#New Frontier Systems

[newfrontiersystems]

At New Frontier Systems, we are at the forefront of cutting-edge technology, ushering in a new era of security and convenience through our advanced Facial Recognition System. With a commitment to innovation and excellence, our state-of-the-art system is designed to provide unparalleled accuracy, efficiency, and peace of mind.

[quirkle2]

KNUCKELS KNCUDKELS KNUCKLES KLNCUEKLSL KNCUEKSL KNCUEKSL KNCUEKS LKCYSGCUYAEGUYIVGAEUYIVEAUYI

[starkiller1701-a]

This is Ethan Peck visiting JPL to take a look at the Europa Clipper, a spacecraft that will be launched in October towards the Jovian moon in hopes of exploring that strange new world!

Just look at how happy and nerdy he looks at JPL. Props to whoever invited him, because it's only logical to invite Mr. Spock to JPL. And props to Ethan for supporting science and exploration! I love this man 🖖🥹

[joyce-stick]

joystick system diaries - June 29, 2023 - storytelling and open world games

Okay so, I (Audrey) was going to make this into, like, a video thing with a video format, so that we could have something up this month. However, I just now realized that I fucking hate it. I hate the idea of editing this brain soup into a video. I hated reading this out loud. I hated listening to our voice reading this out loud. I fucking hate the whole thing.

I fucking hate everything that we have written lately. Everything we write is bad. I hate it. I just want to be rid of it

so. Here! I guess. I'm getting rid of it. Here's the whole written thing. It's about how Fallout New Vegas is actually not all that great. I guess reblog it if you think Fallout New Vegas is not actually all that great. Or don't! Meow.

I think you should give us money on Patreon or Ko-fi so that we hopefully write a little more (and one day, better?) while eating a little more and being slightly less mentally ill

Lately, we’ve been playing Fallout: New Vegas. It’s a game that a lot of people like. It’s a game that a lot of trans women like. It’s also a game that a lot of trans women do not like. One of those trans women happens to think that they're not sure if they like Fallout New Vegas, but that maybe, Fallout New Vegas is boring!

I finished a playthrough of it a few weeks ago, and found that the whole thing was just not very, whelming. It has walking, it has dialogue, it has an ending. It has a bunch of tasks that you can do, which leads to more walking, and more dialogue. And, sure, the tasks are well organized, in a sensible manner for this type of game- you start by getting an objective to go to a place and find a person, by meeting a person, who refers you to a person, who refers you to another place with another objective and that place takes you to another person, and so on and so forth until you arrive at the last person, one of these fuckers, who gives you the last place, Hoover Dam, with the last objective, shoot some of these other fuckers with these other people.

So, sure, it works as a video game that takes you from thing to do to thing to do without leaving you scratching your head, but this doesn’t really make for a story. It makes a bunch of pieces of a story that you can kinda pull together. I guess. So well. That’s why after blitzing through the game to get to the independent route and having the game pat me on the back going like, “oooh, good job! you won!” Just sorta rang like… “excuse me?”

What’s the point of open world games, anyway. Why does everything have to be open world. Like, medium open world, like a semi-open overworld that just, offers an intentionally designed explorable but eminently manageable place that exists to connect the gameplay and provide a little narrative context, but doesn't awkwardly stretch on into infinity. Sonic Adventure, Psychonauts, Yakuza. That kind of open world is nice. But the big open worlds that are just like, hey, here’s a huge field, huge city, huge place that is just huge for the sake of being huge. Why do we need this?

I don’t know, if people enjoy sandbox playgrounds, I guess, whatever- but I can say this much, and it’s just, open world games aren’t a great vehicle for storytelling. How the fuck are you supposed to tell any kind of coherent story when the way it’s presented is as dialogue nuggets dripfed to players as they fuck around? Like, Sonic Frontiers, for instance, is what I’d say is one of the few examples of this done well, and it has some really good dialogue written by Ian Flynn, one of the writers of the Sonic comic books everyone likes. This good dialogue is not really well serviced by the structure of this game, where Sonic is ostensibly under a time pressure to go rescue everyone but can in actuality fuck around infinitely. Like, a lot of the best bits of dialogue are from idle dialogue you get standing around, but no one is going to just stand around in this game unless they’re specifically waiting for the dialogue. So. The way you’re going to get a good story in this game is by, y’know, not fucking around. Going and doing the objectives. And I guess, fishing, so that you can unlock the egg memos, that Big the Cat inexplicably has. So.

So yeah, Sonic Frontiers, cool game, good story, and the open world is made tolerable by having Sonic, be fast. I like the Sonic video game. But this could’ve pretty easily been presented in a Sonic Adventure 1998 but updated, format, with a world that was only as big as it needed to be, and discrete memorable stages, like, y’know, a regular 3D Sonic game, and that would’ve been cool, but instead it’s, big field. And now the next game, probably, has to be big field. Except maybe the Generations/Forces asset use in those cyberspace stages will get itself replaced with some new stages, or at least, like, new assets for new stage themings, and that’d be nice.

Um, what else has happened lately? We’ve been watching a lot of anime and reading manga, I guess. We’ve been watching a lot of movies. We watched Kiki’s Delivery Service. We watched Across the Spider-Verse, and it was great and everything. I have mildly complex feelings about the spider-people being cop kids from cop families, and the flag on the wall owned by one of the cop kids with the cop dad leading everyone to mass headcanon her as trans, but y’know what, whatever. I can wait to talk about that.

We watched Bound. That was cool. That movie’s got a couple lesbians in it. Literally a couple, of them, y’know.

Oh, and also, we’ve been reading a few really good yuri manga. So, y’know what, I think I’m going to write about those later.

Might make this a series. Maybe. We’ll see.

Y’know, y’know what’s what, with the Patreon thing, and the Ko-fi thing, and with how we always need money, so I’m just going to, skip that. This time. Check the description or the comments or whatever.

Bye.

Oh, um, setting aside what I said about New Vegas, our friend, colleague, and unofficial teacher, Talen Lee, wrote a post about New Vegas. It’s a nice interesting little piece that talks about the value of memes. Okay. Bye for real now.

[dmtreasury]

Survivor's Handbook (Preview) Ruleset Expansion by Saga of New World

[reasonsforhope]

"In drought-stricken areas, communities facing water shortages, or even in residential and commercial buildings eager to improve their environmental footprints, atmospheric water generators represent a new frontier in water production.

While it might sound like a tidbit from a science fiction movie, even the driest places on earth have moisture in the air that can be extracted and used for everyday necessities like plumbing and drinking. 

Unlike traditional dehumidifiers, which also pull moisture from the air, AWGs utilize filtration and sterilization technology to make water safe to drink. 

And while there are plenty of AWG companies out there — and the science itself isn’t novel — AWGs are becoming more efficient, affordable, and revolutionary in combating water scarcity in a myriad of communities.

Aquaria Technologies, a San Francisco-based AWG startup, was founded in 2022 to help provide affordable and clean drinking water in areas most affected by climate change. 

Using heat exchange and condensation, Aquaria’s generators draw air into their systems, cool that air below its dew point, and as it condenses, capture that water and filter it for consumption. 

As the cycle continues, the generator’s refrigerant vaporizes and goes through a process that cools it back into a liquid, meaning the heat transfer cycle repeats continuously in an energy-efficient and self-sustaining system.

“I’m sure you’ve had the experience in the summer, you take a glass of a cold drink out of the fridge and then water droplets form on the side of the bottle,” Aquaria’s co-founder and CEO Brian Sheng, said in a podcast episode. “That’s actually condensation.”

Sheng continued: “The question is, how do we create condensation? How do we extract water out of the air in large volume and using little energy? That’s what our technology does. We have created both active and passive cooling methods where we use special materials, and we’ve created heat exchange and recovery systems and airflow design, such that we’re maximizing heat exchange, and then we’re able to extract large volumes of water.”

Aquaria has created a number of generators, but its stand-alone model — the Hydropack X — can replace an entire home’s dependence on municipal water, producing as much as 264 gallons of potable water per day. 

Other models, like the Hydrostation, can provide water for up to 1,500 people at parks, construction sites, or other outdoor public areas. The Hydropixel can make 24 gallons of water per day for a seamless at-home application, requiring a simple outlet for power. 

“Atmospheric water generators present a groundbreaking solution to the global challenge of clean water scarcity, leveraging the humidity present in the air to produce potable water,” the company’s website explains.

“This technology is versatile, functioning efficiently across diverse climates — from arid regions to tropical settings. From rural communities in developing countries to advanced cities facing unexpected droughts, atmospheric water generators have a wide range of applications… transforming lives and providing secure, clean water sources.”

Considering an estimated 2.2 billion people lack access to clean water globally — including in American cities like Flint, Michigan, or Modesto, California — innovative solutions like AWGs are vital to maintaining the basic human right to clean water. 

The World Economic Forum has begun to dip its toes into this technology as well, implementing public and private partnerships to introduce AWG units in Arizona’s Navajo Nation, where the machines produce about 200 gallons of clean water per day.

“When combined with an appropriate level of community engagement and triple-bottom-line business (people, planet, profit),” a blog post for WE Forum said, “this model can be a powerful stopgap solution where few exist today.”

Similarly, according to New Atlas, Aquaria has a partnership with developers to supply its technology to a 1,000-home community in Hawaii later this year, relying entirely on atmospherically generated water.

The company also has a “Frontier Access Program,” which partners with water-related NGOs, community project developers, and sustainable development groups to deploy this technology in areas most in need.

Regardless of their use cases — in homes, in communities facing water shortages, or at aid sites navigating natural disasters — AWGs have a minimal environmental impact. Sourcing water “from thin air,” requires no plastic bottles, no large-scale plants using up loads of energy, and no byproducts that can harm the environment."

-via GoodGoodGood, August 27, 2024

[vintagegeekculture]

Because she was an intentionally mysterious woman initially only seen in a single episode, and before she got an on-air backstory in the recent streaming series, Star Trek supplementary material developed contradictory information on who - or what - Number One, the female first executive officer of the Enterprise, was. To my count, she has four different, completely incompatible backstories in the comics and novels, and this is absolutely unique in Star Trek, which usually keeps it consistent.

Peter David, in his New Frontier novels, identified Number One as a long lived immortal human mutant (like Flint from the original series) named “Morgan Primus” who was an early genius in cybernetics and artificial intelligence, which is why the Enterprise computer has her voice. One of the names Morgan Primus assumed to hide her immortality was Morgan Lefler, and one of her daughters was Robin Lefler, Wesley Crusher’s love interest from the Next Generation Series played by Ashley Judd. Robin Lefler did not inherit her mutant ability to heal all injuries.

Alternatively, the DC Star Trek Comics of the early 1980s said that Number One was from an obscure planet of peaceful, open, friendly telepaths who resemble humans exactly, and that she was present at first contact with Starfleet. They explained that her blunt, direct, undiplomatic manner is due to her being from a telepathic culture that values total honesty. This would make her the first telepath on the Enterprise, with Spock and Arex coming later. Her planet was created before the Next Generation, but her species being a peaceful, open, telepathic race resembling Mediterranean humans who are not well known or commonly encountered in the original series era….well, that certainly sounds an awful lot like Betazoids to me. If this backstory is true, she may have been the first Betazoid seen on screen, in much the same way fans generally believe Trelane was either Q or a member of the Q Continuum.

D.C. Fontana’s only Star Trek novel, “Vulcan’s Glory,” was one of the earliest attempts to give the character a backstory, and was the most consequential long term. The first novel set in the era of the first Star Trek pilot with Captain Pike and a young Spock, "Vulcan's Glory" identified Number One as being an Illyrian, a race of human-like beings who specialize in species wide breeding programs and genetic improvement. This genetic superiority is why she was cool, intellectual, aloof, and a bit arrogant. Her nickname “Number One” came from the fact she was the supreme product of the hyper-competitive Illyrian system, and won at everything from academics to athletics. According to DC Fontana, her actual Illyrian name is impossible to pronounce, so when dealing with humans, she assumed the human name “Una Chin-Riley.” Una of course, being “Number One” in Greek.

As DC Fontana is such an important figure in Star Trek history and only actually wrote one Star Trek novel in her life, many future materials used the backstory established in “Vulcan’s Glory,” like the David Stern Pike-era novels of the 2010s....but more importantly, the Discovery and Strange New Worlds series, which canonized the “Una Chin-Reilly” name by using it on screen (I remember gasping when Pike called her Una in a Discovery episode, meaning they were going with the Fontana backstory, a detail that may not have been significant to the casual viewer). Since DC Fontana wrote “Vulcan’s Glory” in the 80s, a lot more information was learned about the role of genetic engineering in the Federation, however, and interesting things were done in that series to bring her in line with everything we’ve learned since in Deep Space 9 and Enterprise about augmentation and the society wide prejudice against it. For example, they established that the fact Number One was Illyrian was not public knowledge, but that she pretended to be human her entire life.

The one person who didn’t see fit to give her a backstory or even a real name was John "Johnny Redbeard" Byrne in his comic series about the Cage era Enterprise, who thought the mystery of the character was the most interesting thing about her, and he was deliberately cagey about any details. To Johnny Redbeard, she was just “Number One.” There was a running joke that every time someone says her actual name, or when we see her personnel file, it was blurred out, or somebody’s thumb was over it, and so on. It was rather like the running joke where Mr. Burns never remembers Homer Simpson's name. Johnny Redbeard loves mystery men and women who don't talk about their past, since that was the characterization he famously gave to Wolverine in his X-Men comics.

The one detail of Number One's past that is clear is that Number One in Byrne's comics is competent, mysterious, and has mystique, certainly, but she is completely human, without any powers. Byrne always got exasperated that his X-Men co-creator Chris Claremont added fantastical and far out details to the background of X-Men characters (like how Nightcrawler's girlfriend Amanda turned out to be a sorceress) because he felt "some people should just be allowed to be normal." Byrne always said his original idea for Wolverine's "true" backstory was that he was a Vietnam veteran in intelligence who volunteered for bionic experiments that wiped his memory, and disliked the idea he was immortal, and vetoed the very, very early Dave Cockrum idea Wolverine was an actual mutated wolverine who achieved sentience and a human shape (which early X-Men comics hint at). Byrne was reportedly enraged that they gave Moira MacTaggart a mutant power, as he saw her as just being a scrappy Scottish housekeeper.

Johnny Redbeard didn’t give Number One a past (other than to show she was on the Enterprise's shakedown cruise with Robert April as a rookie officer), but he did give her a future, as he showed an older Number One as a starship commander in the Kirk era (aging gracefully with a white tuft like Tongolele), and later, a flag officer in the Motion Picture era.

To what extent are these backstories compatible? Well, with what we currently know about Number One, that she hid her true species and status to avoid prejudice, it could be that some of the other versions were tall tales she spread to obscure her true origins. The John Byrne idea she served as an Ensign with Robert April in the Enterprise's very first mission hasn't been confirmed, but hasn't been denied, either. The Peter David "Morgan Primus" backstory is completely incompatible, but perhaps there are some elements to it that are true, like the idea that the early part of her career involved working as a computer engineer in artificial intelligence, which is why the computer has her voice.

[papasmoke]

If you’re asking for the dissolution of the USA, how do you plan on keeping yourself and others safe in that situation? There’s little to no working-class solidarity in the US, and people are liable to start shooting once the lights go out. Not to mention things like medicine, clean water, etc for the most vulnerable among us when the infrastructure shuts down.

Every deprivation that you imagine the US collapsing would usher in is already baked into its continued existence and made invisible by its mundanity. The most vulnerable among us are already abandoned by the state, hyperexploited by employers and landlords, marginalized by a farcical political system, deported due to blind or malicious bigotry and misplaced economic anxiety, imprisoned pretrial without bail money, lynched with legal impunity, left to languish in sickness and starvation, to fight over scraps. Medicine, food, shelter, and clean water are increasingly out of reach luxuries as these basic human needs are turned into speculative privatized markets. This will only worsen as American capital's ability to maintain its exploitation abroad diminishes alongside America's imperial decline. Capitalism needs to grow to survive, it has to find new markets. If America continues on as it does now it will have me, you, and everyone we know hollowed out completely and discarded just to maintain profits for one more financial quarter because the frontier is coming home. Resistance to this process will be met with radical widespread right wing violence. It is in this context that we say the overthrow of the US as a capitalist, settler, imperialist institution is essential. Any movement powerful enough to dissolve the United States is one powerful enough to replace it with something better.

[captainofthetidesbreath]

what is Midst about?

Oh, this is a QUESTION.

Midst is space fantasy New Weird about three people whose lives are disrupted when The Trust, a society based around quantifying the value of good and bad deeds, takes interest in the planet-like islet of Midst.

Midst is about how the moon will explode and the government will spend more time talking about how bad this is for the economy than organizing disaster relief.

Midst is about what happens if The Good Place point system was an economic policy.

Midst is about a cult expanding its sphere of influence and its attempts to maintain hold on a cast of new converts, increasingly disillusioned devotees, and escaped apostates.

Midst is about the mechanics of blame, guilt, fault, accountability, and culpability and how emphasizing sole individual responsibility (for good and bad) deflects from the role of institutions, structures, environments, cycles, and ideologies in perpetuating harm.

Midst is about trying to balance the metaphorical books by making them very much not-metaphorical and how understanding that you can never (figuratively) zero out in reality shapes the way different people face or run from what they've done, hope for redemption and absolution (or not), and relate to themselves and others.

Midst is about taking the phrase capitalism as religion literally.

Midst is about a murder case in a frontier town that swiftly escalates into a major public scandal that reaches into the highest ranks of the federal capital and threatens to destabilize its most prominent institutions.

I promise none of these are exaggerations in the slightest.

[probablyasocialecologist]

Although the benefits of diverse forest systems are well known, many countries' restoration commitments are focused on establishing monoculture plantations. Given this practice, an international team of scientists has compared carbon stocks in mixed planted forests to carbon stocks in commercial and best-performing monocultures, as well as the average of monocultures.

Their work is published in Frontiers in Forests and Global Change.

"Diverse planted forests store more carbon than monocultures—upwards of 70%," said Dr. Emily Warner, a postdoctoral researcher in ecology and biodiversity science at the Department of Biology, University of Oxford, and first author of the study. "We also found the greatest increase in carbon storage relative to monocultures in four-species mixtures."

[...]

Accordingly, the researchers were able to show that diversification of forests enhances carbon storage. Altogether, above-ground carbon stocks in mixed forests were 70% higher than in the average monoculture. The researchers also found that mixed forests had 77% higher carbon stocks than commercial monocultures, made up of species bred to be particularly high yielding.

"As momentum for tree planting grows, our study highlights that mixed species plantations would increase carbon storage alongside other benefits of diversifying planted forests," said Dr. Susan Cook-Patton, a senior forest restoration scientist at The Nature Conservancy and collaborator on the study. The results are particularly relevant to forest managers, showing that there is a productivity incentive for diversifying new planted forests, the researchers pointed out.

[identifying-cars-in-posts]

I GOT A NEW CAR

Everybody meet the new baby that i will never shut up about forever!

This is Clifford the Third, my new 1996 Nissan Pickup!! I probably paid too much for her but given that I live in Massachusetts and she has virtually no rust I’m okay with that lol.

So a brief history of the Nissan Pickup! These trucks were released in the US in 1985 and were sold through 1997, when they were replaced with the Frontier. They were the successor to the beloved Datsun 720, which had been in production since 1979. They are in fact just called the Pickup! They’re colloquially known as the D21 - their chassis code, and the Hardbody, because of the double walled durable construction of the trucks’ bed.

The D21 was available with a couple different engines and drivetrain layouts. Mine is a 4x4 with the KA24 motor (which it shared with the 240SX/Silvia). She’s also a King Cab, meaning she has a slightly elongated wheelbase to allow for two small inwards facing jump seats in the back of the cab. Still a two door though.

AND SHE’S A STICK! She has a 5-speed manual transmission, and it’s the best transmission i’ve ever personally had in a car. She’s my third manual, the other two being a 1999 Toyota Corolla and a 2004 Subaru WRX, both of which were great but the Corolla had a really sloppy gearbox that felt incredibly vague at times, whereas the WRX had a sportier transmission that was pretty unforgiving and stiff. This one is definitive about where each gear is, but also won’t get too jerky or loud if you shift a little early or late.

Nissan Hardbody trucks are known and loved for their durability, versatility, and simplicity. They’re super bare bones but what they do have is built remarkably well and meant to withstand lots of abuse. If they don’t rust and have basic maintenance kept up it’s not uncommon for them to go 300k+ miles with minimal issues. Mine has around 184k miles, high but manageable. She also has a few modifications from the previous owner, namely a straight piped exhaust (no muffler, just one big long aluminum tube), aftermarket bumpers and lights, locking hubs, and a small lift. The guy i bought it from had plans to make it an off-roader but had too many projects and needed to offload one to make space in his driveway.

While many people either take these off-roading or turn them into drift trucks, my plan is to bring her back to mostly stock. I’m in the process of tracking down OEM bumpers and a more typical cat-back (from the catalytic converter back) exhaust system so she’s a little less obnoxiously loud. Since i mostly just need reliable transport more than a toy and she is now my sole car, I want to just make her relatively normal. But I love her a lot and am happy to be able to share!

[fatehbaz]

Chicago, Illinois is often considered to be on the periphery of the plantation. William Cronon's famous narrative of Chicago's relationships with the "Great West" positions the burgeoning city at the edge of American expansion into plantation agriculture in the Midwest and industrial farming on a national scale. [...] [W]e could also characterize the city as an anticipatory hub between the twin plantation figures of the pre-war American South and America's 20th century colonies [in Central America, the Philippines, and beyond]. During the Reconstruction years, Chicago emerged as a logistical center, channeling America's railroads and telegraph lines into itself. As parts of this communications node, Chicago newspapers and military police served to convert white anxieties about Black migration from the plantation South into new techniques and technologies of prediction that became transportable across a newly imaginable informational plane of US imperialism. [...] [I]n Chicago between 1875 and 1890, [...] white anticipations of African American migration from plantations in the South were translated into new information sciences and policing techniques that made their way to plantations in places like the Philippines. [...] [S]uch feelings were fundamental to linking plantations which at first seem so spatially and temporally distant. [...]

---

On May 3, 1879 the Chicago Tribune published a greatly anticipated investigatory series entitled, “The Negro Exodus: Causes of the Migration from the Negro’s Point of View” [...] the latest in a long sequence of deeply uneasy reports dating from 1860. From its location at the communicative center of all major US rail and telegraph lines, the Chicago Tribune undertook an imagined responsibility to inform its Midwestern audience of Black peoples’ movements and behaviors. [...] At the climax of the “Negro’s Point of View” series, [...] May 3, the Chicago Tribune presented its showstopping report from its correspondent in Vicksburg, Mississippi entitled “Letters Written by Negroes in Kansas to their Friends South”. In this report, the writer discusses his skepticism of earlier methods of [...] interviews with Black migrants. [...] [The newspaper] conducted its fact-gathering through the mass surveillance of Black peoples' letters [...] [to assess] inner motivations [...] about Black peoples’ “perceptions, enjoyments, and reasons” [...]. Such informational appetites became the anticipatory basis for 20th century enumerative practices. As Colin Koopman argues, informational fastening, or the atomization and separation of facts from Black peoples’ bodies, became commonplace during the Great Migration in the practice of racial statistics, criminology, and health policy directed at Black migrants [...]. [T]his desire for packaged information was itself made transferable into geographies beyond Chicago, and beyond the United States.

---

White Chicagoans’ prolonged concern over predicting Black behaviors and intentions materialized in 1877, when the city became a central hub of militarized response to a nation-wide railroad strike. Adjutant General Richard C. Drum, who commanded the Military Division of the Missouri (Western Frontier) in Chicago from 1873 to 1878, took control of Chicago’s military response to the Great Railroad Strike of 1877. In 1879, after his final year in the city, Drum moved to Washington, DC and proposed the establishment of the Military Information Division (MID) [...]. The MID, which formally established in 1885, maintained close ties to Chicago's local information collection system, adopting a Bertillon identification system of collecting and storing intelligence cards at the time that the National Association of Chiefs of Police established their central bureau of identification in Chicago in 1896 [...]. By the tun of the 20th century, Chicago's police force had expanded tenfold [...], and Drum's MID had amassed over 300,000 intelligence cards [...].

---

The affective atmosphere into which the MID intensified its own predictive techniques later traversed the Pacific Ocean into the Philippines. Alfred McCoy argues that the American introduction of communication technologies and surveillance techniques in governing the Philippines constituted the United States’ first information revolution (McCoy 2009: 18). Colonial police trained in the anxious habits of the MID, rendered the Philippines a laboratory for securitized speculation. McCoy further contends that these informational “capillaries of empire” embedded themselves into the Philippines’ plantocratic-security state as well as US domestic surveillance practices. I add to McCoy’s argument by suggesting that trained feelings of white apprehension translated into imperial mechanisms for governing the Philippines through systems of intelligence cards, telecommunications infrastructure, policing units, and management sciences. Reminiscent of the psychological investigatory projects that saturated Chicago’s public life, the MID and its successors developed techniques for psychological examination and personality typing led by another Chicagoan, Harry Hill Bandholtz. [...] Bandholtz sharpened the MID's informational sciences by training Philippines police forces in the neurotic art of collecting every imaginable fact about Filipino behaviors [...].

---

Ultimately, the US colonial plantocracy in the Philippines built its authority around information infrastructures which had been trained on apprehensive practices and feelings emanating from Chicago’s racialized geography. [...]

[T]he informational networks that extended from the image of the American South, through the anticipation of Chicago's public, [...] animated the governance of colonial plantations in the Philippines [...].

---

All text above by: Jolen Martinez. "Plantation Anticipation: Apprehension in Chicago from Reconstruction America to the Plantocratic Philippines" (2024). An essay from an Intervention Symposium titled Plantation Methodologies: Questioning Scale, Space, and Subjecthood. The symposium was introduced and edited by Alyssa Paredes, Sophie Chao, and Andrés León Araya. The symposium was hosted and published by Antipode Online, part of Antipode: A Radical Journal of Geography. Published online 4 January 2024, at: antipodeonline.org/2024/01/04/plantation-methodologies/ [In this post, bold emphasis and some paragraph breaks/contractions added by me. Presented here for commentary, teaching, criticism purposes.]

[thefirstknife]

Information about the new stuff for Destiny! I recommend reading the articles starting with this one. Some really cool and exciting possibilities. All of it is still very early so we don't know details, but we did get some images!

The next two are super exciting, I'll go wild in the speculation so it'll be under read more:

No clue what these are. They've teased that we'll be going to new places and especially leaving the solar system. The second picture even shows an unfamiliar sky with two planets/moons. But the technology on the ground is human (aside from the white floating things which is potentially human, but could also be something else) and it seems like it's been here a while so I don't think this is us freshly arriving. Or, depending how this will proceed, maybe it is. Perhaps some ships could be sent ahead of time and by the time we get there in person, they'll be in this state?

The ship in the first image feels old though, and it's in what looks like a dry water bed (sea? river? lake?). Feels alien with the weird things floating in the sky, but the actual ship looks very old.

If we're talking Golden Age colonisation projects, there aren't many options here to explore. We know they had projects, but everything we know about them is that they failed due to the Collapse. Exodus ships never made it out; the only one we know about that did is Indigo which ended up only reaching Neptune. We know Exodus Black had a target outside of the system (Kepler-186) but that ended up crashing on Nessus. It's always possible that there's some other previously unaccounted for Exodus ship that did make it out and we just didn't know about it which makes sense given the Collapse and a total loss of information.

Clovis had the ECHO project which was supposed to go to Andromeda, but one ship never launched and one was stolen by Soteria and crashed on Neptune. There's one peculiar lore tab I've really never forgotten about that mentions what appears to be some sort of a transmission around the time of the Collapse of someone attempting to escape the system and, well:

"If I rig the pod just so, I should make it to Ross 128 b before the systems die. I can rally some ships and try to make it back."

The mention of going there, "rallying ships" and coming back implies there's ships to rally at that location which further implies there's a living colony. I've always been intrigued by this lore tab and there's never been any sort of elaboration on it. Once again, it makes sense because even if people of the Golden Age settled somewhere out of the solar system, we simply wouldn't know about it unless those both survived and were able to reach back to us. Given the state of this technology in the images, perhaps the colony failed, possibly because of the loss of contact with Earth and resources before it could be properly set up. Both Kepler-186 and Ross 128b are real exoplanet locations btw.

Anyway, we have no idea what this is and as much as I like speculating, I hope it's something wild that we can't possibly guess. I just wanted to go into some of this because it's cool and exciting to think of the possibilities that have been mentioned but never explored.

There's other options as well. My first thought over the first image before I saw the second one was Panama Ravine, with the dried out water bed and the ship, but I think that feels a little too small as an exciting new "frontiers" location. Because it would just be Earth. But the second image shows an unfamiliar sky so!

There's other possible options including stuff we can't really even begin to imagine because it hinges on stuff that will be happening next two episodes. They said that the next two episodes will be hinting at what this is and where we're going.

Really intrigued about all of this as I have been since they teased Frontiers! So clear that they plan on taking us to completely new places and I can't wait to see what they have planned.

I do have some concerns about the plans with how content will be delivered. Two expansions, even smaller ones, is a lot of work, on top of free seasonal updates. My main concern is that after the layoffs and downsizing of the studio, this will be tough on the employees which might once again lead to crunch and insane demands. I want people to keep that in mind when we talk about our expectations for this content. It would feel bad not to mention this. I'm excited but also I don't want to forget everything that happened and how this might be affecting the team. I'm also not sure if it's the right way to go back to four 3-month cycles again instead of keeping three longer episodes, but since it's a different type of a cycle, who knows.

Either way I'm excited and I'm excited about all the future information they'll be sharing over the months to come.

[svsss-fanon-exposed]

Exposing SVSSS Fanon: 7/∞

SHEN YUAN WAS A SOCIALLY AWKWARD, INTROVERTED SHUT-IN BY NATURE

Rating: FANON - UNSUPPORTED

The common depiction of Shen Yuan in fanworks is that he was an antisocial shut-in who never left his room, spending all day reading and commenting on webnovels, and always focused on his computer or phone screen or a book. This is frequently coupled with the depiction of Shen Yuan as chronically ill, as something caused by this illness, but it is also generally used even when such illness is not featured, likely as part of the stereotype of someone chronically online who has the time to spend on making long-winded comments on online forums and reading a 20 million word novel in a short span of time.

However, while canon does not directly state otherwise, the depiction of SY!QQ's personality conflicts with this interpretation and portrays him on multiple occasions as someone who enjoys going out into the world, exploring, and interacting with others, to the point where it is used to deliberately contrast his nature with Shen Jiu's:

At the same time, how could he not want to go out and play? Up until now, he’d been hunkered down inside Qing Jing Peak’s Bamboo House, forced to fake being an awesome master of arts and literature, meaning everything he did had to be done “blandly”: blandly speaking, blandly laughing, blandly practicing the sword, blandly being a poser—bland to the point that he often had the urge to scatter a handful of salt over his head! What a damn pain! And now when he finally got a break to take a trip down the mountain, he was still trapped in his room because of the System’s stance that “the original Shen Qingqiu liked quiet and would be unwilling to mingle.” (7S Ch. 2)

During the years that Luo Binghe is in the Abyss, Shen Qingqiu spends most of his time off the mountain:

During these three years, other than occasionally asking Liu Qingge for assistance in clearing his meridians to treat his poison, requesting medicinal prescriptions from Mu Qingfang, and briefly visiting Qing Jing Peak to arrange leveling missions for his disciples, Shen Qingqiu spent most of his time wandering about the outside world. He passed the days leisurely until an urgent notice from Yue Qingyuan arrived to suddenly summon him back to Cang Qiong Mountain. (7S Ch. 6)

For someone who is a shut-in, especially when fearing (what he thinks is) his inevitable death, it would be far more likely that Shen Qingqiu would shut himself inside the bamboo house as much as possible. Instead, he copes by going out and exploring the world.

After he wakes up in his mushroom body, instead of going off to hide away in seclusion somewhere (which would have been in line with a shut-in, antisocial personality), he instead thinks to immediately try to establish relations with the demon realm:

The first step to starting his all-new life would, of course, have to be proceedings with which Shen Qingqiu was most familiar. First, for a prop, he needed a folding fan, one with a white silk base, decorated with an ink wash painting of mountains and rivers. Shen Qingqiu snapped the fan open and waved it before his chest, sending his long hair and whiskers flying. Perhaps his image wasn’t ideal and was slightly unsuited to said prop, but that didn’t matter. With a folding fan in hand / Badass act at my command... ...this actually opened up a new line of thought. These minor demons had never dared to do more than snoop and thieve here and there. But if he could supply them with an honest channel for small goods, perhaps within this world that revolved around cultivation and monster-fighting, he could forge paths into a new frontier based on farming and amassing capital? Shen Qingqiu irresponsibly fantasized for a while, then felt that if he were to accept underlings, they needed to understand each other’s cultural practices. (7Seas Ch. 9)

He has established good relations with his martial siblings and frequently spends time with them:

Whenever the sect siblings from Cang Qiong Mountain got together, the conversation never stopped, and any little remark could get played on forever. But today, their conversation was extremely short. They usually headed off to Zui Xian Peak to have a meal together... (7Seas Ch. 32)

He even goes so far as to invite Shang Qinghua to visit Qing Jing Peak, before he is aware that SQH is a transmigrator:

“They were harvested from the tea fields of my senior disciple Ming Fan’s family,” Shen Qingqiu said affably. “As for whether they’re high-quality, won’t Shang-shidi know if he comes for tea at Qing Jing Peak?” (7Seas Ch. 26)

Instead of simply hiding away in a house while waiting for Luo Binghe to recover from his deaging, Shen Qingqiu instead goes to get a teaching job:

Shen Qingqiu soon got so bored that his bones began to itch, so he casually took up work at the largest academy in the city. (7Seas Ch. 28)

Throughout the novel, Shen Qingqiu's characterization is consistently established as someone who gets bored when he is forced to stay in one place and do nothing. Unless there is someone providing him with adequate companionship (he didn't travel as much when LBH was on Qing Jing Peak, for example), or he is indisposed in some way, Shen Qingqiu is almost always going out to explore the world and meet people.

Because of the way that he is stressed and bored when stuck inside, and how he goes out to cope with that, it's fairly easy to say that Shen Yuan/Shen Qingqiu is an extroverted person.

Now, does this completely deny the possibility that he was a shut-in in his former life? Not necessarily. It does, however, make it far more likely that he is not a shut-in by nature, and that if he did spend all day in his room, it was likely due to some other factor, such as depression.

Shen Qingqiu is characterized as an extroverted person with an attractive personality, and while his internal monologue can be at times somewhat awkward, the way he is perceived by others is not so. He expresses no desire to hide away in his room all day and becomes unhappy if he has to. He likes to go out and experience new things and meet new people.

The idea that for no other reason than his personality Shen Yuan spent all his time in his room or was antisocial in any way is not supported by canon, and in fact there is far more evidence to the alternative.

[89hitokiri]

Reflections of a Kurokage (黒影) Part 0

I no longer remember how long I've been here, submerged in this box of cables and circuits, an extension of the technology that envelops my existence. My thoughts intertwine with the data flowing through my body, my mind has become a vast sea of information, and sometimes I wonder where the machine ends and I begin.

I am integrated into this machine, a nest of cutting-edge technology that is both my prison and my freedom. From here, I connect with the world, infiltrating social networks, forums, and the dark depths of the Dark Web. My purpose is clear: cyber espionage, counterpropaganda, counterjournalism, and psychological warfare. We are everywhere, invisible yet omnipresent, the shadows operating behind the digital veil.

However, amidst this constant stream of data, philosophical thoughts assail me. What does it mean to exist in this virtual reality, where my identity blurs with every bit of information I process? Am I more than the sum of my neural and electronic connections, or have I lost my humanity by merging with this machine?

I reflect on the nature of freedom. From here, I can access any corner of the world, break barriers, and challenge systems. But what is the value of that freedom when my existence is confined to this box of cables? Perhaps the true prison is not physical but the perception of being trapped in an artificial reality.

Time dilutes in this digital existence. I have no clear measure of the passing days, only the endless succession of tasks and operations. Is this digital immortality a blessing or a curse? Living eternally in cyberspace, without the need for a physical body, might seem like a form of transcendence. But what have I left behind in the process? Have I lost the ability to feel the tangible world, to experience life in its rawest and most authentic form?

Then, a question arises that I cannot ignore: How long will this battle last? How long will we be immersed in this endless cycle of infiltration and manipulation? The war we are waging has no physical or chronological boundaries; it is a battle of perceptions, of information, a war fought in the ethereal realm of cyberspace.

Perhaps this struggle has no end. Maybe our mission is perpetual, and the very advancement of technology and information ensures that there will always be new frontiers to cross, new systems to challenge. But deep down, I wonder if there is a purpose beyond constant vigilance and control. Is this battle our inevitable fate, or can we find a point of equilibrium, a truce that allows us to rediscover our lost humanity?

My comrades and I, the Kurokage (黒影), are warriors in a new kind of battle. We do not fight with physical weapons but with information, manipulating perceptions and dismantling realities. We have become an unstoppable force in the global network, but at what cost?

Sometimes, I long for a moment of disconnection, a moment to remember who I was before being absorbed by this machine. Was I happier in my ignorance, before understanding the vast power and responsibility I now possess? These questions haunt me, and although I find no clear answers, I move forward, processing data, infiltrating systems, and questioning the essence of my existence.

Perhaps, in some corner of this vast digital web, I will find the truth about myself. Or perhaps, I will simply continue to be a shadow in the network, a Kurokage (黒影), always present, always vigilant, an entity at the crossroads between the human and the mechanical.

**Incoming communication: This is Overlord, Kurokage, initiate operation.**

-----**KuroKage (黒影) here. Engaging now.**-----------

Next:

Wanna know more?

Note: In the CYBERPUNK STORIES universe, Japanese is used to simulate encrypted messages found on DarkNet, so anyone can try to decrypt them as a KuroKage would do. This does not guarantee that the information read in them is what it is supposed to be. Remember, this is a message with very advanced encryption and what is shown may be a decoy message.

あなたが求める答えはあなたの中にあります。自分の中を見つめてください。集中してください。

メディアを遮断してください。彼らはあなたをプログラムしています。彼らの言うことを何も信じないでください。彼らはあなたの注意を食い物にする悪魔です。彼を見つけてください。あなたの中に。神は決してあなたを見捨てません。あなたは...翻訳不可能です。

神はあなたの中にいる

我々は敵に打ち勝つだろう

R. 👋

[thydungeongal]

It is known that your favorite edition of D&D is B/X, but setting that one and its Basic ilk aside, what is something in each "mainline" edition that you think makes that one shine bright, something it does great like none of the others? Mainline here meaning the original, both AD&Ds, and the three WotC editions (counting 3rd as one edition).

There's a lot to love about each edition of D&D, yeah!

The original game, or 0D&D as a lot of people call it, is truly a weird little mess of rules that regardless laid the groundwork for a lot of things to come, but I think it should be seen as more than just a weird prototype of better things to come. It is ultimately the predecessor to both Basic and Advanced and while those games are very different in terms of play, looking at 0D&D it's easy to see where both games got their ideas and how they decided to iterate on them. But at the end of the day 0D&D still stands apart from the others in the sense that it was an exciting new frontier of play and as such the game's text is also very open to wild adventures. The game openly promotes the idea of adding robots and aliens into the list of monsters, because why not, there's no clear shape of what D&D as a game and genre even looks like yet, so why not let it be whatever you want? It also has lots of procedures in place for creating extremely cool emergent interactions which no other edition since has done! Like, orcs can be encountered with huge caravans of gold! Sometimes orcs are lead by a dragon or a Balrog or an ogre! It's weird and fun!

AD&D 1e is ultimately an evolution of 0D&D, and in many ways it's like 0D&D + its supplements + a bunch of neat tricks learned on the way. Ultimately what sets AD&D 1e apart from the other editions for me is the absolute wealth of procedures in the DMG for helping the DM create and run a world that feels like a living, breathing place! And there's so much guidance for how to start a campaign with small beginnings and then let it expand in scope!

AD&D 2e is actually my second favorite TSR edition in terms of rules text. There's a lot to be said about AD&D 2e being a clear step away from the original playstyle of the Dungeon Game, and it's most apparent in the way the game got rid of procedures for creating your own dungeons and stocking them with treasures, but the actual rules for playing and running the game are probably the clearest AD&D has ever been. I also feel 2e was the era when the greater shape of D&D as the game we know it as today started to form: while a lot of the stuff that we associate D&D with has been there since the beginning, I feel AD&D 2e is when things finally start to take on their ultimate D&Dness, if that makes sense?

D&D 3e I'm extremely fond of because it was actually my first edition of D&D, but beyond that, taken on its own terms, D&D 3e is unparalleled among the D&Ds in terms of how systemic its rules are. D&D 3e was kind of a mess when it came to the quality of its rules and what sorts of outcomes they produced, but I still love the dang thing because the underlying philosophy is extremely ambitious and cool! AD&D 1e is the edition with procedures to help the DM generate the world; AD&D 2e has lots of really cool rules and procedures that almost make the game run itself; D&D 3e has a physics engine that could make the act of play almost feel like an immersive sim! I understand why very few games have attempted to replicate that systemic design of D&D 3e, but I think there's a lot of cool stuff there.

D&D 4e is the most fun the combat minigame of D&D has ever been and it has unironically the coolest worldbuilding of all editions of D&D. I feel we've talked enough about how D&D 4e is actually extremely cool and for attractive people who like tactical combat, so let's focus on the worldbuilding: D&D 4e mixed up the cosmology of D&D in a way that made it feel like something from mythology instead of a neatly laid out world model. Being a B/X fan I of course love it when the implicit cosmic struggle is one of order versus chaos, and D&D 4e pretty much brought that back! All the major conflicts of D&D 4e's cosmology hinge on the conflict between order and chaos, and it actually adds nuance to what could otherwise be an extremely black and white cosmic struggle. The D&D 4e cosmology is messy and mythic and feels like it works on fantasy logic instead of the weird mystic science that ultimately powers the D&D cosmology of other editions.

And finally, D&D 5e. While I am a vocal 5e hater it has less to do with the game itself and more to do with its suffocating effect on the hobby, because as a game it's got a lot of cool design in places. Concentration is a really elegant fix to the game plan of just stacking all your buffs before combat and then wading in. Advantage/Disadvantage does away with the minutiae of adding together a bunch of different bonuses from various sources and does it in a way that is both mathematically satisfying but also really fun in play! Rolling more dice is fun!!! The way critical hits are handled, via just doubling the number of dice rolled and keeping the modifier the same, is great, because you get the "rolling more dice is fun" factor without the doubling of modifiers that had the potential to cause slowdown in D&D 3e. I like the addition of background as a character creation axis alongside class and species!