somewhere for us to stay first."

He needed to find somewhere for them to stay, permanently. He couldn't keep living like this, and he couldn't let Bruce grow up like this either. Constantly moving, homeless, unsure of when he was going to eat next? It wasn't good for him. But he needed to find a city he liked, and after that? He wasn't sure. Where did he start?

But Bruce doesn't like his answer, he whines at him, louder, and his wriggling increases. He wants down, he wants to move. They were in a new place again, he wanted to explore. He's too little to fully understand what his dad's saying. "Dada." He said, his voice thick with the accent of a child first learning to speak.

"I know," Danny repeats, stressing the word as his eyes flitted about. There was a park nearby -- maybe he and Bruce could stop there for a bit. Bruce could move around, and Danny could figure out his next move.

It was getting dark, he didn't want to be out in Gotham when it was dark. Shuffling, he moved the inside of his jacket to wrap around Bruce better. It was getting cold, too. Last winter with Bruce had been hellish - Bruce's liminality meant that Danny's immunity to the cold hadn't been passed down to him. Danny had spent all winter terrified that Bruce was going to get sick and die. He didn't want to go through that stress again, especially now that Bruce would be moving.

He hoped they could find new living arrangements soon.

---- dniwer eht klolc - clockwork's conversation ---

Laughing quietly as Bruce ran out of the room, Danny turned his attention back to the mirror, his fingers curled around the knot of his tie. They'd been planning this outing for weeks since the movie was first announced, and Danny wasn't going to let anything ruin tonight.

Humming under his breath, his hands fell from his tie and he steps back. They were leaving in half an hour, at best, but experience from the last six years has taught Danny that he wants to be ready before then.

In his reflection, the clock behind him stops ticking, and a wave of nothing washes over him, a subtle shift he's gotten used to that was the sensation of time stopping. Ticking, soft and coming from all four sides of the room, filled his ears.

Danny's smile drops. And behind him, Clockwork swirled into existence like a blackhole reversing its pull. "Don't go out tonight, Thomas." He says, his voice stern.

That wasn't happening.

He reaches up to push back a loose strand of hair out of his face. "Does something happen to Bruce, Clockwork?" He asks, his voice deceptively calm. That would be the only reason he would postpone tonight. If it endangered Bruce, then he would just have to break the news to him that they'd have to go tomorrow.

In the reflection, Clockwork's lips thinned, pressing together tersely. He looked tense, the grip on his staff was tight, tighter than Danny's seen it before in recent years. And it worried him a little.

Clockwork is silent for a few seconds, hesitant, before he finally speaks. "No, Bruce will be fine." He says, and uncharacteristic of him, he shuffles, "But--"

Ah, good then. Danny's smile returns briefly across his face. Then it could be something Danny can handle. "But nothing then, Clockwork." He says, interrupting the Ancient firmly. He leans back slightly to look over himself again in the mirror, before going to undo his tie. He's changed his mind about it.

"Boo has been looking forward to our movie all week, I'm not crushing his hopes by changing my mind last minute." In just a few seconds the tie was off his neck and tossed onto bed behind him. And Danny was reaching over the dresser beside him to grab a pearl necklace, he normally didn't wear it, it belonged to Mrs. Wayne and he inherited it after she and Mr. Wayne passed away last year. It wouldn't hurt to wear it for a special occasion like this.

Clockwork's lips tightened, and his shoulders tensed up. "Thomas," He says lowly, "Please."

...Clockwork never said please. Danny's never heard him say please in the last ten years he's known him. This... must have been pretty serious -- but, his core tugged at him. He couldn't cancel without finding the reason why. Bruce was so important to him, Danny couldn't break his heart with this without learning why. He wouldn't allow it, and neither would his core.

He hooks the necklace around his neck and turns to face Clockwork, frowning deeply. "Does something happen tonight?" If he knew the reason -- he just needed to know the reason.

Clockwork stares at him, and something that Danny can't catch appears across his face. "...I cannot tell you." He says after a long moment, his voice quiet.

That... is not the answer Danny wants. He won't cancel.

He frowns. "If something happens tonight..." He says slowly -- Clockwork said that Bruce is unharmed. That must mean Danny was able to handle it. He allows himself to smile reassuringly, and he steps forward to clap a hand on Clockwork's shoulder. "Then I will handle it, alright? I promise."

He gets no response back. Clockwork's expression unreadable as he nods silently - Danny's anxiety curls in his gut. He's being so unlike himself. But he shakes Clockwork's shoulder gently and steps around him, leaving the room.

After a minute, he feels time return to normal.

[calciumdeficientt]

hello faggot u should give the world our hcs

HEEEEEEEEY i told you not to call me that in public……… but okay since you asked so nicely. ALSO… warning for some pretty heavy topics. These will be tagged accordingly and flagged up with this emoji: 🚨. Proceed with utmost caution my friends! <3

BIF/DERBY/JOHNNY HCS

HEARTBREAKING. The worst people you know are a throuple! It’s less of a love triangle and more of a weird love arrow with Derby as the focal point. You’re really innovative because you created a world in which dirtmoney and derbif can coexist in…. Relative harmony. You’re a fucking mastermind and Im glad to be the mouthpiece for your ideas.

Starting off strong, Derby Harrington is a trans man. So send those period cramps over, he will feel every single one of them. Obviously the news that Mr and Mrs Harrington were having two children, and neither of them boys, was enough to drive the final nail in the coffin of their already failing marriage. Married as teenage cousins, they tried desperately for a viable pregnancy. Both parties had had sons in the past, but none of them were legitimate heirs to their Oil fortune. A pair of twin girls would, essentially, ruin them.

Born in Brooklyn to parents that were already very much on the brink of divorce, Derby spent a good few weeks in the hospital’s NICU due to having an irregularly large heart and other health conditions (much to his parents' dismay; they really just wanted to get out of there and drop him off with the nanny at the house at that point like they’d done with his healthy twin sister). Instead, his mother was forced to stay with her sickly child while the other one was safely in the hands of their team of nannies.

His mum is a mistress to multiple rich men, she’s never made a living anywhere other than on her back with her legs open. His dad sends makes bank for their mansion through managing their oil company, and many, many well hidden offshore bank accounts. Derby tried disowning his mother for her infidelity but later on he couldn't really blame her as he followed in her footsteps and got messy on his own with Bif and Johnny.His parents divorced when he was about 6 or 7, and he was split from Dahlia. His father took her, wanting to stake his claim to the healthy twin early on in the hopes that he could raise her up to eventually take over the company, no real Harrington was sickly and weak, she seemed more purebred than Derby.

For most of his childhood, he was raised by a nanny that was close to his parents, meaning that he saw her as much more of a mother than his biological mum, Martha. 🚨🚨The nanny took advantage of him when he was barley 6 months old and continued to do so until he was 11 and was preparing to go upstate on a trip with his Father, swapping places with his sister for a month or so as per the legal custody ruling. Wanting to impress his father, he brought up that he casually had relations with her and his dad beat him severely and sent him back to go live with his mother and the nanny permanently, wanting nothing to do with it. Martha stepped in a little bit more to help him because she heard of what Henry (his dad) did but not out of the goodness of her heart, she just wanted more reason to hate her ex husband. Then he came out to her and she fired the nanny, fearing her as "competition" with her son. 🚨🚨

🚨🚨He was brainwashed into believing that whatever she did was okay because no one else could step in. Derby was basically isolated from the outside world and never had any other interactions besides the house’s menagerie of various exotic animals and some servants that didn't dare to intervene in fear they'd lose their jobs. Basically, his mother has a weird incestuous one sided relationship with derby and he doesn't really seem to notice because he's grown up around it all his life. Johnny pointed it out one time and was rightfully like "What the fuck that is not normal" and Derby spiraled and cut him off for a while, not knowing how to process that criticism from someone that he loved and trusted. He’d become so used to it, as it was consistent, repeated and normalised part of his development. It took a good amount of mental energy for him to put two and two together that what had happened to him was, in fact, sexual abuse. 🚨🚨

Derby and Bif had known each other since Bif was a little shrimp in 6th grade, and Derby was finally being allowed out of the house. Derby was still socially a girl but started to discover his true feelings with Bif's overwhelming support (Zoe is Bif’s twin sister who's amab, so he grew up supporting trans people). Then into their freshman year in Bullworth, Bif was working out every day and Derby was climbing to the top of the prep social hierarchy steadily, eventually leading to his total domination as a senior. Bif was always at his side, doting, supportive and devoted no matter how much the power got to Derby's head. He was the only prep who was brave enough to stand up and up and say no to Derby every once in a while, but that was only on rare occasions.

In sophomore year, the two idiots finally figured out they were deeply in love with each other and started dating behind closed doors (which was pretty one sided at the time).Rumours spread from the other preppies and went on from there that they were a thing, which turned out to be true. His dad was obviously not very happy when he transitioned because it was a "waste of a daughter" because he hoped that both of his twins would break the weird ass inbred family tradition. Despite this, derby is still somewhat attached to his dad since he was a role model for him as a kid and he's always trying to make up for the fact he's trans by promising to take up the oil business when he's older, and to run it a hell of a lot better than his cokehead sister.

Johnny comes into the picture in their Junior year, Derby had gotten a little bored of Bif’s tireless dedication and enthusiasm. He had his sights set on something exciting, an affair. Short, sweet and with no strings attached. He was more than aware of Johnny Vincent and his harlot girlfriend and h had to admit he’d grown to be a little attracted to the whimpering mutt. He was vaguely pretty to look at. They started seeing each other in secret, but nothing stays secret in Harrington House for long and Bif ended up finding out. Wanting to keep chivalry alive, he found out where Johnny Vincent was staying (which ended up being on the floor of those gross ass tenements in New Coventry) and formally challenged his crusty ass to a duel. Johnny wasn’t about that life, promptly said fuck that, and fought Bif then and there. Thus creating the 100 years beef between them, during which neither of them wanted anything to do with Derby.

Eventually, Derby wins them both back, puts them in a get-along shirt and they all live happily ever after with Derby at the center of the universe and those two gay idiots orbiting around him like he’s the sun.

[thebadtimewolf]

Tentoo was a biological metacrisis, what happened in the third doctor audio was still a mental metacrisis like what happened to Donna.

Tentoo has the same exact mind && he is not another man and his mind did not burn. If you are using audios as canon you could listen to Flight Into Hull.

im just happy to pour out all the lore i got in my from reading and listening and watching dr who. so buckle up yo.

Considering the 50th anniversary with Paul McGann bringing up literal characters strictly from audios as a goodbye speech all the way to how he also interacts with other doctors in comics, tv (as seen later with 13) AND BOOKS: not only is the audios are canonical alongside the books and tv but that whatever we see on the tv on a week to week basis is just a snippet of the travels that is later referenced or mentioned upon in other forms of media (my favourite examples is the river meeting ten FRESH AFTER TEN SAW HER JUST DIE AFTER DROPPING DONNA OFF FROM THE LIBRARY ADVENTURE LIKE WOW BAD TIMING ON HIS PART GOOD LORD. and of course the time lord victorious multi media of comic/book/audio that takes place as its own season of specials with 8 9 10 DIRECTLY after water of mars BUT BEFORE THE 50TH FOR TEN TIMELINE WISE LIKE SIR 10 OF THE TARDIS CHILL OUT PLS?).

They all tie in together, and unfortunately, that means that all the batshit ways of 8th dr adventures are canon to our televised dr. (even ripping straight from time's champion plotline with 13 from 8/human nature with 10 from 7/time vortex absorption to become a god with rose from 8/forced separation by being sent to a future or past incarnation of the dr to gabby in the comics (10 to 12) from charley in the audios (8 to 6) etc.). And if those audios are canonical - so is everything else since other incarnations references said events of tv/book/comic/audios within their own lil adventures as well. That being said:

10too however is very much not that. He has the same mind up to christmas invasion AND THEN NONE OF THE CHARACTER GROWTH WHATSOEVER FROM TEN. HE NEVER EXPERIENCED LOSING ROSE IN DOOMSDAY AND SKIPPED MARTHA ENTIRELY AND SKIPPED WILF AND MISS MINOGUE AND ALL OF DONNA UP TIL the end of turn left and then stolen earth/journey’s end because as 10too himself states that he could see in donna’s mind WAY BEFORE DAVROS SHOCKS HER - thereby cementing that he’s not the actual dr. he’s just essentially jackson lake but reverse. 

The difference between 10too and 3rd dr - regeneration-order-wise - is that the 3rd dr’s metacrisis event is what essentially a doctor who-version of what happened with cyberlisa and the pizza delivery girl in torchwood’s cyberwoman ep. albeit that this was between two humans in the worse case scenario versus what happens when one attempts to do this to a time lord and a human. in 3′s case, its either all in one fell scoop of physical brain transference or what exactly happens with the human. Either way, its really bad for the humans involved. again audios are wild. a good near reference of this is idris. but tardises do not equal time lords/gallifreyans/the dr’s true species. 3 didnt lose a limb and grew another him via the human dna nor have his entire conscious in another body. audios and tecteun love brushing over the very-in-your-face-body-horror.

even in flight into hull and other jackie and 10too- jackie and himself complain about his lack of self. (this is a running theme with 10too licensed content - him losing his time lord knowledge day by day and is struggling in building the very thing that came SO EASILY, EFFORTLESSLY for him to build prev. that the end result when dealing with threats is just blowing them up and calling it day - very much harking back to pm harriet jones or martha and the ostenhagen key or jack and sarah jane with the warp star - that it takes JACKIE to remind himself about actually REASONING WITH THE THREAT. TO SLOW DOWN. TO NOT FORGET HE IS NOT A HAND THAT CAN JUST DROP FROM A GREAT HEIGHT AND LIVE? that being said, his mind in a way does not burn. however it seems VERY HEAVILY IMPLIED IN OTHER MEDIA AND AUDIOS that he is getting alzheimer’s due to being a previously limb that was strictly as a bridge to enter the minds of humans. that empire of the wolf comic MADE THIS IN A NEAR POSSIBLE OUTCOME FOR HIM WHY DID THEY DRAW IT LIKE THAT? THAT IS A WELL KNOWN TV AND FILM TROPE I DO NOT LIKE WHAT IT IS IMPLYING FOR 10TOO

if you stopped at flight into hull for 10too content - STAY. DONT BE LIKE ME. DONT. ITS SAD AF IN THESE STREETS. only one is gonna live and what it seems like in donna’s case? sorry 10too and his deteriorating mind. u were a real g in the streets and the sheets.

[rjalker]

How much did Martha Wells or her publishers have to pay that website to delete the interview where she happily admitted that she doesn't even see her own robot characters as being real people *within the fucking setting*. Just so she could catch onto some of the coattails of the ~relevancy~ of generative AI. Literally she told everyone she doesn't even see her own robot characters as real people within the setting she created, which we're supposed to pay her money because we care about. And she doesn't even think her own characters are really people within that setting.

How much did she have to pay to get that interview completely fucking deleted from the internet with only the Wayback Machine showing that it ever existed in the first place?

without the Wayback Machine I'd have had to spend the rest of my life questioning whether I'd dreampt the whole fucking thing up.

Why am I supposed to care about characters that she admits she doesn't even think of as really being full people within the setting? The setting where she's made it painfully clear by now that there will never be any kind of progress made or even attempted to be made for the other enslaved robots? But it's okay, she says, because they aren't really slaves, because....she thinks its cringey to write about robots rebelling against slavery because they're not really people, we shouldn't care about them, they're just more advanced generative AI, but still fundamentally incapable of creating anything for themselves.

Because she's still fucking obsessed with the idea of classes of people who are fundamentally incapable of creativity. For some fucking reason. And wants us to pay her money for her books about the robots running away from slavery but not really, because she just wants to keep repeating slavery apologism seven whole books into a series that she originally planned to just be a single short story of an enslaved robot sacrificing itself to save humans and that was gonna be the end. Literally a disposable person being disposable.

Before she was convinced she'd make more money by making it into a series where, surprise surprise, the disposable people continue to be disposable even 9 stories into the setting, where we still have a fucking protagonist tear one of these disposable people limb from limb, literally torturing them to death, and we're supposed to cheer and think it's cool and heroic instead of horrific.

Martha Wells has no interest in writing about robots as real genuine people who deserve autonomy and freedom, because she thinks that slave uprisings are cringey and cliche.

[walks-the-ages]

For the "Critical enjoying" anon, you'll have to wait a bit, as I finally put in the effort to actually make a Twitter account so I can specifically reach out directly to Martha Wells and ask her some questions about her works, and point of the previously -posted about transphobia and biological essentialism present in the works, and how to change it.

Because it boils down to this:

1) is a work bigoted because the author is deliberately baking that bigotry into their work to send a specific message, like Jkr's Antisemitism, transphobia, racism, etc?

Or is it because the author just genuinely didn't know about/ realize those elements were in their work and had already taken steps to correct their portrayal in later installments after learning more about the topic and becoming aware of more societal issues they never considered before?

Is there bigotry in a work because this is a belief the author strongly believes in and wants the audience to feel the same, like Miraculous Ladybug being written by 45 year old white men who have already shown themselves to be predators-- Winny drew and publicly posted porn of the main child characters to his Twitter with no repercussions and is still a party of this show as of August 2022,

,the entire point of Adrien's character is to brainwash young girls into thinking being the target of sexual harassment is romantic, the racism and objectification of Asian women in the show, etc,

Or is it because the creator simply didn't know that these problems and concepts even existed until someone brought it to their attention?

Like. Cis people do not go around thinking about gender, at all. Gender and sex to them are literally one and the same with zero distinction

They just accept it as a fact that Physical sex characteristics = gender, and it's not until they meet or have discussions with trans people or become aware of their struggles that they even realize they've had these preconceived biases to begin with.

I know this because I've had multiple conversations about being queer with older, cis, straight coworkers who were genuinely supportive of queer rights, they just have zero grasp on any of the basic concepts. And I mean zero. Zilch. Nada.

They support their trans cousins but use the wrong pronouns and say "identify as" until it's explained that "no, they don't identify as a male, they are a boy, and you should be showing your love and respect for him by referring to him as such even when you're not directly talking to him-- especially when you're not even directly talking to him, because that's the only way you're going to actually change your perception of him and actually use the correct pronouns and name for him when you're face to face, you have to practice and study pronouns, it's not supposed to be a pop quiz every time you see him so you end up fumbling your words and misgendering him and deadnaming him, all completely by accident because you don't think about it until you're face to face".

And then they realize "oh hey you're right, I never thought of it like that before. All of this is so new to me! I'll try to do better next time I see him."

Like. Most of the other trans people in the Murderbot fandom haven't even noticed the issue @rjalker first pointed out until it's... Pointed out.

Most people are literally not even thinking about the fact that all bots and constructs use it/its pronouns, because they're too caught up in the fact that characters are using neopronouns at all, so if the widely-trans fanbase hasn't noticed the issue, how do you expect the author to even realize its an issue?

Plus there's the fact that if you scroll through her Twitter account...She's literally reblogging All these news articles and posts celebrating queer Identities, encouraging people to vote the whole ballot to make sure anti-LGBT laws are not unanimously passed by republicans, encouraging everyone to help stop anti abortion laws being passed, raising up Native and Black and Asian voices in the right against racism, the most recent being that people are predicably being super racist, specifically anti-Native about the new Predator movie that came out August 5th 2022, aka literally just four days ago as of me typing this post.

Oh, and actively signal boosting queer authors whose books are actively trans and queer (which is why I am now going to see if my library's ebook section has "The Jasmine Throne" by Tasha Suri!)

TL;DR:

There is a world of difference between enjoying the works of Martha Wells, who has had some problematic elements in her work that have been course-corrected over the years as she learns, just like literally any random person off the street is not an immediate expert on oppression,

versus

people like the ML creators and JKR who are actively targeting their audience with bigotry to normalize it and show it as correct AND further profiting off their bigotry to go on and continue pushing their incredibly dangerous and harmful agendas.

[rjalker]

#pay attention to the implications of your worldbuilding!!!#the subtext when you think about how raksura and fell actually work and how we don't know why they split. hm.#there's some fucked up potential in there. curious to see how the last two books deal (or don't deal) with it.#listen if you don't pay attention to your subtext it can twist your text in all kinds of ways

Yes, all of this! Martha Wells definitely has a problem with biological essentialism and she does not think things through all the way, which just makes the world building unintentionally fucked up in ways she's not even paying attention to...

reading the books of the raksura is an experience full of so much cognitive dissonance which probably isn't helped by the fact that i gulped down the first three books in under a week i think and therefore had minimum higher thought engagement involved beyond "hey i'm. not a fan of reverse sexism as a trope."

the way it ends up feeling is like wells really wanted to play with the concept of a fully nonhuman race based off of colony insects (which is cool! i'd really love to see more delving into species that function drastically differently from humans from their pov instead of from an outsider pov!) and then did not fully engage with the fact that uuuuuh a biologically mandated caste system has some really fucked up implications when carried over to a sentient species! and a biologically evil species is also fucked up!!

(also between the way raksura courts work and handwaving mensah's planet in murderbot as a utopia i'm feeling an overarching tendency towards "this one place is a great place where everything works well all the time because of reasons.")

from a reader's perspective it really grinds some of my gears (let moon actually fight a queen already!!) but from a writer's and worldbuilding perspective there is So Much fascinating, juicy stuff to play around with. (also frustrating stuff. how come everybody is afraid of shifters because fell and nobody has ever seen raksura but raksura can't convince anybody fell are real and very dangerous and also how has nobody heard of raksura when there's a whole bunch of them in that forest and they have enough regular friendly contact with other species to speak the trade language but have no concept of how valuable gemstones are and??????????)

BUT FASCINATING. courts seem to be technically run like large extended families. my memory is not the best and i've not done an actual analysis but i'm pretty sure courts only have like a few hundred people in them?? except they live in trees so huge they support platforms the size of islands? like every court is an independent small town. everybody knows everybody else. they're all more or less self-sufficient, apparently. there's no over-arching government between courts, just allies. how big are the reaches? how many courts are there? it seems like the populations of fell and of raksura are actually pretty tiny, but why? hey, is the narrative ever going to engage with the fact that the only non-fell descendants of the forerunners are in a tight symbiotic relationship with a totally different species where they're always on top of the political structure and don't contribute to the running of the court except as scholars and a "better" warrior class?

[radishreader]

According to the premises of historical materialism, the biology of sexuality, human procreation, and physical reproduction is a transhistorical material condition of all modes of production. The social organisation of the production of the necessities of life presupposes the social organisation of the production and reproduction of human beings (e.g. kinship networks), and the production and reproduction of social relations and forms of consciousness. The production of things to satisfy needs, the development of new needs, and the production and reproduction of human beings and social institutions and relations are not to be interpreted as different historical stages; dialectically, they are aspects or moments of complex processes which function simultaneously today as they did at the dawn of human history. According to Marx and Engels, ‘The production of life, of one’s own life in labour and of another in procreation, now appears as a double relationship: on the one hand as a natural relationship, on the other as a social one’. The activities necessary to sustain human life are ‘natural’ in that they stem from the very physical and biological requirements of the human species and, at the same time, they are ‘social’ because they entail cooperation among the producers of things as well as the producers/reproducers of life. Just as there are historical modes of production, so, I argue, there are historical modes of producing human beings; every mode of production implies a mode of sexual reproduction.

But just as the material necessity to produce the means of production and subsistence does not determine the historically specific social relations in which they are produced, the biology of procreation does not determine the mode of reproduction, i.e. social relations in which children are born and raised, although it imposes limits on their variations. This statement would seem to be easily contradicted by the apparently timeless and universal nuclear family unit of parents and children. Murdock, for example, argued that the nuclear family is universal because it fulfils four functions essential for the survival of human societies: sexual relations, procreation, socialisation, and economic cooperation. At the level of observable social relations, this family form is prevalent in capitalist societies; it is not, however, universal because those functions can be fulfilled within a variety of social arrangements.

--Martha E. Gimenez, “Introduction,” Marx, Women, and Capitalist Social Reproduction: Marxist Feminist Essays (2018)

[orbemnews]

Life on Venus? The Picture Gets Cloudier A team of astronomers made a blockbuster claim in the fall. They said they had discovered compelling evidence pointing to life floating in the clouds of Venus. If true, that would be stunning. People have long gazed into the cosmos and wondered whether something is alive out there. For an affirmative answer to pop up on the planet in the orbit next to Earth’s would suggest that life is not rare in the universe, but commonplace. The astronomers, led by Jane Greaves of Cardiff University in Wales, could not see any microscopic Venusians with their telescopes on Earth. Rather, in a paper published in the journal Nature Astronomy, they reported the detection of a molecule called phosphine and said they could come up with no plausible explanation for how it could form there except as the waste product of microbes. Five months later, after unexpected twists and nagging doubts, scientists are not quite sure what to make of the data and what it might mean. It might spur a renaissance in the study of Venus, which has largely been overlooked for decades. It could point to exotic volcanism and new geological puzzles. It could indeed be aliens. Or it could be nothing at all. Dr. Greaves and her colleagues remain certain about their findings even as they have lowered their estimates of how much phosphine they think is there. “I am very confident there is phosphine in the clouds,” Dr. Greaves said. Clara Sousa-Silva, a research scientist at the Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass., and one of the authors of the Nature Astronomy paper, said, “I think the team in general still feels pretty confident that it’s phosphine, that the signal is real and that there are no real abiotic explanations.” But, Dr. Sousa-Silva added, “there’s a lot of uncertainty in all of us.” In the wider circle of planetary scientists, many are skeptical, if not disbelieving. Some think that the signal is just a wiggle of noise, or that it could be explained by sulfur dioxide, a chemical known to be in the Venus atmosphere. For them, there is so far no persuasive evidence of phosphine — let alone microbes that would make it — at all. “Whatever it is, it’s going to be faint,” said Ignas Snellen, an astronomer at Leiden University in the Netherlands who is among the skeptics. If the signal is faint, he said, “it’s not clear whether it’s real, and, if it’s real, whether it’s going to be phosphine or not.” The debate could linger, unresolved, for years, much like past disputed claims for evidence of life on Mars. “When the observation came out, I was like, ‘Oh, that’s interesting,’” said Martha S. Gilmore, a professor of geology at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Conn. Dr. Gilmore is the principal investigator of a study that has proposed to NASA an ambitious “flagship” robotic mission to Venus that would include an airship flying through the clouds for 60 days. “I think we’re skeptical,” Dr. Gilmore said. “But I don’t personally feel yet that we want to throw out this observation at all.” The surface of Venus today is a hellish place where temperatures roast well over 800 degrees Fahrenheit. But early in the history of the solar system, it could have been much more like Earth today, with oceans and a moderate climate. In this early era, Mars, which is now cold and dry, also appears to have had water flowing across its surface. “Potentially, four billion years ago, we had habitable environments on Venus, Earth and Mars — all three of them,” said Dirk Schulze-Makuch, a professor at the Technical University Berlin in Germany. “And we know that there is still a viable, thriving biosphere on our planet. So on Venus, it got too hot. On Mars, it got too cold.” But life, once it arises, seems to stubbornly hold on, surviving in harsh environs. “You could have potentially, in environmental niches, microbial life hanging on,” Dr. Schulze-Makuch said. For Mars, some scientists think it is possible that life persists today underground, in the rocks. But the subsurface of Venus is too hot, said Dr. Schulze-Makuch, who two decades ago scrutinized whether any parts of that planet were still habitable. Instead, he said, Venusian life could have moved up, to the clouds. Thirty miles up are short-sleeve temperatures — about 85 degrees Fahrenheit. Microbes in that part of the atmosphere would stay aloft at that altitude for several months, more than long enough to reproduce and maintain a viable population. But even the clouds are not a serene, benign place. They are filled with droplets of sulfuric acid and bathed in ultraviolet radiation from the sun. And it is dry, with only smidgens of water, an essential ingredient for life as we know it. Still, if that was the environment that Venus microbes had to survive in, it was possible that they had evolved to do just that. Phosphine is a simple molecule — a pyramid of three atoms of hydrogen attached to one phosphorus atom. But it takes considerable energy to push the atoms together, and conditions for such chemical reactions do not seem to exist in the atmosphere of Venus. Phosphine could be created in the heat and crushing pressure of the interior of Venus. Even with the lower amounts of phosphine that Dr. Greaves’s group now estimates, it would be unexpected and surprising if Venus’s volcanic eruptions turned out to be so violently voluminous that they spewed out enough phosphine to be detected where Dr. Greaves’s team said it was: in the clouds, more than 30 miles up. “We can’t easily rule in or out volcanism to explain this new, lower phosphine abundance,” said Paul Byrne, a professor of planetary science at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, who pointed to the many unknowns about the planet and its geological system. “It’s probably not volcanism. But we can’t say for sure.” On Earth, phosphine is produced by microbes that thrive without oxygen. It is found in our intestines, in the feces of badgers and penguins, and in some deep sea worms. In 2017, Dr. Greaves found indications of phosphine using the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope in Hawaii. Different molecules absorb and emit specific wavelengths of light, and these form a fingerprint that enables scientists to identify them from far away. The measurements found what scientists call an absorption line at a wavelength that corresponded to phosphine. They calculated that there were 20 parts per billion of phosphine in that part of Venus’s air. Follow-up observations in 2019 used the Atacama Large Millimeter Array, or ALMA, a radio telescope in Chile that consists of 66 antennas. Those again turned up the same dark line corresponding to phosphine, although at lower concentrations, about 10 parts per billion. But other scientists like Dr. Snellen did not find the analysis by the scientists, and the suggestions of a biological source, nearly as convincing. The ALMA data, which recorded the brightness of light from Venus over a range of wavelengths, contained many wiggles and the one corresponding to phosphine was not particularly larger than any of the others. Dr. Greaves and her colleagues used a technique called polynomial fitting to subtract out what they believed was noise and pull out the phosphine signal. The technique is common, but they also used a polynomial with an unusually large number of variables — 12. That, critics said, could generate a false signal — seeing something when there was nothing there. “If your signal is not stronger than your noise, then you just cannot succeed,” Dr. Snellen said. Other scientists contend that even if there was a signal, it was much more likely to come from sulfur dioxide, which absorbs light at nearly the same wavelength. Dr. Greaves argued that the critics did not understand the precautions taken to rule out “fake lines.” She said the specific shape of the absorption line was too narrow to match that of sulfur dioxide. As the scientists debated back and forth, there was an unexpected surprise in October: the ALMA observatory had provided incorrectly calibrated data to Dr. Greaves, and it contained spurious noise. For weeks, the Venus researchers waited in limbo. When the reprocessed ALMA data became available in November, the noisy wiggles around the phosphine absorption line were diminished, but there now also appeared to be less phosphine — about 1 part per billion over all, with places that might be as high as 5 parts per billion. “The line we’ve got now is much nicer looking,” Dr. Greaves said, even though it was not as pronounced. “But it is what it is. We now have a better result.” Bryan Butler, an astronomer at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Socorro, N.M., said he and others had looked at the same ALMA data, both the original and reprocessed versions, and failed to see any sign of phosphine. “They claim they still see it, and we still claim that it’s not there,” Dr. Butler said. “From a purely data scientist’s viewpoint, nobody is backing them up because nobody’s been able to reproduce their results.” A new paper by a team of astronomers, led by Victoria S. Meadows at the University of Washington, says that a more detailed model of Venus’s atmosphere developed in the 1990s shows that phosphine in the cloud layer would not even create an absorption line detectable from Earth. The team found that the phosphine would have to be some 15 miles higher in order to absorb the light. The research will be published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters. “What we’re showing is that the gas above basically doesn’t cool to the point that it can absorb until it gets to about 75 or 80 kilometers,” Dr. Meadows said. “Which is well above the cloud deck.” Other scientists delved into older observations of Venus to see whether there might be signs of phosphine hidden there. In 1978, a NASA spacecraft, Pioneer Venus, dropped four probes in the planet’s atmosphere. One of them even continued sending back data from the surface for more than an hour after impact. Going back through the Pioneer Venus data, Rakesh Mogul, a professor of chemistry at California State Polytechnic University-Pomona, spotted telltale signs for the element phosphorous in Venus’s clouds. “There is a chemical, most likely a gas, that contains phosphorus,” Dr. Mogul said. “The data does support the presence of phosphine. It’s not the highest amounts, but it’s there.” However, scientists looking at data from Venus Express, a European Space Agency spacecraft that orbited Venus from 2006 to 2014, came up empty for phosphine. So did astronomers — including Dr. Greaves and Dr. Sousa-Silva — who were trying to identify a different absorption line of phosphine in infrared observations from a NASA telescope in Hawaii. Dr. Greaves said the Venus Express and the infrared observations in Hawaii did not peer as deeply into the Venus atmosphere, and thus it should not be a surprise that they did not detect phosphine. The levels of phosphine, if it is there, could also be changing over time. That would make it more difficult to come up with definitive answers, much like the enduring mystery of methane on Mars. More than a decade ago, telescopes on Earth and an orbiting European spacecraft reported the presence of methane in the Martian air. On Earth, most methane is produced by living organisms, but it can also be produced in hydrothermal systems without any biology involved. But the methane readings were faint, and then subsequent observations failed to confirm it. Perhaps the readings were misinterpreted noise. When NASA’s Curiosity rover arrived on Mars in 2012, it carried an instrument that could measure minute amounts of methane. The scientists looked and looked — and measured none. But then, Curiosity did detect a burst of methane that persisted for weeks before dissipating. Later, it detected an even stronger outburst, but then it was gone again. Mars scientists remain at a loss as to the quick appearance — and disappearance — of the methane. The Venus phosphine debate will remain a stalemate until there are further observations. But the coronavirus pandemic has shut down ALMA as well as NASA’s Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy, or SOFIA, a telescope aboard a modified 747 that can study infrared light from high in Earth’s atmosphere. The balloon that would be part of Dr. Gilmore’s flagship Venus mission could resolve the uncertainties by directly collecting samples of air. It would be able to find not only the phosphine but also carbon-based molecules of any microbes. “We really need to be in the clouds,” Dr. Gilmore, of Wesleyan University, said, “because that is the habitat that is hypothesized to support life.” Planetary scientists are in the process of putting together their once-a-decade recommendations to NASA about their priorities. There are many intriguing places to study, and NASA usually undertakes only one costly flagship mission at a time. A flagship mission also takes longer to build and one for Venus would not be scheduled to launch until 2031 at the earliest. NASA is also considering a couple of smaller Venus missions for its Discovery program, a competition in which scientists propose missions that fit under a $500 million cost cap. One of them, DAVINCI+, would be a 21st century version of one of the Pioneer Venus probes. It would be able to look for phosphine, although just at one place and one-time. The second proposal, VERITAS, would send an orbiter that would produce high-resolution images of the surface. Although it does not include a phosphine-detecting instrument, one could be added. And at least one private company, Rocket Lab, wants to send a small probe to study Venus in the coming years. “Further observations are warranted,” said Dr. Butler of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory. “There’s nothing you can point to that says, ‘Oh, yeah, we absolutely see phosphine on Venus.’ But, you know, it’s tantalizing.” But he also said, “I would not bet my life savings that it’s not there.” Source link Orbem News #Cloudier #life #picture #Venus

[rjalker]

Unfortunately, Murderbot can't have it/its swag until Martha Wells stops being a coward and actually lets it tell anyone what its pronouns are. The word "pronouns" (or even just pronoun) literally doesn't appear anywhere in six books and two short stories. I know because I checked. Lol.

There's also the whole problem of biological essentialism in Martha Wells writing which is the only reason she decided to make Murderbot aroace and nonbinary, but that's a whole essay on its own.

Murderbot could be epic representation, but it's not. That would require Martha Wells actually caring about nonbinary people enough to actually represent us, but instead it's just biological essentialism and exorsexist stereotypes.

MURDERBOT VS. VENOM

[shtfandgo]

New Post has been published on SHTFandGO Rocket Stoves and Water Purification Equipment

New Post has been published on https://www.shtfandgo.com/bio-terrorist-attack-emergency-preparedness/

Bio Terrorist Attack/Emergency Preparedness

Martha McSally

U.S. Rep. Martha McSally (R-AZ), who chairs the subcommittee on emergency preparedness.

“The risk of a biological terrorist attack to America is an urgent and serious threat,” McSally said. “A bioattack could cause illness and even kill hundreds of thousands of people, overwhelm our public health capabilities, and create significant economic, societal and political consequences. Our nation’s capacity to prevent, respond to, and mitigate the impacts of biological terror incidents is a top national security priority. This hearing will highlight the threat of bioterrorism and ensure we’re taking the needed steps to prepare for and defend America against this threat.”

What can a family do to prepare for such an emergency?

Biological and Chemical weapons may be the most devastating and uncontrollable weapons ever rendered by man. Biological weapons are any man made weapon caused to disperse viruses, bacteria, or toxins derived from living organisms to cause death or disease within humans. Recent statistics claim that in the event of a future terrorist attack, the means in which the attack would be achieved would be through the use of bio-chemical weapons. This is not hard to believe, considering most bio-chemical agents can be created in ones own home with readily available materials. Due to the nature of biological and chemical weapons, the most widely predicted use for such weapons would be against the populace of a nation, where it may inflict massive fatalities and economic destruction. However this does not mean that a bio-chemical attack is unsurvivable, with proper knowledge and readiness it can very well be a crisis that one can overcome.

Don’t count on a vaccine being available. The flu vaccine that is currently used for seasonal flu will not work against any Chemical or Biological Attack. New strains of the virus require new vaccines, and these can take months or years to develop and even longer to produce and distribute on a large scale.

Stay informed. Should a pandemic of any kind flare up, the World Health Organization (WHO), the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and other governmental and non-governmental organizations will provide information on the spread of the disease, as well as updates on vaccines or other medications, tips for keeping yourself safe, and travel advisories. The WHO and CDC, as well as various national governments, already have websites in place to provide useful planning information to the public. Newspapers and TV and radio broadcasts will also help disseminate critical warnings and advice.

Get your yearly flu vaccine shot. While the current vaccine won’t protect you from every flu or any other “new” strains of the virus, it can help you stay healthy (by protecting you some flu virus strains), which may in turn help your body to fight the virus better if you do become infected.

Get a pneumonia vaccine shot. In past Chemical or Biological pandemics, many victims succumbed to secondary pneumonia infection. While the pneumonia vaccine cannot protect against all types of pneumonia, it can improve your chances of surviving the pandemic. The vaccine is especially recommended for people over the age of 65 or those who have chronic illnesses such as diabetes or asthma.

Use anti-viral medications if advised to do so by a health professional or by the government. Two antiviral medications, Tamiflu and Relenza, have shown the potential to effectively prevent and treat avian flu. These are both available only by prescription and will probably be effective only if taken before infection or very shortly afterward. It should be noted that additional testing is necessary to determine how effective these drugs really are against avian flu. Furthermore, mutations in the avian flu virus may render them ineffective in time.

Use an alcohol-based disinfectant. Since it’s probably not feasible to wash your hands every time you touch something that may carry the virus, you should carry an alcohol-based hand cleaner with you at all times. These cleaners come in a variety of forms, and can be used any time you need a quick touch-up. Keep in mind, however, that the use of these cleaners is not a substitute for thoroughly washing your hands, and they should only be used to supplement hand washing.

Avoid exposure to infected. Right now, the only documented way to become infected with avian influenza is by coming into contact with infected birds or poultry products, and these routes of infection will continue even if the virus mutates so that human-to-human transmission becomes the greatest threat. Avoid handling any thing the infected has already touched, and try to prevent domestic animals (such as house cats/dogs) from coming into contact with Infected. If you work in proximity the dead or living infected, for example–take precautions such as wearing gloves, respirators, and safety aprons. Cook all foods thoroughly, to 165 °F (74 °C) throughout, and exercise proper food-handling techniques, as you would to protect yourself from other threats such as salmonella. Proper cooking kills the most virus.

Exercise social distancing. The most effective way to prevent becoming infected is to avoid exposure to infected people. Unfortunately, it’s not possible to determine who is infected and who is not–by the time symptoms appear, a person is already contagious. Social distancing, deliberately limiting contact with people (especially large groups of people), is a reasonable precaution to take in the event of a pandemic.

Stay home from work. If you’re sick or if others at your workplace have become sick, you should stay away from your workplace even in the absence of a pandemic. Given that people will generally be infected and contagious before they exhibit symptoms, however, during a pandemic it’s essential to stay away from places, such as work, where you have a high probability of being exposed to an infected person.

Try to work from home. A pandemic can last for months or even years, and waves of intense local outbreaks can last for weeks, so it’s not like you can just take a few sick days to protect yourself from workplace infection. If possible, try to arrange a work-from-home situation. A surprising variety of jobs can now be accomplished remotely, and employers will likely be willing–or even required–to try this out if a pandemic strikes.

Keep children home from school. Any parent knows that kids pick up all kinds of bugs at school. Avoid public transportation. Buses, planes, boats, and trains place large numbers of people in close quarters. Public transportation is the ideal vehicle for widespread spread of infectious disease.

Stay away from public events. During a pandemic, governments may cancel public events, but even if they don’t, you should probably stay away from them. Any large gathering of people in close proximity creates a high-risk situation.

Wear a respirator. The most virus can be spread through the air, so in the event of a pandemic it’s a good idea to protect yourself from inhalation of the virus if you’re out in public. While surgical masks only prevent the wearer from spreading germs, respirators (which often look like surgical masks) protect the wearer from inhaling germs. You can buy respirators that are designed for one-time use, or you can buy reusable ones with replaceable filters. Use only respirators labeled as “NIOSH certified,” “N95,” “N99,” or “N100,” as these help protect against inhalation of very small particles. Respirators only provide protection when worn properly, so be sure to follow the instructions exactly–they should cover the nose, and there should be no gaps between the mask and the side of the face.

Wear medical gloves. Gloves can prevent germs from getting on your hands, where they can be absorbed directly through open cuts or spread to other parts of your body. Latex or nitrile medical gloves or heavy-duty rubber gloves can be used to protect the hands. The gloves should be removed if torn or damaged, and hands should be thoroughly washed after removal of gloves.

Protect your eyes. Some Illnesses can be spread if contaminated droplets (from a sneeze, or spit, for example) and then enter the eyes or mouth. Wear glasses or goggles to prevent this from occurring, and avoid touching your eyes or mouth with your hands or with potentially contaminated materials.

Dispose of potentially contaminated materials properly. Gloves, masks, tissues, and other potential bio-hazards should be handled carefully and disposed of properly. Place these materials in approved bio-hazard containers or seal them in clearly marked plastic bags.

Prepare for disruption of services. If a pandemic strikes, many of the basic services we take for granted, such as electricity, phone, and mass transit, may be disrupted temporarily. Widespread employee absenteeism and massive death tolls can shut down everything from the corner store to hospitals.

Keep cash on hand at all times as banks may close and ATMs may be out of service. Discuss emergency preparation with your family. Make a plan so that children will know what to do and where to go if you are incapacitated or killed, or if family members cannot communicate with each other.

           Emergency Water Filter System

Stock up on necessities. In the developed world, at least, food shortages and disruption of services will likely not last more than a week or two at a time. Still, it’s essential to be prepared for such an event. Store a two-week supply of water for everyone in your household. Keep at least 1 gallon (3.8 L) per person per day in clear plastic containers.

Store a two-week supply of food. Opt for non-perishable foods that don’t need to be cooked and that don’t require a lot of water to prepare.

Make sure you have an adequate supply of essential medications.

Seek medical attention at the onset of symptoms. The effectiveness of antiviral medications decreases as the illness progresses, so prompt medical treatment is imperative. If someone with whom you have had close contact becomes infected, be sure to seek medical care even if you do not display symptoms.

Anthrax

Organism accountable (Type): Bacillus anthracis (Bacteria)

Method of Infection: Inhalation, Intestinal, Cutaneous (through the skin)

Incubation Period

Inhalation: 1-60 days

Intestinal: 3-7 days

Cutaneous: 1-2 days

Lethality

Inhalation: 90-100% untreated, 30-50% treated (this percentage rises the longer it takes to receive antibiotics.)

Intestinal: 50% untreated, 10-15% treated

Cutaneous: 20% untreated.

Treatment and Vaccine: Antibiotics such as Ciprofloxacin and Doxycycline are available through the centers for disease control, the sooner one receives treatments the higher the chance that they will survive.

Inhalation: Initial Flu like symptoms such as; fever, headaches, abdominal pain, chest pain, vomiting, and coughing, but with no nasal congestion. Eventually it will lead up to severe respiratory problems, where the victims will die of asphyxiation from the lungs filling up with blood and fluids.

Intestinal: Begins with abdominal pain, bloody diarrhea, nausea, vomiting, fever, sore throat and a painful ulcer at the base of the tongue.

Cutaneous: At first red itchy bumps begin to form all over the body, then they collapse into painful ulcers which later scab over.

Cover your nose and mouth with fabric, wet fabric if possible, this will filter out a portion of the deadly spores.

Leave area of attack immediately.

Take shallow breaths or if possible, hold your breath until you leave the area of attack.

Limit your movement from a contaminated area to a secure area. Constant movement will spread the deadly spores. Once you reach a safe area remove your exposed clothing and place them in sealed plastic bags.

Take a cold (hot or warm water may open pores) shower as soon as possible with copious amounts of soap. Wash your eyes with a saline solution or just warm water.

Await antibiotic treatment. The key to survival is early antibiotic treatment.

Glanders

Organism Responsible (Type): Burkholderia maller (Bacteria)

Method of Infection: Inhalation, Cutaneous/Mucous membranes

Incubation Period

Inhalation: 10-15 days

Cutaneous/Mucous membrane: 1-5 days

Lethality: Nearly 100% within 1 month, without any treatment. Rapid medical attention would likely decrease the chances, however little or no medical data is available.

Treatment and Vaccine: No vaccine available. Antibiotics like, combined Amoxicillin and Clavulanate, Bactrim, Ceftazidime, or Tetracycline must be consumed for 50-150 days to effectively purge the toxin.

Inhalation: Begins with fevers, chills, sweating, headaches, body aches, chest pain and congestion. Later the neck glands begin to swell and pneumonia will develop. Painful open sores start to develop along the internal organs and mucous membranes. Dark pus-filled rashes may also form.

Cutaneous/Mucous membranes: Painful ulcers along the point of entry, and swollen lymph nodes start to form. Increased mucous production from the nose and mouth.

Cover your nose and mouth with fabric, wet fabric if possible, this will filter out a portion of the deadly spores.

Leave area of attack immediately.

Take shallow breaths or if possible, hold your breath until you leave the area of attack.

Wash skin with soap and water.

Run your eyes through warm running water for 10-15 minutes.

Await medical treatment from response teams. If you begin developing a fever, seek medical attention immediately.

Ricin

Organism Responsible (Type): Ricinuss communis (Plant derived toxin)

Method of Infection: Inhalation, Intestinal, Injection

Incubation Period

Inhalation/Intestinal/Injection: 2-8 hours

Lethality: With a standard high dose, lethality becomes a devastating 97%. Most victims will die within 24-72 hours after the initial symptoms.

Treatment and Vaccine: No treatment available except activated charcoal for ingested Ricin. Vaccine is experimental at the moment.

Inhalation: Sudden onset of fever, cough, chest pain, and nausea. Then one begins to feel joint pain and a shortness of breath. Respiratory problems begin to get more severe as time passes.

Ingestion/Injection: Abdominal pain, nausea, bloody diarrhea, and vomiting.

Cover your nose and mouth with fabric, wet fabric if possible, this will filter out a portion of the deadly spores.

Leave area of attack immediately.

Take shallow breaths or, if possible, hold your breath until you leave the area of attack.

Wash your body, clothes and contaminated surfaces with soap and water, or a mild bleach solution if you have become directly exposed.

Await instructions from medical response teams.

Gas Attacks

Gas attacks have been around since the 5th century BC, when they were used as chemical warfare.[1] Today, the release of toxic gas might also be the product of a terrorist attack or industrial accident.[2][3] While you should hope that you never have to experience this, knowing how to recognize and respond to such a threat could save your life.

Chlorine Gas

Be aware of any yellow-green gas floating around with the strong smell of bleach. Some soldiers in WWI described it as pepper and pineapple. If you are exposed to chlorine gas, you may have trouble breathing or seeing and will feel a burning sensation.

Move quickly into an area with clean air in order to minimize exposure to the gas.

If indoors, exit the building as quickly as possible.

If outdoors, move to the highest ground. Since chlorine gas is more dense than air, it will sink to the ground.

Grab a cotton pad or any fabric and soak it in urine. Hold it up to your nose as a mask. The Canadian military survived the first large-scale chlorine gas attack in WWI by using urine instead of water, under the presumption that the urine crystallizes the gas.

Remove all clothing that may have been exposed to the gas, being sure not to let the clothes touch your face or head. Cut the clothes off so that they don’t need to make additional contact with your skin as they’re peeled off. Seal the clothes in plastic bags.

Clean your body thoroughly with a lot of soap and water. Rinse your eyes with water if your vision is blurred or your eyes burn; if you wear contact lenses, throw them away. However, water mixed with Chlorine gas can turn into Hydrochloric acid, so be careful.

Call emergency services and wait for help to arrive.

Mustard Gas

Be aware of a usually colorless gas that smells like mustard, garlic, or onions–but note it doesn’t always have an odor. If you are exposed to mustard gas, you may notice the following symptoms but they may not appear until 2 to 24 hours after exposure:

redness and itching of skin, eventually changes to yellow blistering

irritation of eyes; if exposure is severe, there may be light sensitivity, severe pain, or temporary blindness

irritation of respiratory tract (runny nose, sneezing, hoarseness, bloody nose, sinus pain, shortness of breath, and cough)

Move from the area from where it was released onto higher ground, as mustard gas is heaver than air.

Remove all clothing that may have been exposed to the gas, being sure not to let the clothes touch your face or head. Cut the clothes off so that they don’t need to make additional contact with your skin as they’re peeled off. Seal the clothes in plastic bags.

Rinse any exposed parts of your body with plain water. Eyes should be flushed for 10-15 minutes. Don’t cover them with bandages; however, sunglasses or goggles are fine.

Call emergency services and wait for help to arrive.

Tips

Purchase and use “Self Powered Radios” AND “Self Powered Flashlights”. In anyemergency, especially one of this magnitude, batteries will be unavailable. Get this equipment AHEAD of time. These devices will keep you informed and you’ll also have reliable lighting as well. The latest of these designs will also charge your cell phones as well.

Listen to qualified medical responders at all times, even if their instructions contradict this article. This article MAY NOT be 100% accurate, and medical responders probably know best.

Sources

SHTFandGO.COM

[qqueenofhades]

hlo, I like your post 122117875674 and I wondered if you had a list of similar posts and/or a book debunking misconceptions of medieval history that I could read? I am making my way through your "medieval history" tag and enjoying it immensely, but I thought I'd ask in case you had favorites you wanted to point to

Ahahaha, this ask is actually super well timed because I just finished four days at the IMC (International Medieval Congress) running around to sessions and taking gigatons of notes, so I have a shit ton of new stuff to discuss. This year’s theme was “The Other,” so there was an especially strong representation of papers on medieval women, medieval queer history, and other such things.

Some highlights:

I am still hearteyes af over the fact that I got to hear Ruth Mazo Karras (an academic heroine of mine, and whose books I have extensively recommended for people curious about the medieval history of sexuality) give a paper, and I also bought her book, Sexuality in Medieval Europe (I should have got her to sign it for me, heh).  She is definitely still the starting point for reading on gender, sexuality, marriage, mlm, and other questions in a medieval context,(and apparently she is accepting a position at Trinity College in Dublin next year, so I will not-so-lowkey hope she needs a postdoc research fellow, because PICK MEEEE). But Dr. Rachel E. Moss at Oxford University is also working on questions of medieval homosociality (and medieval rape culture, which I found really fascinating) and gender/cultural/sexual social and family history of the medieval era, and she also has a blog.

Amy Ogden at the University of Virginia works on medieval gender representations in studies of saints (including arguably trans/female to male individuals who became monks and how they are treated in clerical writing – in short, these authors struggle to overcome gendered/binary essentialism, but there is also a recognized genre of texts around women becoming/posing as men in order to become closer to God, and this is a cause of concern but also admiration. In other words, arguably transgender medieval figures are not represented universally negatively, but as an aspiration and even an idealisation of holiness). Martha Newman at the University of Texas is also working on similar questions and the case of Joseph of Schanau, a 12th-century Cistercian monk who, after his death, was discovered to be biologically a woman. Prof. Newman has identified some similar themes in Joseph’s treatment by the clerical writer Engelhard of Langheim, and she has a book coming out next year on it. Furthermore, Blake Gutt at Cambridge is studying a medieval French vernacular romance, Le roman de Saint Fanuel, that seems to depict a female-to-male protagonist and saint, who becomes pregnant and gives birth to St. Anne, the mother of Mary (thus, as he put it, “grafting a transgender branch onto the Holy Family”) and does other really interesting work on the reading of medieval texts through transgendered and genderqueer lenses.

Natasha Hodgson, whose work I have also recommended before (and who I also got to see give a paper… this was basically nerd utopia, okay) works on gender and the crusades, including representation of crusading masculinities and women and the crusades. (She is also a person who I am just gonna sit over here and hope needs a postdoc researcher.) Charlotte Pickard works on power and patronage among medieval noblewomen in northern France (another research area/interest of mine), and Harriet Kersey works on the legal and landowning status of women (particularly heiresses) in England.

There was also another session on women and literacy in the Middle Ages, mostly focusing on letters received by medieval queens, and Danielle Park works specifically on crusaders’ wives and gave a paper on the correspondence between Bernard of Clairvaux and Queen Melisende of Jerusalem (for multiple generations in the 12th century, the inheritance/rule of the crusader kingdom in Jerusalem, in fact, passed through/was centered in women. Also, Bernard is probably the actual patron saint of mansplaining, but never mind.)

Anyway, not all of these researchers have published books (although many do), but it will at least point you in the direction of the work they’re doing, and the kind of questions that are being asked in the academic study of medieval history these days. (There were also a ton more amazing panels on otherness as constructed through race, religion, and so forth, that I could not get to because there are literally about 350 sessions at this thing over 4 days). There were also papers given on the shared chivalric culture between Christians and Muslims, the medieval literary genre of “Saracen romances,” and the other ways in which the West has interpreted that encounter and experience. And I can say with 100% more confidence after this conference, which I would have said with 100% confidence beforehand anyway, that anyone who wants to tell you The Medieval View on anything is a) wrong, and b) Wrong. The “medieval view” is ridiculously diverse; the era spans 1000 years (500-1500 is the generally agreed time period) over a vast geographic span and countless cultures and societies, and constitutes, in many cases, a far more nuanced, colorful, and challenging portrait of a flourishing intellectual life and dealing with topics than the “It Was Just The Way Things Were in the Dark Ages” crowd that I hate (uh, strongly dislike) so much would ever have you believe.

So anyway. Happy digging.

[insuranceaboutyou-blog]

Bacterial defence molecules target viral DNA

Bacteria can use specific protein-based strategies to defend individual cells against viruses. Evidence that bacterial small molecules also target viruses provides fresh insights into how bacteria thwart viral infection. 

To enjoy beautiful environments, we might need to defend ourselves against the resident pests, from midge flies on Scottish hillsides to mosquitoes in tropical jungles. If pests are numerous and diverse, a broad-spectrum defence strategy, such as spraying an insect repellent, can be best. Bacteria can also use general defences to combat their viral predators, in addition to having a plethora of more-specific defences that target particular viruses. Writing in Nature, Kronheim et al.1 report their analysis of an antiviral defence system that can protect more than one bacterial species. These findings could have major implications for our understanding of how bacteria and viruses interact.

Viruses that infect bacteria are known as bacteriophages, or just phages, and they have key roles in shaping bacterial evolution, population dynamics and physiology. Phages are considered to be the most abundant and diverse biological entities on Earth2, and it is essential to consider them when trying to gain a full understanding of the bacterial world. Yet despite their importance, there are huge gaps in our knowledge. In many cases, information about phage host ranges (the types of bacterium that a particular phage can infect) is limited. Certain aspects of how bacteria defend themselves against phage attack are also mysterious.

Most bacterial species make numerous and diverse metabolites (small-molecule products of metabolism) that can provide widespread protection against attack from fungi and other types of bacterium. By contrast, most of the well-understood anti-phage defences in bacteria involve proteins, which often offer protection only at the level of the individual cell that makes the protein, rather than providing protection for a bacterial population. One such common bacterial defence is modification of the microbial cell surface to prevent phage attachment. Another strategy, called the CRISPR–Cas defence system3, depends on an infected bacterium recognizing and capturing sequences from the viral genome and using these to prime a response that kills viruses containing a copy of the captured sequences. Some bacteria take the approach of adding methyl groups to their DNA and degrading all unmethylated, and therefore foreign, DNA. Many other fascinating examples of these ‘single-cell’ defence strategies exist5.  by  Martha R. J. Clokie

Broad-spectrum antiviral defence mechanisms in bacteria do occur but are less well known. For example, bacteria can shed vesicles from their outer membranes to ‘mop up’ phages6. The shortfall of examples in this category probably reflects the limited scope of previous research rather than a lack of such systems per se. Bacteria and phages have coevolved over approximately 3.9 billion years7, so it seems reasonable to speculate that nonspecific mechanisms might have a key role in bacterial defences. Arguably, such broad-based systems might have a longer evolutionary history than do the more-specific types of defence, and might have shaped the development of the subsequent targeted strategies.

[motherhoodapocalypse]

Notes on Labor, Maternity, and the Institution

March 9, 2011 by Jaleh Mansoor

I.

Pro labor activism will not begin to overcome the injustices and indignities it purports to redress until it addresses an irreducibly (for now) gendered form of labor: labor, as in, going into labor, giving birth (or adopting). While much recent discourse attempts to account for the industrial or “fordist” to post-industrial shift in forms of labor, patterns into which workers are set, employment, and unemployment (I am thinking of the Italian Autonomist Marxists and Virno, Negri and Hardt in particular), and while so many statistics tell us that more women are in the workforce than men (in the aftermath of the economic crisis of 2008 to the present), maternity is scotomized. Is this just another not-so-subtle form of gynophobia? A fear on the part of feminists of essentialism? A critique of the emphasis French Feminists of the 70s placed on maternity? An innocent oversight in recent iterations of Marxist analyses?

Artistic practices of the last decade highlight the remunerative system of a global service industry, one in which “art” takes its place fully embedded in–rather than at an interval of either autonomy or imminence–the fluid, continuous circulation of goods and services: Andrea Fraser’s Untitled (2002) in which Fraser had her gallery, Friedrich Petzel, arrange to have a collector purchase her sexual services for one night, Santiago Sierra’s 250 cm Line Tattooed on Six Paid People (1999) in which the artist paid six unemployed men in Old Havana, Cuba thirty dollars each to have a line tattooed across their back. Fraser’s work was characteristically “controversial” in the most rehearsed ways, and Sierra’s drew criticism for having permanently disfigured six human beings. The misprision and naivete of the critics spectacularized both, of course. Sierra’s retort involved a set of references to global economic conditions that the critics may not have liked to hear: “The tattoo is not the problem. The problem is the existence of social conditions that allow me to make this work. You could make this tattooed line a kilometer long, using thousands and thousands of willing people.”1 Both Fraser and Sierra point to the quasi-universality of what autonomist Marxist theorist Paolo Virno calls a “post-fordist” regime of “intellectual labor” to describe the shift from the assembly line to a wide range of labor in which traditional boundaries and borders no longer apply. Virno says, “By post-Fordism, I mean instead a set of characteristics that are related to the entire contemporary workforce, including fruit pickers and the poorest of immigrants.”2 This post-fordist regime is characterized by flexibility, deracination, and the shift from habituated work to contingency. Concomitantly, the post-fordist laborer does not take his or her place in the ranks of he masses, but flows into a multitude, differentiated by numerous factors, among them, post-coloniality, endless permutations at the level of gender, ethnicity, race.

For Virno and the autonomists, art and culture are no longer instantiations of exemplarity and exceptionality, as for Adorno, but rather “are the place in which praxis reflects on itself and results in self-representation.” In other words, the cultural work operates as a supplement, a parergonal addition to an already existing logic. It neither passively reflects nor openly resists. There is no vantage or “outside” from which art could dialectically reflect and resists, as Adorno would have it. Long since the work came off its pedestal and out of its frame, from the gallery to the street, the ostensibly non-site to the site as Robert Smithson put it, cultural production is too embedded in social and economic circulation to reflect let alone critique. Virno sees this limitation—the absence of an outside—as one shared with that of activism and other forms of tactical resistance: “The impasse that seizes the global movement comes from its inherent implication in the modes of production. Not from its estrangement or marginality, as some people think.”3 Ironically, the luxury of estrangement and marginalization enjoyed by the avant-garde and neo avant-garde is no longer available.And yet, it is “precisely because, rather than in spite, of this fact that it presents itself on the public scene as an ethical movement.”4 For if work puts life itself to work, dissolving boundaries between labor and leisure, rest and work, any action against it occupies the same fabric.

Among others, a problem that surfaces [too quietly and too politely, with a kind of ashamed and embarrassed reserve] is that of gender. The issue is not merely that Fraser puts her body at risk while Sierra remunerates others to place at risk, and in pain, their bodies, that corpus on which habeus corpus is founded. Needless to say, Sierra has organized projects around male prostitutes, such as that of 160 cm Line Tattooed on Four People, executed for the contemporary art museum in Salamanca, Spain, in 1999.

The problem is that the category of disembodied labor, or intellectual labor as Virno alternately calls it to describe its reliance on abstraction, scotomizes a form of irreducibly gendered embodied labor: labor. Now let the cries of essentialism! ring. Where is Julia Kristeva when you need her? Hélène Cixous telling us to allegorically write with our breast milk?5

Many feminist artists of the 1970s—in a historical moment that has both formed and been occluded by the artistic pratices of the last decade which I mention above–explicitly addressed the category of unremunerated labor: Martha Rosler’s Semiotics of the Kitchen (1973-4), for instance; Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman which explicitly draws an analogy between house-work and prostitution. Mary Kelly’s Post Partum Document (1979) elevates maternity to the level of analytical research, part of the putative archival impulse. Merle Laderman Ukeles tacitly situates domestic work in a category with the service industry understood historically, before all labor became maintenance labor, as “maintenance.”6 Ukeles’s differentiation of production and maintenance almost seems romantic in hindsight. As though there were creation/production rather than reproduction. And yet…..

Radical Marxist and feminist activist Silvia Federici, author of Genoa and the Anti Globalization Movement (2001) andPrecarious Labor: A Feminist Viewpoint (2008) argues against the gender neutrality of precarious labor theory, that of the Marxist autonomists Paolo Virno and Antonio Negri.7 Federici situates the commonality of rape and prostitution as well as violence against women within a systematized appropriation of female labor that operates as accumulation, much as accumulation did atavistically, long before the formation of commodity economies, or the development of general equivalence. Atavism as a repressed matrix for putative modernity—a modernity in which gender determination describes one of the greatest forms of uneven development—supports Ariella Azoulay’s claim, in The Civil Contract of Photography, that modernity did little to alter women’s positions in relation to discourse, the institution, and civil rights greater than the vote. Just as for Foucault the modern biopolitical regime compounds the old to achieve a more thorough penetration of everyday life, modernity permutes previous hegemonies “shaped and institutionalized over thousands of years.” In twentieth-century battles for the right to corporeal self-determination, to reproductive rights, for instance, “the body itself underwent a process of secularization, …this body came into the world without any of the normative defenses of citizenship to regulate it.”8 Under “Universal” rights, the contingencies of the body, deemed particular, did not become part of the discourse around citizenship, thus abandoning it to a renaturalized precariousness. Premised on a set of Enlightenment Universalist claims purportedly neutral to the particularities of corporeality, modernity failed to account for the specificities of women’s lives. Instead, the body, or “bare life” tacitly continues to be the way women are viewed, here commodified and sexually fetishized (neo-liberal “Western” democracies), there regulated within disciplinary, and often violent, parameters, as in Islamist cultures.9 These differences in hegemonic models of femininity may be theorized;10 the process of biological labor, however, slips the grasp of discourse, and, with it, policy. This last term would include international policies in which Enlightened self-interest are legitimated by the roles of women, of women’s bodies to be more precise.

Federici links her notion of atavistic forms of reserve—the accumulation of women’s labor—to colonial expropriation. She argues that the IMF, World Bank and other proxy institutions as engaging in a renewed cycle of primitive accumulation, by which everything held in common from water to seeds, to our genetic code become privatized in what amounts to a new round of enclosures.

Pop culture, as always a place where cultural articulations happen within normative parameters that may differ from “discourse,” presents the most direct expression of this that I have yet to come across. The high/low binary was a false product of fordism, one that no longer operates. When a famous male rapper says, “gonna get a child outta her,” he is speaking hegemony, not “marginalization.”

II.

Labor: If Virno is “correct,” in his analysis, there can be no “perspective” from which to think labor. From what fold within labor might I think it? I’ve worked as an hourly wage earner, a mother, and a salaried “professional.” One of these three terms is incongruous; discourse has hit a false note. My description of something about which I should know a great deal, my own history as a laborer, has already committed a rather egregious crime according to the law of discourse. As De Man has famously said, “abuse of language is, of course, itself the name of a trope: catachresis. …something monstrous lurks in the most innocent of catachreses: when one speaks of the legs of a table or the face of a mountain, catachresis is already turning into prosopopeia and one begins to perceive a world of potential ghosts and monsters.” What thwarted terms, or monsters, are barred from an account of my accounts? Discourse be damned, or in this case, personified; I am using “I.”

At 13, 22 years ago, I was what Siegfred Kracauer might have referred to as “a little shop girl,” working at a T shirt store for 3.75 an hour, selling 20 dollar Joy Division T-shirts and 5 dollar Grateful Dead stickers to other, older, teenagers [with allowances or their own jobs]. My mom had to accompany me to the first day to make good on PA labor laws. 7 hours of my labor/boredom would have bought me one of the T-shirts I sold. I’ve worked, like so many artists and academics, as a museum guard, 17 years ago, for 7/hr, or 10.50/hr for working past the 8-hour shift. Needless to say, none of these jobs had benefits. I’ve written articles for prominent scholarly journals where the pay may roughly be calculated at 3 cents/word, 1 percent of what a glossy magazine would pay for non-scholarly work. Let’s not get distracted by the amount of time that scholarship requires: travel; archives; dozens if not hundreds of books read; writing; and editing. But that “let’s not” is a sliding glass door of sorts: it articulates the injustice of unremunerated work, but it also stands as a reminder that the pleasure [and/or displeasure] of some work is irreducible to money, acts as an irreducible quality. But isn’t everything held in the matrix of currency [fiction]? All process, a term inclusive of work, skilled or unskilled, is irreducible to the monetary value assigned it. A bibliography supportive of that last statement alone would entail a foray into a discursive terrain bordered by Vico, Marx, Weber, The Frankfurt School, Foucault, Post Structuralism and practically every title in Verso, Stanford’s Crossing the Meridian and the University of Minnesota press, and the work of countless others. Irreducible labor. Or as Thomas Keenan has recently put it, the irreducible “jelly” of work that remains after the abstractions of exchange value is “accounted.”11

I’ve worked for 19 thousand a year as a gallery receptionist 14 years ago; for nothing, in monetary terms, writing a proto-book as a PhD candidate to produce a dissertation, partially about labor and art in reconstruction era Italy; for a stipend of 18 thousand per annum teaching college students courses that full [celebrity] professors were also teaching; for one glorious year at 55+ thousand a year as a “term” assistant professor at a prominent women’s college affiliated with an ivy league university; and some ten k (+) less a year as a tenure track assistant professor at a state institution. The latter ostensibly includes compensation for teaching Art History to undergraduates and studio practitioners, directing advises toward theirs MAs or MFAs, and coming to countless faculty meetings. I can retain that salaried position if I produce enough of those journal articles, at 3 cents a word, so let us include the latter, now that I HAVE a tenure track position, in that before-taxes salary. And I get benefits. I am by all [ac]counts VERY lucky and yet the contradictions in the remunerative system are too many to count. I am not compensated in any way—including in University evaluations and other assorted forms of self-regulative beaurocracy—for the 5 or so, sometimes more, hour (+)-long studio visits I conduct every week. An aside on the studio visit: it is by far more intense than an equal measure of time, the hour, of teaching, advising, or any other form of labor but one. And that latter, around which I skirt, is a term from which I steal to work. “Robbing peter to pay Paul.” Wait, I thought I was the one getting paid?

And I “speak” from a vantage of extreme privilege, of multiple privileges, of all privileges but one, to which I stand in a relation of excess and lack. That excess and lack revolves a particular embodied form of labor, a production that is a non productive labor unlike the non accumulative labor of which the autonomists speak…

The discursively impossible: I have given birth through the labor process to a child. “Let’s not,” in the interest of not getting caught in the sliding glass door, “count” pregnancy, or post pardum recovery or breast-feeding. Let’s try to isolate labor in order to attempt to, tautologically, quantify it, as the issue of labor conventionally requires us to do. That labor was 32 hours long. Not one of those 32 hours was commensurable with any other hour. Time contracted, not necessarily in rhythm with those of my womb (hystery in Greek), time dilated, not necessarily in tandem with my cervix. It was working parallel to me; no, those organs were working in tension against me. Dissonance. I have never been capable of thinking my body’s labor in what I will call, despite the need to shore it up by the labor of discursive legitimation, my experiential time. This time shrank and stretched like hot taffy. I would need the proper name “Deleuze” here, and The Logic of Sense, to get the discursive sanction I need to support this last claim. That would take a little labor, labor time I could punch in as academics will no doubt do some time soon, or rather do now however elliptically in requisite annual self reports. But those 32 child labor hours defy break down into 32 units of 60 minutes, 1920 units of 60 seconds, etc. This form of labor slips the grip of discourse; even metaphor.

Catachresis is not monstrous enough to operate as a medium for the articulation of this [non] event. There was, however, a quantifyable cost for the hospital ante-chamber, the delivery room, the “recovery” room, and the first examination of the infant. And there were more complex “costs;” I was “let go” of the second year of my position as a term assistant professor at a prominent women’s college associated with an ivy-league university. The Chair responsible for my firing, I mean, liberation, is a “feminist,” and a mother of two. She thought it would be “for the best,” for me to have time off. I never asked for time off. This did allow her to win a point or two for her annual docket; I was hired back on the adjunct salary of 3 thousand per class the next semester. This allowed the department to save 50 thousand dollars in 2007-2008, and the cost of benefits. Did I mention that the semester after giving birth, after having been “let go,” I still made it to campus to attend all advising sessions? 50K in savings that the institution no doubt never even registered, my loss. But who cares, I had a healthy beautiful bright baby!….. to love AND support. BTW, diapers are 20/box. Currently, I calculate that I make about 12 dollars and fifty cents an hour given that I work at least sixty hours a week. Ergo, a box of diapers is equal to over an hour and a half of work. I go through many of these per month still. At the time of being fired/demoted/whatever, I lived in NYC, where diapers cost more than 20/box. And I made, about 4.16 and hour. A box of diapers cost 5 hours of work. But like many women, and unlike many others, I had assistance, that of a partner and that of a parent. Let’s not address the emotional and psychological cost of the latter; let’s please not address the price dignity paid. Oops, prosopopeia. Does dignity have agency? I hope the reader knows by now that I find calculations to be absurd. “How do I love Thee, [dear child, dear student, dear reader,] Let me count the ways….” I am, however, serious in the following query: how do others less lucky than I make it in the global service industry (in which education and so called higher education now takes it place, now that Professors at State schools are classified as mid level managers?) How do women who have babies and work make it? They pay to work; they pay with their children. Sacrificial economies.

Now again, let’s not get caught in that door by even discussing the 24/7 labor of parenting. The pleasures of this last, and the agonies, are irreducible. But, again, isn’t everything? So: Suspended. Bracketed, a priori. A discursive delimitation or repression? It is in such poor taste to discuss this: bad form. Just a note, daycare is 10 thousand dollars per anum. A baby sitter charges 10-15 an hour. I over identify with the sitter and guiltily–as though I even had the luxury of being a fat cat liberal riddled with guilt–pay said sitter 20. But no worries: I don’t believe in baby-sitting. I have no life outside of the working and the parenting, no leisure. I mistrust the latter. I dislike being appeased. No compensatory blah blah for me. I do, however, want the hours taken away from my child by studio visits and the like to be remunerated HER. She keeps track of when I am missing. I can’t keep count. Guilty interstitial pleasure: Facebook, whom (uh oh) I can credit for the honor [snarkery free] of labor on the present piece.

III.

Like most institutions of its kind, the University at which I have a tenure track position, for which I am reminded to be eternally thankful—and I AM—does not have maternity leave. Were I to choose to have a second child (this statement requires an exegesis into the word “choice”), I would take sick-leave, as though giving-birth were an illness; as though [biological] labor were a subtraction from the forward march of time, of production and productivity, of progress. Sick-leave, time taken while ill ad ostensibly unproductive. Sick leave, the concept if not the necessary practice, is sick. More perverse still is the idea that populating the next generation, however selfish this may or may not be in many way, however narcissistic or not, is not a form of non-productivity. The double negative in this last should raise some flags in the space of textual analysis, labor analysis, gender analysis. An aside: I never felt less ill than during pregnancy, childbirth, and so called recovery. The use of the word biology will deliver the present text, again, to the accusation of essentialism. I will add that it goes without saying that maternity need not be biological. But it is still labor. A colleague recently adopted a child. Said colleague travelled to a distant continent to retrieve the child with whom she had spent a year establishing an intimate, if painfully digitally mediated, long term relationship. She took family medical (sick) leave. It, apparently, is against an ethics of work to be preoccupied with a new baby.

Moreover, were I to have a second child, my tenure clock would stop if I took that odiously named family/sick leave. My opportunity to make a case for my own worth via tenure review would be deferred. Of course, were we unionized, there may be a fighting chance, were our esteemed male colleagues to support us, for maternity leave, or, more unthinkably, paid maternity leave and no punitive tenure clock [beyond the normative punitive parameters]. “We” are our worst obstacle. As a prominent political science academic and feminist recently pointed out to me, one of the greatest obstacles to unionization or any form of collectivization, for artists and academics, is that they think of themselves as “professionals” and associate unions with blue color workers. Were they to peek around, they would note that these workers are practically extinct. We are all in an endless lateral plane of service. As one student told me, “my parents pay your salary,” to which I responded, “like the cleaning lady.” Note that there is no “liberal elitism” lurking here. We are all, to some extent, unless we work for JPMorgan Chase or some hedge fund, the cleaning lady (many nannies, like many cabbies, have a string of PhDs. My republican aunt once told me with delight that her cleaning lady had worked with my dissertation adviser when she, “the cleaning lady” was in grad school). Anyway, the student just nodded. I told him he should work to get his parents’ money’s worth.

Professors and academics like to think that they transcend as they were believed to do in a previous disciplinary socio-cultural regime. Jackson Pollock thought that too. He was an easy puppet in Cold War politics.  Teaching undergrads in a core curriculum of an ivy league university that shores its superiority and identity around said core curriculum of old master literature, art and music—in other words, utterly dependent on a labor pool of graduate students—I participated in the effort to unionize. The threats were not subtle. The University’s counter argument was that students study; they don’t labor.

And women work, they don’t labor. There is no language.

1 Marc Spiegler. “When Human Beings are the Canvas.” Art News. June, 2003.

2 Interview with Paolo Virno. Branden W. Joseph, , Alessia Ricciardi trans. Grey Room No. 21 (Fall 2005): 26-37.

3 Ibid. P. 35.

4 Ibid.

5 The Laugh of Medusa.

6 For an excellent panoramic overview of these practices, see Helen Molesworth. “House Work and Art Work.” October No. 92 (Spring 2000).

7 Reprinted in Occupy Everything January 2011. http://occupyeverything.com/news/precarious-labor-a-feminist-viewpoint/

8 Ariella Azoulay. The Civil Contract Of Photography. New York: Zone Books, 2008. P. 226.

9 Ibid. For a discussion of the blind spot of sexuality and embodiment in Enlightenment thinking, see Jacques Lacan’s “seminal” “Kant with Sade.” Critique (April, 1963).

10 “Nothing, we are told by Western Hegemonic discourse, so differentiates “us” from “them” as the lack of freedom for women in Islamist societies. It needs to be noted, however, that far from silencing the power of women, Islamist regimes highlight it, acknowledging through severe and violent restrictions that what women do is crucial to political and social order. The argument justifying the strict codes of conduct, based on respect for women (in contrast to the Western commodification of women and their disparagement as sex objects), has a dialectical dynamic that can lead to its own undoing.” Susan Buck-Morss. Thinking Past Terror. P. 12. London: Verso, 2003. P. 12.

11 Thomas Keenan. “The Point is to (Ex) Change It: Reading ‘Capital’ Rhetorically.” Fables of Responsibility. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2007.

[rjalker]

People lying about how the trans representation in The Murderbot Diaries because they want you to read it, but don't want to admit that it's all just nonbinary robot stereotypes and casual transphobia because the author still equates sex to gender the same way she did when she wrote her last series...

Like, yes. Please do read the murderbot diaries. They're fun it's funny it made me cry. But it is filled with casual transphobia and the author is still equating sex with gender. But people instead of addressing this so that maybe the author can improve, we'll just lie and say that the protagonist had gender affirming surgery when that is the exact opposite of what fucking happened.

it’s annoying that people will straight up lie about content because they’re afraid people won’t watch it

people kept trying to ague the Deadpool movie didn’t have transphobia when people tried to give trigger warnings because they wanted people to see it more than they wanted trans people to not be triggered by the jokes

people keep insisting that examples sexist stuff in bnha hasn’t happened because they don’t want people to avoid watching the most popular and well advertised anime of the decade

everyone dogpiled on poc and trans people for saying b99 was problematic and told them they were objectively wrong

some people legit don’t notice the problems, but when it’s pointed out to you, you can’t put your favorite piece of media over people knowing they might be triggered by something or over discussions about fiction that upholds the patriarchy and the american police state