#but they are people.

[wolfsbaneandthistle]

Enith first developed space travel around 500,000 years prior to the modern period. This early era of space travel, called the First Enlightenment period, is survived almost solely through it's planetary colonists.

The Corldaxians of Enlightenment period had one goal- to send as many people as possible to nearby habitable planets. Ostensibly, the purpose of this was to set up an extensive empire with infinite resources so that Enlightenment period civilization could exist, as it was, forever. The real motivation behind this was the fear of what they assumed to be an exponentially growing population, and of the internal collapse of the state.

Enlightenment Corldaxians sent out hundreds of colonial trolleys with thousands of people aboard, all to colonize planets their ships wouldn't reach for hundreds of thousands of years. The majority of ships used cryofreeze to keep their colonists alive for the journey, with a good bit of variation on the specifics. All of them, with the exception of the earliest ships, packed the materials needed to make a wormhole generator.

Enith had set up a wormole gate on the edge of it's system towards the end of the Enlightenment period, but it had the knowledge and ability to create them halfway through shipping the colonists. The plan was to have the colonists construct their own wormholes upon reaching the edge of their planet's solar system; then land, set up their colony, and contact Enith through a micro-wormhole com set. The ships that did not have the materials for this on their leaving had another ship sent following them.

Many of the ships did not make it to their destinations. But some did.

The surviving colonists woke up, set up their wormholes, and landed on their planets. Many encountered barely habitable planets that needed thorough terraforming to support a decent population. Some encountered planets that weren't habitable at all, or were habitable but didn't have any native life, and a rare few encountered planets with life already on it. A few of those were even met by sapient life.

The colonists were lucky that, when the first of them contacted Enith, it was once again going through a period of space exploration. The First Enlightenment had collapsed not long after the last colonists left, and Enith had been in and out of dark ages ever since. The wormhole generator, luckily, saw a fair amount of upkeep every couple of millennia and was able to be repaired. Then duplicated, then updated as Enith entered it's modern period.

When Enith was contacted by it's long-lost colonist, it quickly sent more colonists and supplies. The problem was... well... it had been 500,000 years.

The colonists were met by people who barely looked like them, who rarely spoke the same language as them, and who often chastised them for dressing or acting how they always have. They were similar, but that was all that could be said. Enith had changed and the colonists had not. Their way of life was dead and gone, and they were the only memory.

First contact had to have been funny though. I mean imagine you went to an exoplanet to colonize it and when Earth sent some more guys for you and opposite Homo Heidelbergensis pops out with a grey alien behind it.

Hilarious.

A colony ship contacts Enith every couple of decades now. Bitriem's colony was the first to encounter native sapients, and they contacted Enith around one and a half thousand years ago. Zornxia and Atiske were two other early contacts, and the most recent contact was with the Umblans.

The people who were sent to colonize Umblan are still alive in the setting of The Little Bird. Diaf is probably in contact with a few of them. But while they made contact with Enith, while they have access to the full network of planets Enith has made, they're still alone. Isolated, because everything they once knew is gone.

Humans had the same strategy.

Enith is on the Sagittarius branch, though the cluster of systems the Enithian and Teth Tias governments inhabit is just about the closet you can get to Orion.

Hán was on one of the first generations of ships to be sent towards Sagittarius. Cereza's two times great grandparents were shipped out later than her.

Earth didn't send them out with wormhole tech. No one has heard from Earth since waking up.

What would you do if everything you ever knew was just gone? Unreachable, unknowable for the rest of your life. Not just what was your life, but all of Earth. Of humanity.

What would you do if you were stranded, alone, quite possibly the last humans in the universe?

[bitchfitch]

writing advice for characters with a missing eye: dear God does losing an eyes function fuck up your neck. Ever since mine crapped out I've been slowly and unconsciously shifting towards holding my head at an angle to put the good eye closer to the center. and human necks. are not meant to accommodate that sorta thing.

[hydrattan]

I was feeling agitated and artblocked yesterday so I decided to give my brain a rest by watching TV and then the next thing I knew these were in front of me

[westiec]

You've gotta love Jews more than you hate Nazis.

You've gotta love trans folks more than you hate TERFs.

You've gotta love your unhoused neighbors more than you hate the billionaires.

You've gotta love immigrants more than you hate ICE.

You've gotta love queer kids more than you hate christian fundamentalists.

You've gotta love fat people more than you hate the diet industry.

You've gotta love disabled people more than you hate the insurance companies.

You've gotta love your fellow humans more than you hate the worst that humanity has to offer. You don't have to like every person you're fighting for, and you sure as hell don't have to give up your righteous anger, but hate is ultimately corrosive.

You've gotta love.

[donnieisaprettyboy]

“what if kids identify with something and it ends up just being a phase-?” good. stop teaching and expecting kids (and adults honestly) to formulate permanent traits and ideas of themselves. everything in life is a phase. that doesn’t make it any less legitimate while you experience it. let people explore themselves and know it’s okay if what you think about yourself changes.

[daftpatience]

slow down for your disabled friends. thats like a bare minimum kindness that we shouldnt have to ask for. i love that youre so quirky and walking fast is a cool personality trait to you and all that but i bet you can count your physically disabled friends on less than one hand

[rouge-the-bat]

"can we normalize-" NO!!!!!! we do not need to expand whats considered normal!!! we need to teach people to stop reacting judgmentally when encountering something new and weird!!!! things dont need to be normal to be respected!!!!!!!!!!

[astronnova]

yeaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa

[just-french-me-up]

'ao3 needs a like and dislike button'

what you need, my algorithm-rotten minded friend, is a grip

[angelofdumpsterfires]

presented without comment

[whitepeopletwitter]

[koobiie]

shoutout to everyone who wants to infodump but cant string together coherent thoughts to form sentences and instead just look at you like this

[sparklebyte]

“here’s what we know about the uhc shooter”

WRONG! He is a suspect and we should treat him as such. He should be treated as innocent until proven guilty, not guilty until proven innocent. He’s a person of interest not the killer. I don’t care what the media or authorities are saying, he’s a human being who deserves a fair trial and deserves to be treated as innocent until proven otherwise.

[charbroiledchicken]

if it's good enough for you, then it deserves to be made. don't let anyone else decide if your story is worth it or not.

[gabrielora]

When I was younger and researching the autism diagnosis criteria and symptoms, I thought “oh I couldn’t POSSIBLY be autistic.” Because when I read “takes everything literally” I thought it literally meant EVERYTHING and I was like “I don’t take EVERYTHING literally, just most things!” And I just realized the other day that it didn’t actually mean EVERYTHING and that was an overstatement.