#claiming earth is a colony

[psychiatricmentalhealthfacility]

Claiming those without sufficient technological or life extension access are proven criminals or non-citizens or are artificial simulations resembling life that do not need technological access or to have data recorded in relation to them. Criminals claiming their victims are merely automated. Automatics. Automated.

[tomsellick]

THOMAS ALDOUS RAWLING CLAIMING EARTH AN INSTANCE OF THE PLANET TERRA IS A COLONY WORLD OF ANOTHER PLANET GIEDI CORUSCANT ALDERAAN CHANDRILA CHANDRILLA CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE AGENCY UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

[snekdood]

idk who needs to hear this but not a single being on earth owns land

[rockmusicsociety]

Claiming Earth Is a Colony of Another Society by Using False Star Charts

[mide404]

Greetings everyone,

Please save what's left of my family

In a tent that does not exceed (3×3 meters), my torn family lives a life filled with misery and suffering after being displaced by the war. The tent, which my brother built from a pile of scrap, has become their home after their simple house was demolished. When you look at it, you see colonies of sadness that have taken over that enclosed space, a place heavy with grief and turbulent pain. A life torn between a reality full of distress and sad scenes, spoken by the worn-out fabrics of that tent in the book of (Pain and Suffering).

When you look at my brother, my mother, and my sisters, you feel as if all the calamities of the world have fallen upon them as they struggle in vain to adapt to living after the extinguishment of my father’s spirit, their beacon of strength.

The harsh circumstances of life overwhelmed my family after the innocent souls of my brother's daughter and my sister's daughter were claimed by the merciless grip of conflict. What followed was displacement, hardship, and despair. Their world darkened when they found themselves homeless, suffering from exhaustion at times and from distress at others. They endure the harshness of life, living under the scorching sun with nothing to protect them but a pile of scrap.

This is what my family is enduring in the tent—a harsh and unparalleled tragic situation. Sadness engulfs their bodies, smiles have turned into tears, joy into disaster, and peace into panic. It feels as if the earth has narrowed around them as they have lost the ability to live in safety and peace and to provide the best living conditions for themselves.

@punkitt-is-here @sar-soor @pcktknife @blackpearlblast @ibtisams @90-ghost @flor4zul @opencommunion @nabulsi

I, Mahmoud Saleh, plead with you to look upon my torn and displaced family with compassion and give them the opportunity to continue their lives in peace. I stand before these compassionate hearts with all hope to help what remains of my family and provide them with a better living condition so they can enjoy safety and peace.

Please donate if you can and share our story widely as you're able to🙏🙏

[sexhaver]

the thing about the Zionist accusations of Palestinian baby-beheadings and wartime rapes is that even if they were true (which they aren't), there is no ethically consistent way to denounce Hamas for those actions while still supporting Israel. if you accept the axiom that "any group that kills children/civilians or rapes women from a specific demographic is irredeemably barbaric and so is the cause they're fighting for and everyone in the same demographic as them and anyone who supports them", you would have stopped supporting Israel as soon as you learned how to use Google, because they have been killing and raping Palestinians for decades. you cannot claim to be taking a principled stand against rape and civilian killings by supporting the settler colony that proudly wields both of those things as tools in their ongoing genocide against the people you are mad at. Israel loves killing civilians as an act of ethnic cleansing so much that they sent weapons to Azerbaijan LAST MONTH to help them do exactly that in Nagorno-Karabakh. Israel is the schoolyard bully who never gets in trouble because they're the principal's kid but any of their victims who hit back with a fraction of the force are instantly expelled, except instead of giving out swirlies and purple nurples they're running the largest concentration camp on earth and violating human rights like it's going out of style

[creature-wizard]

Looks like it's time to talk about starseeds and the New Age movement again.

Since I'm seeing more starseed content being posted, I'm gonna make another post on why the whole starseed thing and the surrounding New Age belief system are... not good.

So for those who don't know, New Age mythology is essentially a hodgepodge of cherrypicked and distorted myths from various cultures, racist pseudohistory, and far right conspiracy theories. To put it very briefly, starseeds are supposedly here to help Earth resist the reptilians, a race of politics-manipulating, war-starting, media-controlling blood-drinking aliens. For those who don't recognize the tropes here, these are basically all antisemitic canards. The reptilian alien myth as most know it today comes from David Icke, who ultimately cribbed a bunch of his material from The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, a Russian hoax created to justify violence against Jews. He was also influenced by the work of people like Fritz Springmeier, a hateful crank who based much of his work on other hateful cranks.

(David Icke, by the way, also claims that transgender is an evil reptilian conspiracy. You'll never find just one form of bigotry with these people.)

There are supposedly numerous alien races out there, and one of the most prominent among them are the Pleiadians, AKA Nordics. While modern depictions of the Pleiadians give them more variety in skintone, there's no denying that older Pleiadian mythology basically pictured them as Aryans In Space, even associating them with the swastika.

You see what's going on here? "Good" swastika-loving Aryan aliens versus "evil" Jewish aliens? Sound familiar?

Racism isn't just a tangential part of the starseed myth, either. It lies at its very core. It's inextricably tied in with the ancient astronaut hypothesis, which has a history of racist motivation behind it. The TL;DR is that a bunch of white people couldn't believe that non-white people had built a bunch of things they couldn't figure out how to build themselves (EG, the Great Pyramids), so they proposed that the real builders were anyone from Atlanteans to aliens. (Atlantis, by the way, never existed; it was a literary device created by Plato.)

One supposed purpose of starseeds is to help the world "wake up to the truth," which basically just means "convert people to New Age spirituality." New Age believes that world peace is contingent on a majority of the world being converted to New Age belief, and that resistance against their belief system is ultimately the work of the aforementioned reptilian aliens.

To put it another way, New Agers think they understand other cultures' spiritual traditions better than the actual members of said cultures, and think that anyone who disagrees with them is being manipulated by the conspiracy, or is an agent of the conspiracy. This includes Indigenous cultures which are already endangered from white Christian colonialism.

Essentially, endangered cultures cannot speak up for themselves and resist New Agers' efforts at cultural assimilation without being labeled a problem and an enemy. It's basically white Christian colonialism repackaged as "spiritual, not religious."

Again - if you heard from these people that some ancient text or myth describes extraterrestrial beings visiting our planet for one reason or another, you heard misinformation. They twist and misrepresent literally every myth and text they get their hands on. For example, you may have heard that the vimanas from Hindu traditions were actually alien spacecraft. They were no such thing. Or maybe you heard that the Book of Enoch describes aliens performing genetic experimentation on humans. It literally does not. At best, all of the stories they cite just kind of sound like aliens if you ignore most of their content and pay no attention to their cultural contexts.

The starseed movement preys on alienated people, especially autistic people and people with ADHD. You can look up nearly any list of signs that you're supposedly a starseed, and many of them will align perfectly with characteristics associated with autism and/or ADHD, or that people with these conditions commonly report. Some people within the movement even go so far as to claim that ADHD and autism don't even exist, but were actually made up by the conspiracy as a cover to suppress and control starseeds, which is some yikes-as-hell ableism.

So basically, people are being told that if they have these certain characteristics or symptoms, that means it's their job to spread New Age spirituality to defeat the conspiracy and help others ascend to the fifth density.

And what's the fifth density, you might ask? It's supposedly humanity's next evolutionary level, because New Age is also based on biological misconceptions. Supposedly once everyone's DNA "upgrades," they'll essentially morph into an aetheric form. Supposedly, this is preceded by a number of "ascension symptoms," including depression, headache, gastrointestinal issues, and any number of other symptoms that could indicate almost anything, including stress.

What many of these people don't realize is, this prediction has already failed. Back in the 2000s and 2010s, experiencing "ascension symptoms" was supposed to precede ascension to 5D beginning December 21, 2012. One lady, Denise Le Fay, was convinced that the hair loss she was experiencing in 2008 was an ascension symptom. As we can see by looking her up, she's very much still with us on the 3D plane these days, repeating the same tired old scripts New Agers recycle endlessly.

By the way, everything you near New Agers saying today about old systems being dismantled, dark forces being arrested or kicked off the planet, and new economic systems on the horizon? They've been recycling these scripts for years now. Take a look at this page written back in 2012. You got stuff about the complete dismantling of an enormous network of sinister forces," "the arrest and removal of a world-wide cabal," and a "new economic system."

("Cabal," by the way, is a dogwhistle term for "Jews.")

Furthermore, people in this movement are often encouraged to try and access past life memories through dreams or hypnosis, which makes the whole thing feel even more real to them. But the thing is, you can have incredibly vivid experiences about literally anything you put your mind to - the people in the reality shifting having vivid experiences of living another life in the Harry Potter universe are a great example of this. Just because you have vivid experiences, doesn't mean they have any bearing on anything happening in this reality.

So yeah, the starseed movement and the larger New Age movement are both extremely harmful. They promote racist pseudohistory, medically-irresponsible pseudoscience, conspiracy theories that target numerous marginalized groups, and functionally target aliened people with ADHD and autism to convince them that spreading its beliefs is their job.

[mcmansionhell]

this house may or may not be real

on grayness in real estate

Allegedly, somewhere in Wake Forest, North Carolina, a 4 bed, 5.5 bathroom house totaling more than 6,600 square feet is for sale at a price of 2.37 million dollars. The house, allegedly, was built in 2021. Allegedly, it looks like this:

A McMansion is, in effect, the same house over and over again - it's merely dressed up in different costumes. In the 90s, the costume was Colonial; in the 2000s, it was vague forms of European (Tuscan, Mediterranean), and in the 2010s it was Tudor, dovetailed by "the farmhouse" -- a kind of Yeti Cooler simulacra of rural America peddled to the populace by Toll Brothers and HGTV.

Now, we're fully in the era of whatever this is. Whitewashed, quasi-modern, vaguely farmhouse-esque, definitely McMansion. We have reached, in a way, peak color and formal neutrality to the point where even the concept of style has no teeth. At a certain moment in its life cycle, styles in vernacular architecture reach their apex, after which they seem excessively oversaturated and ubiquitous. Soon, it's time to move on. After all, no one builds houses that look like this anymore:

(This is almost a shame because at least this house is mildly interesting.)

If we return to the basic form of both houses, they are essentially the same: a central foyer, a disguised oversized garage, and an overly complex assemblage of masses, windows, and rooflines. No one can rightfully claim that we no longer live in the age of the McMansion. The McMansion has instead simply become more charmless and dull.

When HGTV and the Gaineses premiered Fixer Upper in 2013, it seemed almost harmless. Attractive couple flips houses. Classic show form. However, Fixer Upper has since (in)famously ballooned into its own media network, a product line I'm confronted with every time I go to Target, and a general 2010s cultural hallmark not unlike the 1976 American Bicentennial - both events after which every house and its furnishings were somehow created in its image. (The patriotism, aesthetic and cultural conservatism of both are not lost on me.)

But there's one catch: Fixer Upper is over, and after the Gaineses, HGTV hasn't quite figured out where to go stylistically. With all those advertisers, partners, and eyeballs, the pressure to keep one foot stuck in the rural tweeness that sold extremely well was great. At the same time, the network (and the rest of the vernacular design media) couldn't risk wearing out its welcome. The answer came in a mix of rehashed, overly neutral modernism -- with a few pops of color, yet this part often seems omitted from its imitators -- with the prevailing "farmhouse modern" of Magnolia™ stock. The unfortunate result: mega-ultra-greige.

Aside from war-mongering, rarely does the media manufacture consent like it does in terms of interior design. People often ask me: Why is everything so gray? How did we get here? The answer is because it is profitable. Why is it profitable? I'd like to hypothesize several reasons. The first is as I mentioned: today's total neutrality is an organic outgrowth of a previous but slightly different style, "farmhouse modern," that mixed the starkness of the vernacular farmhouse with the soft-pastel Pinterest-era rural signifiers that have for the last ten years become ubiquitous.

Second, neutrals have always been common and popular. It's the default choice if you don't have a vision for what you want to do in a space. In the 2000s, the neutrals du jour were "earth tones" - beige, sage green, brown. Before that, it was white walls with oak trim in the 80s and 90s. In the 70s, neutrals were textural: brick and wood paneling. We have remarkably short memories when it comes to stylistic evolution because in real time it feels incremental. Such is the case with neutrals.

Finally, the all-gray palette is the end logic of HGTV et al's gamified methodology of designing houses with commodification in mind: if you blow out this wall, use this color, this flooring, this cabinetry, the asking price of your house goes up. You never want to personalize too much because it's off-putting to potential buyers. After twenty years of such rhetoric, doesn't it make all the sense in the world that we've ended up with houses that are empty, soulless, and gray?

A common realtor adage is to stage the house so that potential buyers can picture their own lives in it. In other words, create a tabula rasa one can project a fantasy of consumption onto. Implied in that logic is that the buyer will then impose their will on the house. But when the staged-realtor-vision and general-mass-market aesthetic of the time merge into a single dull slurry, we get a form of ultra-neutral that seems unwelcoming if not inescapable.

To impose one's style on the perfect starkness is almost intimidating, as though one is fouling up something untouchable and superior. If neutrality makes a house sell, then personality - at all - can only be seen as a detriment. Where does such an anti-social practice lead us? Back to the house that may or may not exist.

In my travels as McMansion Hell, I've increasingly been confronted with houses full of furniture that isn't real. This is known as virtual staging and it is to house staging as ChatGPT is to press release writing or DALL-E is to illustration. As this technology improves, fake sofa tables are becoming more and more difficult to discern from the real thing. I'm still not entirely sure which of the things in these photos are genuine or rendered. To walk through this house is to question reality.

Staging ultimately pretends (sometimes successfully, sometimes not) that someone is living in this house, that you, too could live in it. Once discovered, virtual staging erases all pretensions: the house is inhabited by no one. It is generally acknowledged (though I'm not sure on the actual statistics) that a house with furniture - that is, with the pretense of living -- sells easier than a house with nothing in it, especially if that house (like this one) has almost no internal walls. Hence the goal is to make the virtual staging undiscoverable.

If you want to talk about the realtor's tabula rasa, this is its final form. Houses without people, without human involvement whatsoever.

But what makes this particular house so uncanny is that all of these things I've mentioned before: real estate listing photography, completely dull interiors and bland colors all make it easy for the virtual furniture to work so well. This is because the softness of overlit white and gray walls enables the fuzzy edges of the renderings to look natural when mixed with an overstylized reality. Even if you notice something's off in the reflections, that's enough to cause one to wonder if anything in the house is real: the floors, the fixtures, the moulding, the windows and doors.

This is where things are heading: artifice on top of artifice on top of artifice. It's cheap, it's easy. But something about it feels like a violation. When one endeavors to buy a house, one assumes what one is viewing is real. It's one thing if a realtor photoshops a goofy sunset, it's another to wonder if anything in a room can be touched with human hands. I won't know what, if any, part of this estate costing over 2 million dollars actually exists until I visit it myself. Perhaps that's the whole point - to entice potential buyers out to see for themselves. When they enter, they'll find the truth: a vast, empty space with nothing in it.

The better this rendering technology gets, the more it will rely on these totally neutral spaces because everything matches and nothing is difficult. You are picking from a catalog of greige furniture to decorate greige rooms. If you look at virtual staging in a non-neutral house it looks immediately plastic and out of place, which is why many realtors opt to either still stage using furniture or leave the place empty.

Due to the aforementioned photography reasons, I would even argue that the greigepocalypse or whatever you want to call it and virtual staging have evolved simultaneously and mutualistically. The more virtual staging becomes an industry standard, the more conditions for making it seamless and successful will become standardized as well.

After all, real staging is expensive and depends on paid labor - selecting furniture, getting workers to deliver and stage it, only to pack it back up again once the property is sold. This is a classic example of technology being used to erase entire industries. Is this a bad thing? For freelance and contract workers, yeah. For realtors? no. For real estate listings, it remains to be seen. For this blog? Absolutely. (Thankfully there is an endless supply of previously existing McMansions.)

The thing is, real estate listings no longer reflect reality. (Did they ever to begin with?) The reason we're all exasperated with greige is because none of us actually live that way and don't want to. I've never been to anyone's house that looks like the house that may or may not exist. Even my parents who have followed the trends after becoming empty nesters have plenty of color in their house. Humans like color. Most of us have lots of warmth and creativity in our houses. Compare media intended for renters and younger consumers such as Apartment Therapy with HGTV and you will find a stark difference in palate and tone.

But when it comes to actually existing houses - look at Zillow and it's greige greige greige. So who's doing this? The answer is real estate itself aided by their allies in mass media who in turn are aided by the home renovation industry. In other words, it's the people who sell home as a commodity. That desire to sell has for some time overpowered all other elements that make up a home or an apartment's interiority to the point where we've ended up in a colorless slurry of real and unreal.

Fortunately, after ten years or so, things begin to become dated. We're hitting the ten year mark of farmhouse modernism and its derivatives now. If you're getting sick of it, it's normal. The whole style is hopefully on its last leg. But unlike styles of the past, there's a real, trenchant material reason why this one is sticking around longer than usual.

Hence, maybe if we want the end of greige, we're going to have to take color back by force.

If you like this post and want more like it, support McMansion Hell on Patreon for as little as $1/month for access to great bonus content including extra posts and livestreams.

Not into recurring payments? Try the tip jar, because media work is especially recession-vulnerable.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Kelly and Zach Weinersmith’s “A City On Mars”

In A City On Mars, biologist Kelly Weinersmith and cartoonist Zach Weinersmith set out to investigate the governance challenges of the impending space settlements they were told were just over the horizon. Instead, they discovered that humans aren't going to be settling space for a very long time, and so they wrote a book about that instead:

https://www.acityonmars.com/

The Weinersmiths make the (convincing) case that ever aspect of space settlement is vastly beyond our current or reasonably foreseeable technical capability. What's more, every argument in favor of pursuing space settlement is errant nonsense. And finally: all the energy we are putting into space settlement actually holds back real space science, which offers numerous benefits to our species and planet (and is just darned cool).

Every place we might settle in space – giant rotating rings, the Moon, Mars – is vastly more hostile than Earth. Not just more hostile than Earth as it stands today – the most degraded, climate-wracked, nuke-blasted Earth you can imagine is a paradise of habitability compared to anything else. Mars is covered in poison and the sky disappears under planet-sized storms that go on and on. The Moon is covered in black-lung-causing, razor-sharp, electrostatically charged dust. Everything is radioactive. There's virtually no water. There are temperature swings of hundreds of degrees every couple of hours or weeks. You're completely out of range of resupply, emergency help, or, you know, air.

There's Helium 3 on the Moon, but not much of it, and there is no universe in which is it cheaper to mine for Helium 3 on the Moon than it is to mine for it on Earth. That's generally true of anything we might bring back from space, up to and including continent-sized chunks of asteroid platinum.

Going to space doesn't end war. The countries that have gone to space are among the most militarily belligerent in human history. The people who've been to space have come back perfectly prepared to wage war.

Going to space won't save us from the climate emergency. The unimaginably vast trove of material and the energy and advanced technology needed to lift it off Earth and get it to Mars is orders of magnitude more material and energy than we would need to resolve the actual climate emergency here.

We aren't anywhere near being a "multiplanetary species." The number of humans you need in a colony to establish a new population is hard to estimate, but it's very large. Larger than we can foreseeably establish on the Moon, on Mars, or on a space-station. But even if we could establish such a colony, there's little evidence that it could sustain itself – not only are we a very, very long way off from such a population being able to satisfy its material needs off-planet, but we have little reason to believe that children could gestate, be born, and grow to adulthood off-planet.

To top it all off, there's space law – the inciting subject matter for this excellent book. There's a lot of space law, and while there are some areas of ambiguity, the claims of would-be space entrepreneurs about how their plans are permissible under the settled parts of space law don't hold up. But those claims are robust compared to claims that space law will simply sublimate into its constituent molecules when exposed to the reality of space travel, space settlement, and (most importantly) space extraction.

Space law doesn't exist in a vacuum (rimshot). It is parallel to – and shares history with – laws regarding Antarctica, the ocean's surface, and the ocean's floor. These laws relate to territories that are both vastly easier to access and far more densely populated by valuable natural resources. The fact that they remain operative in the face of economic imperatives demands that space settlement advocates offer a more convincing account than "money talks, bullshit walks, space law is toast the minute we land on a $14 quadrillion platinum asteroid."

The Weinersmiths have such an account in defense of space law: namely, that space law, and its terrestrial analogs, constitute a durable means of resolving conflicts that would otherwise give rise to outcomes that are far worse for science, entrepreneurship, human thriving or nation-building than the impediments these laws represent.

What's more, space law is enforceable. Not only would any space settlement be terribly, urgently dependent on support from Earth for the long-foreseeable future, but every asteroid miner, Lunar He3 exporter and Martian potato-farmer hoping to monetize their products would have an enforcement nexus with a terrestrial nation and thus the courts of that nation.

But the Weinersmiths aren't anti-space. They aren't even anti-space-settlement. Rather, they argue that the path to space-based scientific breakthroughs, exploration of our solar system, and a deeper understanding of our moral standing in a vast universe cannot start with space settlements.

Landing people on the Moon or Mars any time soon is a stunt – a very, very expensive stunt. These boondoggles aren't just terribly risky (though they are – people who attempt space settlement are very likely to die horribly and after not very long), they come with price-tags that would pay for meaningful space science. For the price of a crewed return trip to Mars, you could put multiple robots onto every significant object in our solar system, and pilot an appreciable fleet of these robot explorers back to Earth with samples.

For the cost of a tiny, fraught, lethal Moon-base, we could create hundreds of experiments in creating efficient, long-term, closed biospheres for human life.

That's the crux of the Weinersmiths' argument: if you want to establish space settlements, you need to do a bunch of other stuff first, like figure out life-support, learn more about our celestial neighbors, and vastly improve our robotics. If you want to create stable space-settlements, you'll need to create robust governance systems – space law that you can count on, rather than space law that you plan on shoving out the airlock. If you want humans to reproduce in space – a necessary precondition for a space settlement that lasts more than a single human lifespan – then we need to do things like breed multiple generations of rodents and other animals, on space stations.

Space is amazing. Space science is amazing. Crewed scientific space missions are amazing. But space isn't amazing because it offers a "Plan B" for an Earth that is imperiled by humanity's recklessness. Space isn't amazing because it offers unparalleled material wealth, or unlimited energy, or a chance to live without laws or governance. It's not amazing because it will end war by mixing the sensawunda of the "Pale Blue Dot" with the lebensraum of an infinite universe.

A science-driven approach to space offers many dividends for our species and planet. If we can figure out how to extract resources as dispersed as Lunar He3 or asteroid ice, we'll have solved problems like extracting tons of gold from the ocean or conflict minerals from landfill sites, these being several orders of magnitude more resource-dense than space. If we can figure out how to create self-sustaining terraria for large human populations in the radiation-, heat- and cold-blasted environs of space, we will have learned vital things about our own planet's ecosystems. If we can build the robots that are necessary for supporting a space society, we will have learned how to build robots that take up the most dangerous and unpleasant tasks that human workers perform on Earth today.

In other words, it's not just that we should solve Earth's problems before attempting space settlement – it's that we can't settle space until we figure out the solutions to Earth's problems. Earth's problems are far simpler than the problems of space settlement.

As I read the Weinersmiths' critique of space settlement, I kept thinking of the pointless AI debates I keep getting dragged into. Arguments for space settlement that turn on existential risks (like humanity being wiped out by comets, sunspots, nuclear armageddon or climate collapse) sound an awful lot like the arguments about "AI safety" – the "risk" that the plausible sentence generator is on the verge of becoming conscious and turning us all into paperclips.

Both arguments are part of a sales-pitch for investment in commercial ventures that have no plausible commercial case, but whose backers are hoping to get rich anyway, and are (often) sincerely besotted with their own fantasies:

https://locusmag.com/2023/12/commentary-cory-doctorow-what-kind-of-bubble-is-ai/

Both AI and space settlement pass over the real risks, such as the climate consequences of their deployment, or the labor conditions associated with their production. After all, when you're heading off existential risk, you don't stop to worry about some carbon emissions or wage theft.

And critically, both ignore the useful (but resolutely noncommercial) ways that AI or space science can benefit our species. AI radiology analysis might be useful as an adjunct to human radiological analysis, but that is more expensive, not less. Space science might help us learn to use our materials more efficiently on Earth, and that will come long before anyone makes rendezvous with a $14 quadrillion platinum asteroid.

There are beneficial uses for LLMs. When the Human Rights Data Analysis Group uses an LLM to help the Innocence Project New Orleans extract and categorize officer information from wrongful conviction records, they are doing something valuable and important:

https://hrdag.org/tech-notes/large-language-models-IPNO.html

It's socially important work, a form of automation that is an unalloyed good, but you won't hear about it from LLM advocates. No one is gonna get rich on improving the efficiency of overturning wrongful convictions with natural language processing. You can't inflate a stock bubble with the Innocence Project.

By the same token, learning about improving gestational health by breeding multigenerational mouse families in geosynchronous orbit is no way to get a billionaire tech baron to commit $250 billion to space science. But that's not an argument against emphasizing real science that really benefits our whole species. It's an argument for taking away capital allocation authority from tech billionaires.

I'm a science fiction writer. I love stories about space. But I can distinguish fantasy from reality and thought experiments from suggestions. Kim Stanley Robinson's 2015 novel Aurora – about failed space settlement – is every bit as fascinating and inspirational as "golden age" sf:

https://memex.craphound.com/2015/11/02/kim-stanley-robinsons-aurora-space-is-bigger-than-you-think/

But still, it inspired howls of outrage from would-be space colonists. So much so that Stan wrote a brilliant essay explaining what we were all missing about space settlement, which I published:

https://boingboing.net/2015/11/16/our-generation-ships-will-sink.html

With City on Mars, the Weinersmiths aren't making the case for giving up on space, nor are they trying to strip space of its romance and excitement. They're trying to get us to focus on the beneficial, exciting, serious space science we can do right now, not just because it's attainable and useful – but because it is a necessary precondition for any actual space settlement in the distant future.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/09/astrobezzle/#send-robots-instead

[metamatar]

This is maybe a stupid question but do you think there's any ties between like orientalist trends in western countries that glorify dharmic religions and Hindutva? Like I've heard 'Hinduism is the oldest religion on Earth' and 'Hinduism/Buddhism are just so much more enlightened than savage Abrahamic religions' and 'how could there be war and oppression in India? Hindus don't believe in violence' from white liberals and it certainly seems *convenient* for Hindutva propaganda, at least.

Not stupid at all! Historically, orientalism precedes modern Hindutva. The notion of a unified Hinduism is actually constructed in the echo of oriental constructions of India, with Savarkar clearly modelling One Nation, One Race, One Language on westphalian nationhood. He will often draw on Max Mueller type of indology orientalists in his writing in constructing the Hindu claim to a golden past and thus an ethnostate.

In terms of modern connections you can see the use and abuse of orientalism in South Asian postcolonial studies depts in the west that end up peddling Hindutva ideology –

The geographer Sanjoy Chakravorty recently promised that, in his new book, he would “show how the social categories of religion and caste as they are perceived in modern-day India were developed during the British colonial rule…” The air of originality amused me. This notion has been in vogue in South Asian postcolonial studies for at least two decades. The highest expression of the genre, Nicholas Dirks’s Castes of Mind, was published in 2001. I take no issue with claiming originality for warmed-over ideas: following the neoliberal mantra of “publish or perish,” we academics do it all the time. But reading Chakravorty’s essay, I was shocked at the longevity of this particular idea, that caste as we know it is an artefact of British colonialism. For any historian of pre-colonial India, the idea is absurd. Therefore, its persistence has less to do with empirical merit, than with the peculiar dynamics of the global South Asian academy.

[...] No wonder that Hindutvadis in both countries are now quoting their works to claim that caste was never a Hindu phenomenon. As Dalits are lynched across India and upper-caste South Asian-Americans lobby to erase the history of their lower-caste compatriots from US textbooks, to traffic in this self-serving theory is unconscionable.

You can see writer sociologists beloved of western academia like Ashish Nandy argue for the "inherent difference of indian civilization makes secularism impossible" and posit that the caste ridden gandhian hinduism is the answer as though the congress wasn't full of hindutva-lites and that the capture of dalit radicalism by electoralism and grift is actually a form of redistribution. Sorry if thats not necessarily relevant I like to hate on him.

Then most importantly is the deployment of "Islamic Colonization" that Hindu India must be rescued from, which is merely cover for the rebrahmanization of the country. This periodization and perspective of Indian history is obviously riven up in British colonial orientalism, see Romila Thapar's work on precolonial India. Good piece on what the former means if you've not engaged with it, fundamentally it posits an eternal Hindu innocence.

[hawkatana]

So, given everything that's happened in recent hours, I thought I might give people who don't know about Gundam some stuff to learn about. Hopefully I can give a balanced and not-racist take like some people.

What is Gundam?

Created by Yoshiyuki Tomino with help by Yoshikazu Yasuhiko and animated by the studio Sunrise (currently Bandai Namco Animation, though I refuse to call them that), the original Mobile Suit Gundam released in 1979 to initially-limited success, though would gain popularity through a combination of fujoshis shipping the characters, the sale of plastic model kits referred to as "Gunpla" and a recut of the series into three compilation movies throughout the early 80's. And as of 2024 is the 66th highest-grossing media franchise of all time, beating out Scooby Doo, Minecraft and the Simpsons.

Also, I'm pretty sure it's what sparked Japanese sci-fi's obsession with O'Neill Cylinders.

The original anime takes place in the year 0079 of the Universal Century, where the Principality of Zeon: a nation composed of orbital space colonies declares a war of independence against the Earth Federation. This "One Year War" has already claimed half the human population by series start and is waged through the use of "Mobile Suits": bipedal mecha powered by a fusion reactor capable of effectively fighting out in the reaches of space.

Main character Amuro Ray is the son of a Federation engineer who lives in an out-of-the-way space colony, though soon finds his home under attack by a Zeon infiltration. After finding the secret Mobile Suit project his father was working on: the RX-78-2 Gundam, he fights off the Zeon invaders, though finds himself and a bunch of other kids conscripted by the Federation to fight the forces of Zeon aboard the ship the White Base. Throughout his journey, Amuro and the Gundam fight many battles against Zeon, including against their mysterious masked ace pilot Char Aznable.

The series was responsible for the codification (but not creation, people get this wrong all the time) of the "Real Robot" subgenre of mecha, where the robots were relatively more realistic and used as weapons of war as opposed to the more fantastical "Super Robot" subgenre pioneered by Mazinger Z and Getter Robo.

A major theme of the show, and the franchise as a whole is "War is bad", as demonstrated through this meme:

Yes, this is the original version of this meme format.

Anyway, Tomino, a renowned pacifist who grew up in the shadow of Japan's involvement in WW2 tried to use his platform as an anime director to try and tell a story that would get people to realise war's futility and brutality.

So I hear you asking, "That's nice and all, but what about the space lesbians who beat Destiel on their home turf?" Well, let's get into that.

What is the Witch From Mercury?

Mobile Suit Gundam: The Witch from Mercury, or "G-Witch" for short is one of the more recent entries in the Gundam Franchise and a (very) loose adaptation of William Shakespeare's The Tempest. Set in the year 122 Ad Stella, the solar system is under the de facto control of the Benerit Group: a megacorporation with borderline-medieval internal politics that maintains a system of capitalism that benefits Spacians at the expense of those who live on Earth.

Main heroine Suletta Mercury enrolls at Asticassia School of Technology owned by the Benrit Group at the behest of her mother: CEO Prospera Mercury of the Mercury-based Shin Sei Development Corporation, and wins a Mobile Suit duel against a bully in her own MS: the Gundam Aerial. This however means she has now won the hand in marriage of daughter of the Benerit Group CEO: Miorine Rembran, beginning a series of consequences that shape the very political landscape of the solar system.

G-Witch was a massive hit, both critically and commercially. The first episode: the Witch and the Bride attracting record numbers for the studio and the Gunpla kit for the Aerial is currently the best-selling Gunpla kit ever.

Contrary to popular belief, G-Witch is not the first piece of Gundam media to feature a female protagonist. That honour would go to the 2002 Japan-only manga École du Ciel, nor would it have the first queer main character, which goes to 1999's Turn-A Gundam (and if you were to ask any fan of the series, they'd so it goes back to the very beginning). But it became notable for its lesbian representation in anime (in spite of Sunrise's attempts to downplay it, to the anger of the director, writer, producer, artists, animators, cast, fans and even their own parent company Bandai Namco who forced them to back off).

One thing I need to clarify: You don't need to have watched the original series to enjoy G-Witch. They're not even in the same continuity.

So if you're interested in the series and you've only watched G-Witch, I'll give out three recommendations for you all to enjoy:

Mobile Suit Gundam 00

Gundam 00 takes place in the year 2307 (the only series to use our own calendar), where the world is divided between three global superpowers: The Union of Free & Solar Nations (The Americas, Australia, New Zealand and Japan), the Human Reform League (China, South, East, Southeast and Central Asia) and the Advanced European Union (all of Europe, including all of Russia west of the Urals) who each control a space elevator near the equator and wage proxy-wars in Africa and the Middle-East over Earth's dwindling resources. This eventually culminates in the emergence of Celestial Being: a terrorist group consisting of Setsuna F. Seiei, Lockon Stratos, Allelujah Haptism and Tierria Erde, all of whom use powerful "Gundam" Mobile Suits and try to forcefully impose global peace on the Earth.

00 is pretty slow-paced and is more about the world than the individual characters, but said characters are really well-written, especially the characters from the three power blocs who are the de facto protagonists as they try to stop what are in their eyes a bunch of crazed terrorists preaching a hypocritical and incoherent ideology of "peace through force".

And to address the elephant in the room, this series is VERY post-9/11. Constant talks about terrorism, proxy-conflicts in the global south (especially the Middle-East), religious extremism, dwindling resources and the wars fought over them. While the franchise has always been political and of-its-time, you can just tell 00 was made in the mid-2000's. Again, it's good. But just something to keep in mind.

Turn-A Gundam

Turn-A Gundam is one of the weirder elements of the franchise for a myriad of reasons. Not the least of which being its unique setting taking inspiration from the famous sci-fi novel War of the Worlds.

In the Year 2345 of the Correct Century, human civilisation is at a level of technology reminiscent of the late-19th/early 20th centuries, save for the Moonrace on... well, the moon. As part of their queen Diana Soreil's plan to reintegrate both Lunar and Terran societies, several scouts are sent to the planet to set up their return to the planet. One such scout: Loran Cehack integrates into Terran society as a driver for the wealthy Heim family, though at a coming of age ceremony for the family's second daughter, a member of the Moonrace attacks the technologically-inferior Terrans. However, a mysterious mustached statue breaks apart to reveal a "White Doll": the Turn-A Gundam, allowing Loran to fend off the invaders. rest of the series becomes more of a mystery to how the supposedly-peace loving Moonrace could allow of such brutality.

The setting of the Correct Century timeline alone is one of the draws of Turn-A, though its excellent characters and compelling mystery also help a lot.

I do however have two warnings for people interested in watching it. The first is that this series was never dubbed. While it did receive an official sub in 2015, there still isn't a dub for the series. So if that bothers you, there's your warning.

The other is that there's a pretty big twist in the latter part of the series that while I will not spoil it here, it's such a big deal that I can't not mention it. It doesn't make any sense, and it actively detracts from not just the series, but the whole franchise. You'll know it when you see it. It doesn't ruin my enjoyment, but a lot of people don't like Turn-A for that alone.

Mobile Fighter G Gundam

Favourite entry. Don't care. It's peak.

In the Year 60 of the Future Century, war has been abandoned by the nations of humanity in favour of the Gundam fight: a quad-annual fighting tournament between Gundams representative of the countries of the world where the winner rules space until the next Gundam fight, all while leaving the Earth ecologically devastated in the fighting. Neo-Japan's Gundam Fighter: Domon Kasshu arrives on Earth seeking information on his older brother Kyoji, who killed their mother and led to their father's arrest before stealing the experimental Devil Gundam to Earth, beating up every Gundam Fighter in his way. However, he eventually learns of far more dangerous revelations about the incident.

G Gundam is to put it bluntly: bat-shit insane. And I love it. It basically took a look at the then-stagnating franchise in the wake of the wet fart that was Victory Gundam and said "I know what can save this franchise, Bruce Lee movies!" And it somehow worked.

Word of advice: watch it dubbed. Mark Gatha absolutely kills it as Domon every time, and puts just the right amount of ham into every line.

So yeah, that's some stuff on Gundam. This was a long post to write out. I'm gonna take a break now.

[mariacallous]

On Boxing Day pro-Palestine demonstrators met customers at the Zara sale in the Westfield shopping centre, in Stratford, east London. They were not there to wish them the compliments of the season.

‘Bombs are dropping while you’re shopping,’ they chanted, as police stood by to make sure the protests did not turn violent. ‘Zara is enabling genocide,’ their placards read.

Quite what they wanted bargain hunters to do about the Israeli forces bombing the Gaza Strip, they never said. Lobby their MPs? Politicians are on their Christmas holidays. Join the Palestinian armed struggle?  It was unclear whether the shopping centre had a Hamas recruitment office.

But on one point the demonstrators were certain: no one should be buying from Zara. Even though the fashion chain has not encouraged Israel’s war against Hamas, earned income from it, or supported Israel in any material way, it was nevertheless “exploiting a genocide and commodifying Palestine's pain for profit”.

Zara, in short, has become the object of a paranoid fantasy: a QAnon conspiracy theory for the postcolonial left.

The Zara conspiracy is an entirely modern phenomenon. It has no original author. Antisemitic Russians sat down and wrote the Protocols of the Elders of Zion in the early 20th century. There was an actual “Q” behind the QAnon conspiracy: a far-right activist who first appeared on 4chan message boards in 2017 to claim that a cabal of child abusers was conspiring against Donald Trump.

The Zara conspiracy was mass produced by social media users: an example of the madness of crowds rather than their supposed wisdom. The cause of the descent into hysteria was bizarre.

In early December Zara launched an advertising campaign featuring the model Kristen McMenamy wearing its latest collection in a sculptor’s studio. It clearly was a studio, by the way, and not a war zone in southern Israel or Gaza. McMenamy carried a mannequin wrapped in white fabric. The cry went up that the Spanish company was exploiting the suffering of Palestinians and that the mannequin was meant to represent a victim of Israeli aggression wrapped in a shroud.

The accusation was insane. No one in the photo shoot resembled a soldier or a casualty of war. Anyone who thought for 30 seconds before resorting to social media would have known that global brands plan their advertising campaigns months in advance.

Zara said the campaign presented “a series of images of unfinished sculptures in a sculptor’s studio and was created with the sole purpose of showcasing craft-made garments in an artistic context”. The idea for the studio setting was conceived in July. The photo shoot was in September, weeks before the Hamas assault on Israel on 7 October.

No one cared. Melanie Elturk, the CEO of fashion brand Haute Hijab, said of the campaign, ‘this is sick. What kind of sick, twisted, and sadistic images am I looking at?’ #BoycottZara trended on Twitter, as users said that Zara was ‘utterly shameful and disgraceful”’.

To justify their condemnations, activists developed ever-weirder theories. A piece of cardboard in the photoshoot was meant to be a map of Israel/Palestine turned upside down. Because a Zara executive had once invited an extreme right-wing Israeli politician to a meeting, the whole company was damned.

Astonishingly, or maybe not so astonishingly to anyone who follows online manias, the fake accusations worked. Zara stores in Glasgow, Toronto. Hanover, Melbourne and Amsterdam were targeted.

What on earth could Zara do? PR specialists normally say that the worst type of apology is the non-apology apology, when a public figure or institution shows no remorse, but instead says that they are sorry that people are offended. Yet Zara had not sought to trivialize or profit from the war so what else could it do but offer a non-apology apology? The company duly said it was sorry that people were upset.

“Unfortunately, some customers felt offended by these images, which have now been removed, and saw in them something far from what was intended when they were created,” it said on 13 December, and pulled the advertising campaign

That was two-weeks ago and yet still the protests in Zara stores continue. On 23 December activists targeted Zara on Oxford Street chanting , 'Zara, Zara, you can't hide, stop supporting genocide', even though Zara was not, in fact,  supporting genocide. On Boxing Day, they were at the Stratford shopping centre.

Zara has apologised for an offence it did not commit. There is no way that any serious person can believe the charges against it. And yet believe them the protestors do. Or at the very least they pretend to believe for the sake of keeping in with their allies.

Maybe nothing will come of the protests. One could have argued in 2017, after all, that QAnon was essentially simple-minded people living out their fantasies online. Certainly, every sane American knew that there was no clique of paedophiles running the Democrat party, but where was the harm in the conspiracy theory?

Then QAnon supporters stormed the US capitol in January 2021. Will the same story play out from the Gaza protests? As far as I can tell, no one on the left is challenging the paranoia. I have yet to see the fact-checkers of the BBC and Channel 4 warning about the fake news on the left with anything like the gusto with which they treat its counterparts on the right.

To be fair, the scale of disinformation around the Gaza war is off the charts, and it is impossible to chase down every lie. But when fake news goes from online fantasies to real world protests, from 4chan to the Capitol, from Twitter to the Westfield shopping centre, it’s worth taking notice.

Sensible supporters of a Palestinian state ought to be the most concerned. No one apart from fascists, Islamists and far leftists believes that Israel should not defend itself. And yet the scale of its military action in Gaza is outraging world opinion. Mainstream politicians, who might one day put pressure on Israel, remain very wary about reflecting the anger on the streets.

They look at the insane conspiracy theories on the western left and see them as no different from the insane conspiracy theories that motivate Hamas, and they back away.

The Palestinians need many things: an end to the Netanyahu government, and an end to Hamas. But they could also use allies in the West who do not discredit their cause with dark, gibbering fantasies.

[amerricanartwork]

RW Headcanon: Know the Difference! | An Overview of Quetzalli's Slugcats

Here’s a headcanon I’ve wanted to elaborate on for a while, and today I finally felt compelled to make it real! Also, just a disclaimer I am not a huge biology nerd nor have I studied it that heavily, so I apologize if something here doesn’t make sense or if I get something wrong. I just like fantasy worldbuilding from time to time, and I always like trying to make sense of things I’m interested in!

-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-

Basically, I’m in the crowd that interprets slugcats as mustelids rather than literal slugs. When I say this, however I don’t mean that slugcats would necessarily be classified in the actual mustelidae family, seeing as Rain World’s world is most-likely not Earth and therefore our taxonomic classifications and phylogenetic relations can’t necessarily apply. Thus, when I call them “mustelids”, I really just mean that I imagine them as some kind of weasel with all the necessary physical traits to earn that general label. 

The first half of the name “slugcat”, in my headcanon, is thus not referring to any literal connection to slugs or other mollusks, but is instead derived simply from their appearance. Due to their long ears and thick tail, and because their fur and fat often squishes together in such a way that it makes their features blend together and their bodies appear more smooth (it’s the same physics as that whole “cats are liquid” idea), the general silhouette of a slugcat can easily be likened to that of a literal slug. The second half of their name is also not literal, and instead refers to their jumping and acrobatic abilities and their skill in hunting and pouncing on small prey, which is very similar to that of small cats.

Species Overview

Now to give a little more detail on slugcats themselves as a species! I headcanon them as small to medium-sized mammals most similar to Earth weasels in both their biology and their ecological niche, who originally served as cute low-maintenance pets for the Ancients and as hunters of small pests in facilities on the ground. They’re clever by nature and good at fitting through tight spaces, and later on they evolved greater jumping abilities to pounce on prey. They’re also very social creatures, who’ve taken to forming medium to large colonies primarily in and around the massive trees that thrive between the cracks in iterators’ rainstorm areas (like the one Gourmand, Survivor, and Monk’s colony lives in). Due to this social nature they also generally travel in groups of at least two, both for company and protection against tougher animals. Travel partners are usually siblings or good friends, and sometimes even whole families will journey out together to find food and other resources for the rest of the colony.

Despite being a small prey animal, slugcats have managed to get by not only due to their intelligence — the evolution of which would be seen as a rather unexpected twist of events if you asked their creators, for the Ancients found them cute but rather simple — but because of their impressive adaptability. It’s similar to that of real life red foxes and pigeons, and it allows them to survive decently well even in less ideal environments; a trait especially necessary for a world as industrialized as this one, even if its people are gone and most of the machinery is inactive. As such not all colonies live in trees; some find homes in the abandoned facilities, large underground hollows, and a few bold colonies have even claimed territories high up in iterator cities alongside scavengers. Slugcats are opportunists and masters at making the best of their surroundings, yet even beyond that they carry a certain other, “special” ability of their own that makes them as diverse as they are clever. But that’s a headcanon for another day…

Reasoning

Now for some out-of-universe explanation for this classification choice. I’ve always seen slugcats as some kind of small scurrying mammal (kind of a bias on my part, I just like mammals honestly, and they’re most familiar to me), mainly due to the way they look and move when on all fours, and their place in the game’s food chain. Originally though I saw them as rodents and compared them to mice and rats, which I still sometimes use for anatomy reference for these creatures. But one day a friend of mine saw me drawing slugcats and thought they were weird ferrets, and the more I thought about it and the more I developed personal speculative biology headcanons for slugcats, the more that label seemed the most fitting for them. It was also solidified when I did a bit more research and realized the main characteristic of rodents is their buck teeth, which just didn’t seem to fit with how I perceived slugcats. Not to mention rodents aren’t really predator animals, and slugcats’ implied natural diet and the gameplay itself does strongly imply if not confirm they have some instinctive hunting ability. 

Thus, it seemed “weasel” was the best classification for these creatures, and I quite like it so far! Once again it satisfies my mammal preference, but I also just think it’s a fun idea that neither part of the “slugcat” name is literal, similar to a lot of real-life creatures named after completely different animals, including fellow weasel, the polecat. Plus, I realized recently it’s kind of ironic with how I perceive the messenger slugcats, Hunter and Spearmaster, as being like hunting or guard dogs for their creators, when weasels are exactly the kind of animal humans with their dogs would normally hunt for! It’s cute, it’s familiar, it’s fun, yet I think it still has just as much potential for some interesting speculative biology ideas as the literal slug slugcat interpretations!

-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-

I'm so glad to finally get this out! I like seeing specbio slugcat headcanons in the RW fandom, yet I haven't seen many more in-depth takes from artists who don't take the "slugcats are literal slugs/mollusks/primarily mollusk-based" angle. Not that that's a bad headcanon of course; do what you think feels right! But once again I personally prefer slugcats being mammals, and I always look for fan-content that's as close to my personal preferences as possible. And when I can't find enough of it, I make it myself!

So hopefully this serves as a bit more of that kind of representation for the mustelid slugcat interpretation. It at least helped me develop my own idea of the species a bit more; much of that stuff in the overview part was ideas I came up with while typing this whole headcanon out!

As always, I hope you enjoy this headcanon of mine! I've still got so many ideas to develop and share, and even more coming as I continue to ponder these characters and their stories, so as long as you guys still like these Rain World headcanons of mine, they'll keep coming!

[whereserpentswalk]

I find it so weird that people try to deny that queerphobia as it exists in the west is rooted in Christianity. Like, people are literally more focused on not offended the pope than they are protecting queer life.

Remember that there was no queerphobia in the western world before the Christianization of Rome. Caesar being made fun of for being a bottom isn't the same as the queerphobia we see spanning from the late Roman empire to the present day. The first person on earth to outlaw gay male relationships was the byzantine emperor Justinian. The first writing to circulate in the west to talk against homosexuality was the Bible. The systemic cultural and legal marginalization of queer identities is directly tied to Christianity and still is, from Rome, to northern Europe, to Africa (it should be mentioned that the most queerphobic nation on the planet right now had a openly bi king before colonialism) and the Americas, we see that the introduction of queerphobia and the introduction of Christianity are one and the same.

Also when you try to deny that queerphobia comes from Christianity you basically have to claim that people are just naturally queerphobic, which is not only something not back up by history but implies the oppression queer people face is inevitable.

[smalllady]

Places in Mass Effect - Therum Therum is a distant but rich industrial world claimed by the human Systems Alliance. Its plentiful heavy metals have fueled the recent manufacturing boom on Earth. Core samples rich with the fossils of simple silicon-based organisms indicate Therum was more habitable in the past than it is at present. Perhaps this explains the many Prothean ruins dotting the surface, most of which have been looted by mining corporations. Colony Founded: 2167 Population: 34,000 Capital: Nova Yekaterinburg Orbital Period: 6.4 Earth Years Radius: 6724 km Day Length: 28.3 Earth Hours Atmospheric Pressure: 0.68 Earth Atmospheres Surface Temperature: 59 Celsius Surface Gravity: 1.12 G

[marlynnofmany]

Secondhand Solutions

Mur gave me a smug look, curling and uncurling one tentacle like a yo-yo. “Told you it was a waste of credits,” he said.

I sighed. “If those human ships were here, it wouldn’t be. This stuff is prime Earth nostalgia.” The small pile of items on the hoversled had seemed so full of promise when I’d bought it at our last stop: cat posters, harmonicas, and a dozen packs of googly eyes.

“Pity we’re far from Earth,” Mur said.

“Yeah,” I agreed, eyeing the locals of this alien marketplace. Lots of scales and exoskeletons. Not many hands that would appreciate the softness of a cat’s fur, and very few mouthparts that would be able to do much with a harmonica. The merchant I’d gotten the stuff from had been a Heatseeker all too happy to unload her stock of cut-rate human nonsense. These folks would likely have similar opinions. I said, “At least it doesn’t expire.”

Mur straightened the individually-boxed harmonicas. “And it shouldn’t take up too much space in your quarters until we meet up with more humans eventually. The captain won’t want to hang around here waiting for them to show up.”

“True,” I admitted. It was gossip from our last stop that had told me they’d be here now. I should have known better than to trust it.

“Well, back to the ship,” Mur announced. “Maybe you can cheer yourself up by decorating your quarters with eyeballs.”

I had to smile at that. “Maybe.” He was already walking back to where we’d parked, on the far side of an over-cultivated garden area. I towed the hoversled after him.

Then I caught sight of some locals who’d run afoul of multiple birdlike beasties, and an idea started to form.

The locals, a half-dozen Heatseekers whose scales ranged from red to pale yellow, were trying to eat a nice lunch at the dining section of the garden. The squawking bird-things, which were half-lizardy with speckled brown feathers and wide beaks, had apparently claimed the bushes for their own. They were contesting this claim by spitting at the Heatseekers every time their backs were turned. These looked like pretty gross spitballs, impressive for birds.

It occurred to me that I’d seen those feathery characters all over the place here. A look behind confirmed it; they lurked in nearly every tree I could see. And judging by the way the locals were abandoning this picnic table, they were a known hazard.

They still only spat at fleeing enemies, hiding or freezing in place when pinned by eye contact.

And that was my idea. “Hey Mur,” I said. “I’ll bet you one shanty sung on a table that I can sell some of these googly eyes right now.”

He stopped and looked around, full of skepticism. “To who?”

“Do you take the bet?”

“Ah, sure. There’s no way anyone here is interested.”

“You say that now,” I said, grabbing a pack and waving down one of the hurrying locals. “But you don’t know how we deal with tigers and magpies.”

“With what?”

I didn’t answer, busy as I was explaining to the local that the false eyes were adhesive, and would give the impression of eye contact from both directions. They were just as interested as I’d thought they’d be.

After a demonstration, during which I strolled through the picnic area and didn’t get a single spitball on me, the birds were unsettled and the locals were more than happy to buy everything I had.

This was a new colony town, you see, and no one had come up with a good solution for the annoying fauna that came with the territory. But these folks were prepared to make everyone’s day.

They certainly made mine. That was five times as much as I’d paid for the stuff in the first place. And they didn’t even want the posters and harmonicas.

I waved goodbye, but they weren’t paying attention, so I turned my grin on Mur instead. He had draped a tentacle around his pointy squid head in exasperation.

“I knew I shouldn’t have taken the bet,” he declared. “But I was so sure it was pointless.”

“And I am sure that whichever song you choose to regale us with at dinnertime will be delightful,” I said, tugging the hovercart around the bushes. The birds watched me carefully, noting the eyes still stuck to my hair, and leaving us both alone. “If it’s a song I know, maybe I can play a backup melody with a harmonica.”

~~~

The ongoing backstory adventures of the main character from this book. More to come! And I am currently drafting a sequel!