#define climate change

[uncivilliberties]

We used to call it GLOBAL WARMING. "Climate change" was a way to rebrand it, to introduce doubt, to make it sound like it may be a natural cycle. It's a propaganda tool, and we need to stop letting them control the narrative with it.

[essektheylyss]

okay the thing with the coast poll is that my tags were mostly joking cuz I do expect it to be a contest of where you've lived and I respect that so I'm not actually mad HOWEVER I saw some of the comments and as a person who has lived on both, I am thereby qualified to ask, IN WHAT FUCKING UNIVERSE IS THE EAST COAST MORE TEMPERATE. WHAT THE FUCK IS YOUR DEFINITION OF TEMPERATE.

[reasonsforhope]

Green energy is in its heyday. 

Renewable energy sources now account for 22% of the nation’s electricity, and solar has skyrocketed eight times over in the last decade. This spring in California, wind, water, and solar power energy sources exceeded expectations, accounting for an average of 61.5 percent of the state's electricity demand across 52 days. 

But green energy has a lithium problem. Lithium batteries control more than 90% of the global grid battery storage market. 

That’s not just cell phones, laptops, electric toothbrushes, and tools. Scooters, e-bikes, hybrids, and electric vehicles all rely on rechargeable lithium batteries to get going. 

Fortunately, this past week, Natron Energy launched its first-ever commercial-scale production of sodium-ion batteries in the U.S. 

“Sodium-ion batteries offer a unique alternative to lithium-ion, with higher power, faster recharge, longer lifecycle and a completely safe and stable chemistry,” said Colin Wessells — Natron Founder and Co-CEO — at the kick-off event in Michigan. 

The new sodium-ion batteries charge and discharge at rates 10 times faster than lithium-ion, with an estimated lifespan of 50,000 cycles.

Wessells said that using sodium as a primary mineral alternative eliminates industry-wide issues of worker negligence, geopolitical disruption, and the “questionable environmental impacts” inextricably linked to lithium mining. 

“The electrification of our economy is dependent on the development and production of new, innovative energy storage solutions,” Wessells said. 

Why are sodium batteries a better alternative to lithium?

The birth and death cycle of lithium is shadowed in environmental destruction. The process of extracting lithium pollutes the water, air, and soil, and when it’s eventually discarded, the flammable batteries are prone to bursting into flames and burning out in landfills. 

There’s also a human cost. Lithium-ion materials like cobalt and nickel are not only harder to source and procure, but their supply chains are also overwhelmingly attributed to hazardous working conditions and child labor law violations. 

Sodium, on the other hand, is estimated to be 1,000 times more abundant in the earth’s crust than lithium. 

“Unlike lithium, sodium can be produced from an abundant material: salt,” engineer Casey Crownhart wrote ​​in the MIT Technology Review. “Because the raw ingredients are cheap and widely available, there’s potential for sodium-ion batteries to be significantly less expensive than their lithium-ion counterparts if more companies start making more of them.”

What will these batteries be used for?

Right now, Natron has its focus set on AI models and data storage centers, which consume hefty amounts of energy. In 2023, the MIT Technology Review reported that one AI model can emit more than 626,00 pounds of carbon dioxide equivalent. 

“We expect our battery solutions will be used to power the explosive growth in data centers used for Artificial Intelligence,” said Wendell Brooks, co-CEO of Natron. 

“With the start of commercial-scale production here in Michigan, we are well-positioned to capitalize on the growing demand for efficient, safe, and reliable battery energy storage.”

The fast-charging energy alternative also has limitless potential on a consumer level, and Natron is eying telecommunications and EV fast-charging once it begins servicing AI data storage centers in June. 

On a larger scale, sodium-ion batteries could radically change the manufacturing and production sectors — from housing energy to lower electricity costs in warehouses, to charging backup stations and powering electric vehicles, trucks, forklifts, and so on. 

“I founded Natron because we saw climate change as the defining problem of our time,” Wessells said. “We believe batteries have a role to play.”

-via GoodGoodGood, May 3, 2024

--

Note: I wanted to make sure this was legit (scientifically and in general), and I'm happy to report that it really is! x, x, x, x

[probablyasocialecologist]

For as long as Bill Gates has been a philanthropist, he’s latched onto popular “world-saving” causes, from population control to polio eradication to standardized testing in schools, each time using his wealth and public relations muscle to appoint himself to a leadership role despite a total lack of qualifications and then changing the foundation’s programmatic direction to follow his lead. Climate change is only the latest cause, and for Gates, it was a convenient way to endear himself to the public all over again as his marriage to foundation cofounder Melinda French Gates collapsed following revelations about the software mogul’s involvement with Jeffrey Epstein. “I think the clear takeaway is that Bill Gates is not who he says he is,” says journalist Tim Schwab, whose Substack and 2024 book The Bill Gates Problem make him one of the few consistent critical voices tracking the billionaire and his namesake foundation. Per Schwab: Just as Gates tries to assert himself as a leader on climate change by making bogus divestment claims, similar contradictions define his entire philanthropic career. He claims his foundation is delivering innovative pharmaceuticals that are saving lives, for example, yet his foundation stands accused of stifling innovation and access through monopolistic behavior. . . . His track record of failures, which have caused incalculable harm, mean he’s the last person on Earth we should look to for leadership on climate change.

17 February 2025

[grison-in-space]

you know what else fucks me up about the US election? one of the things that has left me reeling in bewilderment and grief this month?

I'm a scientist, y'all.

That means that I am, like most American research scientists, a federal contractor. (Possibly employee. It's confusing, and it fucks with my taxes being a postdoctoral researcher.) I get paid because someone, in the long run ideally me, makes a really, really detailed pitch to one of several federal grant agencies that the nation would really be missing out if I couldn't follow up on these thoughts and find concrete evidence about whether or not I'm right.

Currently, my personal salary is dependent on a whole department of scientists convincing one of the largest and most powerful granting agencies that they have a program that is really good at training scientists that can think deeply about the priorities of the agency. Those priorities are defined by the guy who runs the agency, and he gets to hire whatever qualified people he wants. That guy? The Presidential Administration picks that one. That's how federal agencies get staffed: the President's administration nominates them.

All of the heads of these agencies are personally nominated by the president and their administration. They are people of enormous power whose job is to administer million-dollar grants to the scientists competing urgently for limited funds. A million dollars often doesn't go farther than a couple of years when it's intended to pay for absolutely everything to do with a particular pitch, including salaries of your trainees, all materials, travel expenses, promoting the work among other researchers, all of it—so most smart American researchers are working fervently on grants all the time.

The next director of the NIH will be a Trump appointee, if he notices and thinks to appoint one. NSF, too; that's the group that funds your ecology and your astroscience and your experimental mathematics and physics and chemistry, the stuff that doesn't have industry funding and industry priorities. USDA. DOE, that's who does a lot of the climate change mitigation and renewable energy source research, they'll just be lucky if they can do anything again because Trump nigh gutted them last time.

Right now, I am working on the very tail end of a grant's funding and I am scurrying to make sure I stay employed. So I'm thinking very closely about federal agency priorities, okay? And I'm thinking that the funding climate for science is going to get a lot fucking leaner. I'm seeing what the American people think of scientists, and about whether my job is worth doing. It's been a lean twelve years in this gig, okay? Every time the federal government gets fucked up, that impacts my job, it means that I have to hustle even harder to get grants in that let me support myself—and, if I have any trainees, their budding careers as well!—to patch over the lean times as much as we can.

So I've been reeling this week thinking about how funding agency priorities are going to change. I work on sex differences in motivation, so let me tell you, the politics reading this one for my next pitch are going to be fun. I'm working on a submission for an explicitly DEI-oriented five year grant with a cycle ending in February, so that's going to be an exercise in hoping that the agency employees at the middle levels (the ones that know how to get things done which can't be replaced immediately with yes men) can buffer the decisions of those big bosses long enough to let that program continue to exist a little while longer.

Ah, Christ, he promised Health & Human Services (which houses the NIH) to RFK, didn't he? We'll see how that pans out.

I keep seeing people calling for more governmental shutdowns on the left now, and it makes me want to scream. The government being gridlocked means the funding that researchers like me need doesn't come, okay? When the DOE can't say fucking "climate change," when the USDA hemorrhages its workers when the agency is dragged halfway across the country, when I watch a major Texan House rep stake his career on trying to destroy the NSF, I think: this is what you people think of us. I think: how little scientists are valued as public workers. Why am I working this hard again?

This is why I described voting as harm reduction. Even if two candidates are "the same" on one thing you care about, they probably aren't the same level of bad on everything. Your task is to figure out the best person to do the job. It's not about a fucking tribalist horse race. A vote is your opinion on a job interview, you fucks. We have to work with this person.

Anyway, I'm probably going to go back to shaking quietly in despair for a little longer and then pick myself up and hit the grind again. If I'm fast, I might still get the grant in this miserable climate if I run, and I might get to actually keep on what I'm trying to do, which is bring research on sex differences, neurodivergence and energy balance as informed by non-binary gender perspectives and disability theory to neuroscience.

Fuck.

[theplotmage]

How to Get Started with Worldbuilding for Fantasy Writers

Hey fellow writers!

Worldbuilding can feel like a Herculean task, but it’s one of the most rewarding parts of creating a fantasy novel. If you're getting stuck, Here are some tips that have helped me, and I hope they’ll help you too!

Start with the Basics

Geography

- Map out the physical layout of your world. Think about continents, countries, cities, and natural features like mountains, rivers, and forests.

Climate and Ecosystems

- What are the climate zones and ecosystems like? How do they shape the lives of your inhabitants?

Create a History

Origins

- Dive into how your world came into existence. Are there creation myths or ancient civilizations that set the stage?

Major Events

- Outline key historical events. Wars, alliances, discoveries, and disasters can add so much depth.

Develop Cultures and Societies

Cultures

- Craft diverse cultures with unique customs, traditions, and values. What do they wear? What do they eat? How do they express themselves through art?

Social Structure

- Define the social hierarchy. Who holds power? What are the roles of different classes or groups?

Establish Magic and Technology

Magic System

- Set the rules and limitations of magic. Who can use it? How does it work? What are its costs and consequences?

Technology

- Decide on the level of technological advancement. Is your world medieval with swords and castles, or does it have steampunk elements?

Design Political and Economic Systems

Governments

- Create various forms of government. Are there kingdoms, republics, or empires? How do they interact?

Economy

- Define the economic systems. What are the main industries and trade routes? How do people earn a living?

Build Religions and Beliefs

Religions

- Develop religions and belief systems. Who are the gods or deities? What are the rituals and holy sites?

Myths and Legends

- Craft myths and legends that influence the culture and behavior of your characters.

Craft Unique Flora and Fauna

Creatures

- Invent unique creatures that inhabit your world. Consider their habitats, behaviors, and interactions with humans.

Plants

- Design plants with special properties. Are there magical herbs or dangerous plants?

Incorporate Conflict and Tension

Internal Conflicts

- Think about internal conflicts within societies, such as class struggles, political intrigue, or religious disputes.

External Conflicts

- Consider external threats like invading armies, natural disasters, or magical catastrophes.

Use Maps and Visual Aids

Maps

- Create maps to visualize your world. This helps you keep track of locations and distances.

Visual References

- Use images or sketches to inspire and flesh out your world.

Stay Consistent

Consistency

- Keep track of the details to maintain consistency. Use a worldbuilding bible or document to record important information.

Feedback

- Share your world with others and get feedback. Sometimes fresh eyes can spot inconsistencies or offer new ideas.

Let Your Characters Explore

Character Perspective

- Develop your world through the eyes of your characters. How do they interact with their environment? What do they know or believe about their world?

Be Flexible

Adapt and Evolve

- Be open to changing aspects of your world as your story develops. Sometimes the best ideas come during the writing process.

[genderkoolaid]

In 2020, the global mean temperature was 0.61C higher than 1990. The researchers found that about 65% of that increase could be attributed to emissions from the global richest 10%, a group they defined as including all those earning more than €42,980 (£36,472) a year. That includes all those on the UK median salary for full-time employees, which is £37,430. Wealthier groups bore more disproportionate responsibility still, with the richest 1% – those with annual incomes of €147,200 – responsible for 20% of global heating, and the richest 0.1% – the 800,000 or so people in the world raking in more than €537,770 – responsible for 8%. “We found that the wealthiest 10% contributed 6.5 times more to global warming than the average, with the top 1% and 0.1% contributing 20 and 76 times more, respectively,” the write in their paper, published on Wednesday in the journal Nature Climate Change. Co-author Carl-Friedrich Schleussner, said: “If everyone had emitted like the bottom 50% of the global population, the world would have seen minimal additional warming since 1990.” On the other hand, if the whole world population had emitted as the top 10%, 1% or 0.1% had, the temperature increase would have been 2.9C, 6.7C or a completely unsurvivable 12.2C.

[hgfictionwriter]

Self Control: Part Three - Finding Out

Jessie Fleming x Reader

Summary: It’s been a few weeks since you and Jessie started trying for a family. Will you be welcoming a new member to your family?

Warnings: Smut. Oral (cunnilingus). G!P (girl penis) sex. Language.

Jessie stepped out of the shower, wiping her face as she did so. She grabbed her towel off the rack and started drying off.

She wrapped the towel around herself and moved over to the counter to start her routine when you stepped inside the bathroom.

“Geez babe, didn’t know you were up,” Jessie said as she looked at you in the mirror. Her surprised expression relaxing into a quiet smile upon seeing your tousled hair and wearing one of her shirts you’d stolen for a pyjama top.

“Couldn’t sleep more,” you said simply as you ran your fingers through your hair and came up behind her. Jessie smiled further as you wrapped your arms around her middle and rest your chin on her shoulder.

“Why is that?” Jessie asked, a mild frown on her face as she tilted her head to kiss your cheek.

You shrugged against her. “Not sure, really. I’m tired, but I just couldn’t fall asleep again,” you replied as you snuggled into her. You tipped your chin down to lay a single kiss on the nape of her neck.

“Okay, what can we do to get you some more sleep then? It’s Saturday, you should catch up on rest,” Jessie said, looking at you again in the mirror.

It was busy for you this past week at work. You were a program manager at a local climate change non-profit. Jessie met you through her interest in the field when she first collaborated with your organization.

She’d initially reached out to your org, inquiring how she could make a difference. Things escalated quickly upon recognizing her name; a series of meetings were set up, talks about media, etc. but she met you in the process and you immediately felt like the calm in a burgeoning storm to her and your work reminded her of why she’d engaged in the first place. Now, years later, she could hardly remember a time before you.

“Mm, nothing,” you said slowly, Jessie spying a hint of a smirk forming at the corner of your mouth. “I’m waking up already,” you went on as your hand started to caress Jessie’s faintly defined abs. Jessie righted herself as you began kissing her neck again, kisses slow and lingering now.

“Yeah?” Jessie said with a bit of a chuckle as she smirked into the mirror, though subconsciously leaning back into your embrace.

“Mmhmm,” you nodded, now giving open mouth kisses against Jessie’s exposed shoulder. “You know I’m not a morning person, but you provide nice motivation.”

Jessie was formulating a witty response when your hand snaked down into her towel to start caressing her length. Her breath caught in her lungs at the feel of your warm hand around her.

“How are you this morning, my love?” You asked between kisses that trailed up her neck.

She swallowed. “Good,” she forced out, answer clipped though she now bore a crooked grin as she locked eyes with you in the mirror.

“That’s good,” you said. “But I bet I can make it even better,” you finished, a lilt in your voice. You held Jessie’s gaze as you removed your hand, her releasing a breath as you did so, and you lifted your fingers up to your mouth, licking them before starting to rub her once more.

“Mmnph,” Jessie voiced, her gaze flitting to the ceiling as your warm hand moved slickly up and down her length. Heat started to rush between her legs and she felt herself started to grow firm within your skillful grasp.

You undid Jessie’s towel and let it drop to the floor. “You’re beautiful,” you told her as your other hand continued to sensually explore her abs, while the other slowly stroked her to attention. Jessie gripped the counter, her knuckles turning white.

She let out a soft moan as you stroked her hardness. She began to slowly thrust into your hand and caught the smirk you gave her in the mirror.

“What about you, baby?” She asked with a breathy laugh as she reached behind her, no shorts to bypass, just your underwear which she easily pulled aside with her fingers to stroke your heat. Her cock pulsed with excitement at the wetness that coated her fingers.

“Seems like you’re pretty worked up, too,” she chuckled again as she watched your eyes flutter shut as she pushed her fingers through your slick folds.

Jessie shifted, turning and gently grabbing you by the waist to lift you onto the bathroom counter. Your legs opened immediately for her and she nestled herself between them, her arousal pressing against your stomach for now. She kissed you, cupping your cheek as she did so. She deepened the kiss as you wrapped your arms around her shoulders.

You reached between your bodies, your hand wrapping around Jessie once more and thumbing the bead of precum that had formed at the tip.

“You’re so wanting, baby,” Jessie teased into your kiss. Her jaw dropped as you circled her tip and stroked her again.

“You are too, baby,” you teased with a kiss. Jessie exhaled in a quick laugh.

“And whose fault is that?” She asked as she ground up into your hand and bit your lower lip. She grinned as you let out a short moan.

Jessie took a step back, your hand following her for a bit until you let go with a disappointed look, setting your hands on the counter as you gave her a pout.

Your eyes followed her as she knelt before you, peeling your underwear down your legs and discarding it. She relished the way your fingers wrapped around the edge of the counter and you rolled your shoulders with a breath of anticipation.

“You are the most gorgeous woman I’ve ever known,” Jessie told you unequivocally as she placed her hands on your thighs and shifted inward. She held back a grin at how you bit your lip, tracking her movements.

Jessie leaned forward and dipped her tongue into your dripping entrance, drawing a sharp gasp out of you. She grinned into you as your grip on the counter tightened.

Soon, Jessie was rocking her face into your pussy, loving how your juices started to coat her face.

“You taste so good, baby,” she said as she licked upward to then latch onto and suck your clit.

She devoured you, refusing to come up for air as you whimpered and rocked into her waiting mouth, your pitch rising. She ignored how her cock strained and ached, looking for release. She didn’t even realize how she was subtly rocking her hips up in a vain attempt to find you.

When your hand came to the back of Jessie’s head, she moaned heavily into you and lapped at you with greater fervour. She dug her fingers into your thighs and pulled you closer into her face.

“Oh God, Jess,” you breathed as you gripped her hair and ground yourself against her.

It was only a matter of time before your thighs tightened around Jessie’s head as you released a small cry and you flooded her mouth with juices. Jessie groaned deeply into you as she drank every bit of your wetness that she could.

You were breathing heavily, your shoulders slumped as she stood, wiping her mouth before kissing your neck. Your eyes were closed as you wrapped your arms around her and let out a tired whimper.

“Are you done, baby?” Jessie asked as she slowly shifted her hips up, her cock pushing through your slick folds. Your body jolted as the head of her cock pushed across your clit. Despite your fading orgasm, you groaned and dropped your hands to grip Jessie’s tight ass in response. She chuckled.

Jessie kissed your neck as she brought her tip to your sopping entrance. She circled it a few times, before pushing gently forward, allowing her tip to slowly stretch you open.

Jessie grit her teeth as you let out a light gasp while she teased your entrance.

“Jess, please,” you pleaded as Jessie pushed in painfully slow, her exhaling sharply as your entrance gripped her head tightly. She shifted her hips back subtly, almost popping out yet drawing another moan out of you. “Come on, baby, please,” you begged.

She inadvertently dug her fingers into your hips as she rotated her own forward and sunk in. You both moaned at the sensation.

Jessie wrapped her arm around you as she hugged you tightly to her. She glanced in the mirror to see your reflection, your head tossed back in pleasure.

“Mm. You look so amazing, babe,” Jessie said took in the curves of your back, hips and ass.

Jessie started pumping into you, ditching her typical slow start to instead slap her hips up into you with sharp, quick thrusts that had you moaning heavily in her ear as you clutched to her.

She reached up and started to knead one of your breasts. She retracted her hand abruptly when you winced.

“Sorry, babe,” she said as she very gently brought her hand back to rest on your breast apologetically. She slowed her thrusts as she focused on gauging you.

“It’s okay,” you told her, placing a hand over hers. “They’re just really tender right now.”

Jessie’s thrusts slowed further and she stared quietly as her mind started to turn. You still had your other arm around her shoulder and you held her gaze.

“They’re usually sensitive leading up to my period,” you told her before going on quietly. “You know that.”

She did know that. But you’ve never winced like that before. You seemed to read her mind.

“It’s probably nothing,” you went on softly.

Jessie’s thrusts slowed to a stop and her gaze dropped to your stomach for a moment before looking up at you.

“It’s probably nothing,” you repeated, your voice merely a whisper this time as you anxiously kneaded the back of Jessie’s neck with your fingers.

“Do you want it to be nothing?” Jessie asked, working to keep disappointment out of her voice. You shook your head immediately.

“No,” you said. “I just don’t want to get my hopes up,” you went on, voice so faint Jessie could hardly hear you.

Jessie nodded in understanding. It’d been a few weeks since that first morning and your period was due in a few days. You’d both agreed to not get too eager and test early.

“And if it is something?” Jessie asked, her hands enclosing around your waist further as she held your gaze, eyes searching.

You watched her wordlessly, brows furrowed, but a smile soon formed on your face. Your hand came forward to rest on the side of Jessie’s neck, your thumb caressing her cheek.

“Then we’re having a family,” you said with quiet joy that Jessie saw you actively trying to dampen.

“Then we’re having a family,” Jessie repeated with the resoluteness that you were holding back. A smile started to spread across Jessie’s face as your eyes continued to search hers and slowly lit up. You pulled her in tightly to you, hugging her close.

“Bed. Now,” you told her a few moments later as you pulled back slightly.

Jessie, whose hardness was still sheathed inside of your tight heat, didn’t hesitate as she picked you up into her arms, remaining inside of you as she carried you to the bed.

She lay you down gently on the edge of the bed, mindful to stay joined with you as she lifted you and shifted you further up the bed so your head was resting on the pillows.

Your hands were all over her, searching and caressing, pulling her close as you whispered sweet words in her ear. She rocked into you, full, deep strokes as she chanted declarations of devotion and adoration to you.

Jessie broke away from a kiss to gaze down at you and you locked eyes with one another. Your eyes were misty with passion and emotion and Jessie’s eyes started to sting with tears as well. She smiled at you and you rushed up to meet her in a loving kiss.

Before long, your shared climax was upon you. Jessie shifted upwards, spreading your legs further as she pumped in and out of you.

“I really do mean it,” she panted in your ear. “I know we’ve been talking dirty about all of this. But I love you so much. And the idea of raising a family with you…I couldn’t want anything more. And the idea of you choosing me,” Jessie let out a high grunt, blinking back tears, “I’m amazed and so grateful. I love you.”

“There’s no one else for me,” you told her as you kissed her passionately before letting your head fall back with mounting pleasure. “Cum with me,” you urged.

Heat radiated out from Jessie’s core at your words.

“Always,” she said.

Your cries grew and Jessie groaned as your nails sunk into the skin of her back. You began to tighten and convulse around her length and she gave a few more thrusts before bottoming out, holding herself there and pouring herself out deep inside of you.

You both lay spent, Jessie kissing along your shoulder, neck and face before she sat up back onto her heels. She withdrew to the tip as she did so and gazed down in awe at how the mix of your cum fully coated her still hard cock. She sunk back in slowly and pulled back one more time, biting her lip at the way the cum spread along her cock and pooled at the base.

“Mmm, I gotta stop,” Jessie said though she couldn’t tear her eyes away from where your entrance was hugging her tightly. “I promised Sinc and Janine I’d meet them for brunch.”

You flexed around her, causing her eyes to shut before she gave you a glare that dissolved into an appreciative grin.

“We can always continue later,” you told her with a teasing grin. Jessie returned it, but it faded as yours did too. She gave you a questioning look as she gently pulled out of you and laid down next to you, laying her arm across you.

“I know this has been quick and spontaneous,” you started as your hand absently drew circles on her forearm, “but I’ll still be disappointed if I get my period. I know that’s silly.”

“It’s not silly,” Jessie assured you as she laid a chaste kiss to your cheek. “I feel the same. But I guess we have to keep in mind that it can take some time. Even if it doesn’t happen right away, we can just keep trying. And, if, we have trouble, we can see fertility doctors and see what’s going on. We’re fortunate to have the resources to have options,” she said.

“You’re right,” you told her quietly as you turned your head to her, she cupped your face. “I just really want a family with you, Jess. However it needs to happen.”

“Me too, baby,” she replied. “Let’s not get discouraged yet though. We don’t know anything about this cycle. And it’s early in this entire process.” She saw the worry in your eyes and pulled you into a sweet kiss while giving your waist a reassuring squeeze.

You pulled back with a soft sigh. “Should we still wait a few days to take the test?”

Jessie shrugged. She wanted to know, but it was more important to her to let you set the pace. “It’s entirely up to you. I’m with you whenever you want to.”

You chewed your lip, your gaze unfocused as you thought. “Let’s stick to the plan,” you told her. “This may not be anything at all. No need to veer off course.” Jessie smiled at you and nodded. She’d have to be patient a while longer.

“Sure thing, love. A few more sleeps. And we’re together in this no matter what happens.”

—————

A couple days later, Jessie was making coffee for you both. Her training bag was packed and ready to go at the door and she’d heard the shower turn off a while ago and knew you’d be emerging, ready for work shortly.

She was twisting on the lid of your travel mug when you stepped out.

“What’s wrong with that coffee?” You asked. She turned with a puzzled look to see you sporting a similar expression.

“What do you mean?” She asked.

“You don’t smell that?” You continued as you approached, your face screwing up further as you got closer to the source of the aroma. “It smells foul.”

Jessie gave you a more perplexed look as you reached out to the container and held it up to your nose briefly before extending it away with a look of disgust.

“You’re kidding me, Jess. That smells fine to you?”

You both held one another’s gaze for a few, long seconds.

“Um, aversion to smells. Isn’t that…?” Jessie trailed off though she knew the answer. Of course she did extensive research as soon as you both agreed upon this path.

She saw you swallow before giving a tentative nod.

“Jess, are we…,” you trailed off as well. “Already?”

Jessie went to speak when you abruptly held up your hands and turned, walking a few steps away.

“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” you said in a rush. “I’m not supposed to get my period yet. So, we’re just reading into things.”

“Okay, dear,” Jessie acquiesced though she felt the spark of hope from the other day start to ignite.

“Don’t ‘dear’ me,” you said mildly as you gave her a look, though dropped your gaze and started to chew at the corner of your thumb. Jessie shot you a look and bit back a laugh.

“We said we’d wait to test,” you reminded her and she held up her hands in defense.

“Yes, love,” Jessie replied placatingly. Still, you huffed at her. Jessie couldn’t help but find it adorable as her body started to buzz with mounting excitement.

You snatched up the mug, but immediately set it back down with a visible swallow as you turned your nose up at it. You gave Jessie an apologetic look.

“I can’t drink this. I’m sorry,” you told her. Jessie shook her head excessively.

“That’s fine!” She dismissed. You sighed again, giving her a weary look.

“Don’t read into this,” you warned her. “I’ll see you after work today.”

Jessie pulled you into a hug despite your mood and kissed you. “Have a good day, baby. Text me when you can.”

“You too,” you said with a pout as you kissed her back.

————

“Y/n!” Jessie called as she stepped into your shared apartment after practice. She closed the door behind her and was met with silence.

You’d texted her prior saying you’d be home late, so she didn’t fully expect to see you yet, but she was hopeful.

She was glad to be home. Admittedly, she was unfocused at practice today. Her mind kept drifting back to recent signs that your family may be coming to fruition sooner rather than later; something both of you had been afraid to be too hopeful for.

She knew you wanted to tame expectations, but she couldn’t stop thinking about it. She was already planning out key dates and all sorts of things. Her mind raced when she let it and it left her body buzzing with anticipation.

She was prepping dinner when you came through the door. She wiped her hands and came to greet you. She stopped in her tracks when she saw the pharmacy bag in your hand. You locked eyes.

“I can’t wait any longer,” you said. “And I know you’ve just been giving me space. I know you’re dying to know too.”

Jessie grinned sheepishly. “You could say it’s been on my mind.”

“I know,” you said with a small smile as you came up and kissed her. “Thanks for being patient.”

Jessie wrapped her arms around you and you held one another quietly for a few seconds. Jessie tucked her head into your shoulder as you gave her a gentle squeeze.

“You ready?” You asked as you pulled back in her embrace. Jessie gave you a crooked grin.

“I’m absolutely ready.”

You’d both talked about how you wanted to do this. So Jessie led you by the hand to the bathroom and she had her hands on your waist and kissed your shoulders chastely as you prepped the test.

Jessie leaned back against the wall and waited for you to take the test. You placed the cap on it and took a deep breath, looking up to meet Jessie’s watchful gaze. You held out the test for her to hold and you got up. Jessie set a timer.

When you were ready, Jessie lifted you up onto the bathroom counter. Still clutching the test in one hand, she wrapped her arms around you as yours came up around her shoulders. She rubbed your back with her free hand and you rest your head against hers as you waited for the timer to go.

When Jessie’s alarm went, she silenced it immediately. She still held you close but she could feel the tension rising in both your bodies. Your grip tightened on her and you tucked your head closer into her.

“Still want me to look?” Jessie asked softly. You nodded against her. You wanted her to be the one to check the results. “Okay,” Jessie said with a quick exhale.

She was going to disentangle herself from your embrace and check, but decided against it. She continued to hold you. Her heart was beating out of her chest as she held up the test, her hand shaking as she did so.

Her mouth was dry as she trained her eyes on the test. She felt short of breath and blinked as she processed the results.

She pulled you impossibly closer before pulling back to look you in the eye, your expression a mix of anticipation, hope and worry. This woman that she loved so very, very much.

“Y/n…we’re having a baby.”

A/N: Long chapter, folks. But I have lots more story to tell and wanted to hit this milestone in their journey. Part Four is available here.

[whencyclopedia]

The Indus Valley Civilization was a cultural and political entity which flourished in the northern region of the Indian subcontinent between c. 7000 - c. 600 BCE. Its modern name derives from its location in the valley of the Indus River, but it is also commonly referred to as the Indus-Sarasvati Civilization and the Harrapan Civilization. These latter designations come from the Sarasvati River mentioned in Vedic sources, which flowed adjacent to the Indus River, and the ancient city of Harappa in the region, the first one found in the modern era. None of these names derive from any ancient texts because, although scholars generally believe the people of this civilization developed a writing system (known as Indus Script or Harappan Script) it has not yet been deciphered. All three designations are modern constructs, and nothing is definitively known of the origin, development, decline, and fall of the civilization. Even so, modern archaeology has established a probable chronology and periodization: Pre-Harappan – c. 7000 - c. 5500 BCE Early Harappan – c. 5500 - 2800 BCE Mature Harappan – c. 2800 - c. 1900 BCE Late Harappan – c. 1900 - c. 1500 BCE Post Harappan – c. 1500 - c. 600 BCE The Indus Valley Civilization is now often compared with the far more famous cultures of Egypt and Mesopotamia, but this is a fairly recent development. The discovery of Harappa in 1829 CE was the first indication that any such civilization existed in India, and by that time, Egyptian hieroglyphics had been deciphered, Egyptian and Mesopotamian sites excavated, and cuneiform would soon be translated by the scholar George Smith (l. 1840-1876 CE). Archaeological excavations of the Indus Valley Civilization, therefore, had a significantly late start comparatively, and it is now thought that many of the accomplishments and “firsts” attributed to Egypt and Mesopotamia may actually belong to the people of the Indus Valley Civilization. The two best-known excavated cities of this culture are Harappa and Mohenjo-daro (located in modern-day Pakistan), both of which are thought to have once had populations of between 40,000-50,000 people, which is stunning when one realizes that most ancient cities had on average 10,000 people living in them. The total population of the civilization is thought to have been upward of 5 million, and its territory stretched over 900 miles (1,500 km) along the banks of the Indus River and then in all directions outward. Indus Valley Civilization sites have been found near the border of Nepal, in Afghanistan, on the coasts of India, and around Delhi, to name only a few locations. Between c. 1900 - c. 1500 BCE, the civilization began to decline for unknown reasons. In the early 20th century CE, this was thought to have been caused by an invasion of light-skinned peoples from the north known as Aryans who conquered a dark-skinned people defined by Western scholars as Dravidians. This claim, known as the Aryan Invasion Theory, has been discredited. The Aryans – whose ethnicity is associated with the Iranian Persians – are now believed to have migrated to the region peacefully and blended their culture with that of the indigenous people while the term Dravidian is understood now to refer to anyone, of any ethnicity, who speaks one of the Dravidian languages. Why the Indus Valley Civilization declined and fell is unknown, but scholars believe it may have had to do with climate change, the drying up of the Sarasvati River, an alteration in the path of the monsoon which watered crops, overpopulation of the cities, a decline in trade with Egypt and Mesopotamia, or a combination of any of the above. In the present day, excavations continue at many of the sites found thus far and some future find may provide more information on the history and decline of the culture.

[deception-united]

Let's talk about worldbuilding.

Worldbuilding is a crucial aspect of writing fiction, particularly in genres like fantasy and science fiction.

Remember that worldbuilding is a dynamic process that evolves as you write. Don't be afraid to experiment and make changes to your world as needed to serve the story.

Here are some tips to help you build a rich and immersive world:

Start with a Core Concept: Every world begins with an idea. Whether it's a magic system, a futuristic society, or an alternate history, have a clear concept that serves as the foundation for your world.

Define the Rules: Establish the rules that govern your world, including its physical laws, magic systems, societal norms, and cultural practices. Consistency is key to creating a believable world.

Create a Detailed Map: Optional, but helpful. Develop a map of your world to visualise its geography, including continents, countries, cities, and landmarks. Consider factors like climate, terrain, and natural resources to make your world feel authentic.

Build a History: Develop a rich history for your world, including key events, conflicts, and historical figures. Consider how past events have shaped the present and influenced the cultures and societies within your world.

Develop Cultures and Societies: Create diverse cultures and societies within your world, each with its own beliefs, traditions, languages, and social structures. Explore how different cultures interact and conflict with one another.

Flesh Out Characters: Populate your world with memorable characters who reflect its diversity and complexity. Consider how their backgrounds, motivations, and personalities are shaped by the world around them. (See my post on character development for more!)

Consider Technology and Magic: Determine the level of technology and the presence of magic in your world, and how they impact daily life, society, and the overall narrative.

Think about Economics and Politics: Consider the economic systems, political structures, and power dynamics within your world. Explore issues like inequality, governance, and social justice to add depth to your worldbuilding.

Show, Don't Tell: Instead of dumping information on readers, reveal details about your world gradually through storytelling. Show how characters interact with their environment and incorporate worldbuilding seamlessly into the narrative.

Stay Consistent: Maintain consistency in your worldbuilding to ensure coherence and believability. Keep track of details like character names, historical events, and geographic locations to avoid contradictions.

Leave Room for Exploration: While it's essential to have a solid foundation for your world, leave room for discovery and exploration as you write. Allow your world to evolve organically and be open to new ideas and possibilities.

Revise and Edit: Carefully review your worldbuilding to identify any inconsistencies, plot holes, or contradictory elements. Pay attention to details such as character backgrounds, historical events, and the rules of your world's magic or technology. Make necessary revisions to resolve any issues and maintain the integrity of your worldbuilding.

Happy writing!

Previous | Next

[rnope-c1e]

Hello everyone! I'd like to present to you:

Solarpunk daylight setting system!!!

What is this? This is a way of categorizing and defining solarpunk futures by how far in the future they are by using the natural daylight concept!

The Solarpunk daylight system is supposed to help define your setting, but it's not supposed to limit you in any way!!! It's also supposed to make it easier to search for particular settings in stories :D

🌱Morning Solarpunk 🌄

(Today or Seedling Solarpunk)

Morning Solarpunk resembles the world of today, it resembles the sprouts of solarpunk in societies and our current struggle under capitalism, it resembles the beginning of change.

Morning solarpunk can be happening in twenty-first century or prior.

Defining elements:

Everything you can do today to be solarpunk is what morning solarpunk is! Visibly mended clothing and tools, art on the streets in all forms, guerrilla gardening and permaculture gardens, communities uniting and people joining climate action.

Peaceful Anarchist, Violent World by kayas-kosmos

🪴Noon Solarpunk ☀️

(Tomorrow or Flowering Solarpunk)

Noon solarpunk resembles post-capitalist world or world where significant effort in abolishing capitalism is done. Things are already better, but the scars of the old world are still visible.

Noon Solarpunk is supposed to show us better times and answer the question, what happens on the next day after revolution and in the following years.

Defining elements:

Taking lots of stuff from morning solarpunk and making them more pronounced, repurposed old infrastructure, we can see new solarpunk architecture (sustainable and integrated into nature) appearing, all tech is powered by renewable energy and easily repairable, community gardens everywhere.

Art by mimiitambonne

🌻Evening Solarpunk 🌇

(The day after tomorrow or Ripening Solarpunk)

Evening solarpunk resembles late stage solarpunk world, pure science fiction! This is stories of our successors and how they are living in new refined world!

Defining elements:

Defined by being futuristic, practically unrecognizable from modern age, new hi-tech solarpunk technologies (low tech stuff still exists btw), go as CRAZY as you CAN to show marvelous bright future!

Art by thalieshelen

Things are bound to change and get more refined, please submit your ideas on how this system can be improved! :D

[clevercorvidae]

Why Viktor from Arcane is WRONG About Evolution

Right so, I'm getting my degree in evolutionary biology and evolution as a subject is my absolute bread and butter, so I thought I'd give some insight into a particular line from Arcane and why it both infuriated me AND is also brilliant writing.

(Quick note: I'm not writing this to say the SHOW is wrong about evolution or that the writing is bad. The writing around this is actually amazing and I'll get into that. This IS NOT a critique.)

The line in question happens during episode 6 of season 2 of the show during a conversation between Singed and Viktor where Viktor states the following:

"Evolution has a destination, not to combat nature, but to supercede it. The final, glorious evolution."

Every single thing about this statement is disastrously incorrect. And when I first heard it, it took everything in me not to scream in frustration, but I think I get it now.

The rest of this essay will be me picking apart this quote piece by piece, both to explain WHY its incorrect, but also why that's not necessarily a bad thing.

"Evolution Has a Destination"

We'll start with his first assertion, that evolution has a destination. This is patently false on every level. Evolution occurs constantly, it never ceases.

This is actually a really, really common misconception when it comes to evolution. Many people see the explanation for natural selection, survival of the fittest, and assume that that means evolution is a constant trend of "improvement". There's an assumption that, as we continue to evolve, we become "better".

But that's NOT what "survival of the fittest" means (nor is natural selection the only mechanism of evolution but I digress). "Fitness" is not some overall objective best form, it has a VERY specific definition.

Fitness, when discussing evolutionary biology, refers to your ability to survive within your environment long enough to produce viable offspring. It doesn't mean "fastest" or "strongest", and it's incredibly circumstantial. Every species encounters DIFFERENT challenges based on the biotic (living) and abiotic (non-living) factors of their environment. These pressures are what define "fitness". It's different for all species.

And those pressures are NOT static either. Your environment changes. Plate tectonics shift, natural disasters occur, weather patterns change, other species evolve alongside you, your circumstances as a species will never remain stagnant. New challenges WILL befall you in your environment and you WILL have to evolve new adaptations for continued success.

Even if you tailored everything to perfection, eliminated all challenges, and somehow obtained infinite resources, EVEN THEN you cannot escape the finite resource of SPACE. Your population's density will grow and eventually you will run out of space, and you'd need to, once again, adapt.

(Now, there is a concept in ecology called "climax", where an ecosystem could theoretically perfectly balance itself and remain unchanged for a statistically long period of time, exiting the cycle of succession and in essence, slowing evolution to a crawl at best.

However, this is not only purely hypothetical and heavily debated, it also is not permanent. Even this "perfectly" balanced state of equilibrium cannot compete with the force that is geology and time. Even an ecosystem in climax would eventually be torn asunder by the changing climate and plate tectonics, not to mention neighboring ecosystems.)

There is no static environment and there is no static life, so it's impossible for there to be a "perfect" lifeform. There is no destination, there can't be.

"Not to Combat Nature"

This is Viktor's second statement, and it's... a very interesting choice of words.

Because this... is not actually in response to what Singed says about evolution. His statement is in response to what Viktor has to say about fate:

Viktor: Do you believe in fate, Doctor? Our paths, carved before us guided by... an invisible hand.

Singed: Not fate, evolution. Nature's greatest force, forever in flux.

Singed says he believes in THIS in place of a belief in fate. He doesn't see it as combating nature, but as a force of nature itself. Instead this is actually Viktor's own initial assumption and interpretation of evolution. That evolution combats nature. This is obviously false, and Singed is the one with the right idea.

Evolution is, in fact, a facit of nature itself, of life itself. It is an inseparable part of what defines life; the essence of something being organic in the first place. As I said before, all life evolves CONSTANTLY. We NEVER stop evolving. The results of evolution are often too slow for us to see within our lifetimes, but its still happening. As Singed says, we are "forever in flux".

But Viktor is arguing against something else entirely: that evolution combats nature, that it is an aggressive force, maybe even a destructive one.

Most importantly, to meet something in combat is to be on equal footing, presumably, a mutual struggle. Nature and evolution, equals in a battle that will never end, oscillating between perfection and flaw. This is Viktor's view of Singed's response and of evolution as it currently stands.

"But to Supercede It."

Viktor, however, does not see evolution and nature as equals. Instead, he sees the path of evolution as one that will overtake nature and surpass it. In Viktor's mind humanity is destined to break out of the chains of the organic concept of flaw itself.

But that's impossible, because evolution requires flaws in the first place.

I've talked about how there's no such thing as a perfect, ideal life form, and that alone squanders Viktor's idea of evolution. But it's not just his end goal that doesn't mesh with reality, but the very function of evolution itself.

Evolution relies on diversity. In order for a trait to be selected for or against it must first EXIST within the population. A trait cannot be selected for if the genes that encode for it aren't present, and what is the only way for new alleles come into existence? Mutation. Mistakes. You could even call them imperfections.

Everything that makes us human originated as an inconsistency in the process of DNA replication. We are a tapestry of imperfections, every single living organism on earth. If we didn't have diversity in our gene pools we would have never even become multicellular, we would not have been able to keep up with the changing world at all.

How can you supercede nature via evolution when its made us everything that we are BECAUSE of how messy and flawed nature is in the first place. It's a paradox.

Altogether, Viktor's idea of a destination is impossible, and the very foundations of evolution are built on imperfections. So you may ask yourself: Why does he even believe in this? Why does he say all of this despite being such an intelligent character? Surely he knows he's wrong, right?

"The Final, Glorious Evolution"

Viktor as a character is a lot of things. He's shown to be incredibly intelligent and hyper-competent. He wants to make the world a better place for people suffering because he himself suffered greatly. He's also a perfectionist.

When we first meet Viktor, we're introduced to him as the assistant to the dean of the academy who holds his head high and isn't afraid to be snarky with Jayce for blowing up his apartment. On a whim he chooses to help Jayce, to inspire him to risk it all for Hextech, to improve lives.

He stands with Jayce on the ledge saying no one ever believed in him, so instead he believed in himself. He appears to be incredibly confident.

But we see through the rest of season one that that confidence doesn't come from a place of genuine self love, it comes from security in his abilities. His self-worth is tied to his usefulness, to his impact on the world. Imperfections, in Viktor's eyes, are a mere hindrance.

Viktor isn't actually as confident in himself as he first appears. He postures himself with a lot of faith in what he's able to do, but when it comes to what he IS NOT able to do, he shrivels. He's a deeply insecure person. His disability and his status as a Zaunite have done little for him but hold him back. He thinks he needs fixing, that the undercity needs fixing, that humanity as a whole needs fixing.

So when the hexcore is manipulating him, of course it targets this view in him. Like Viktor, the hexcore wants to change the world to be in its image. It wants to replace all that is organic with that which is artificial, ideal. And so it sings the song of the glorious evolution to Viktor.

Imagine it, a world with no pain, no conflict, no struggle. No environmental pressures to contend with, because a perfect being cannot struggle, it can't make mistakes that lead to pain.

But when we see that imagined world, its a wasteland. In Viktor's own words, a field of dreamless solitude. A flat expanse where nothing can change or grow, nothing new can be experienced, none of humanity's warmth and emotion exist anymore.

"There Is No Prize to Perfection, Only an End to Pursuit"

At first I thought it was kind of silly that a scientist would ever misunderstand evolution to the degree Viktor has with this line. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that Viktor misunderstanding evolution is just another extension of his perfectionism. It's IMPORTANT that he's wrong actually, it's essential to his arc.

He can't perceive the truth of what evolution is at this point in the story because accepting that means accepting that there is beauty in imperfections.

And I think we all know that that lesson is one that he hadn't quit learned yet.

Thanks for reading my insane ramblings.

"There is beauty in imperfections. They made you who you are. An inseparable piece of everything I admired about you." - Jayce Talis

[mariacallous]

The internet—it seemed like such a good idea at the time. Under conditions of informational poverty, our ancestors had no choice but to operate on a need-to-know basis. The absence of pertinent, reliable, and commonly held facts was at first a matter of mere logistics—the stable storage and orderly transfer of knowledge was costly and troublesome, and entropy was free—but, over time, the techniques of civilization afforded us better control over the collection and transmission of data. Vast triage structures evolved to determine who got to learn what, when: medieval guilds, say, or network news reports. These systems were supposed to function in everybody’s best interests. We were finite brutes of fragile competence, and none of us could confront the abyss of unmitigated complexity alone. Beyond a certain point, however, we couldn’t help but perceive these increasingly centralized arrangements as insulting, and even conspiratorial. We were grownups, and, as such, we could be trusted to handle an unadulterated marketplace of ideas. The logic of the internet was simple: first, fire all of the managers; then, sort things out for ourselves. In the time since, one of the few unambiguously good things to have emerged from this experiment is an entire genre of attempts to explain why it mostly hasn’t worked out.

This effort—the attempt to hash out what went so wrong—had something of a rocky start. After 2016, many liberals were inclined to diagnose the pathologies of the internet as a problem of supply. Some people have bad ideas and beliefs. These are bad either because they are false (“climate change is a myth,” “vaccines cause autism”) or because they are pernicious (“we should have a C.E.O. as a monarch,” “foreigners are criminals”). These ideas propagate because the internet provides bad actors with a platform to distribute them. This story was appealing, both because it was simple and because it made the situation seem tractable. The solution was to limit the presence of these bad actors, to cut off the supply at the source. One obvious flaw in this argument is that “misinformation” was only ever going to be a way to describe ideas you didn’t like. It was a childish fantasy to think that a neutral arbiter might be summoned into being, or that we would all defer to its judgments as a matter of course.

The major weakness of this account was that it tended to sidestep the question of demand. Even if many liberals agreed in private that those who believed untrue and harmful things were fundamentally stupid or harmful people, they correctly perceived that this was a gauche thing to say out loud. Instead, they attributed the embrace of such beliefs to “manipulation,” an ill-defined concept that is usually deployed as a euphemism for sorcery. These low-information people were vulnerable to such sorcery because they lacked “media literacy.” What they needed, in other words, was therapeutic treatment with more and better facts. All of this taken together amounted to an incoherent theory of information. On the one hand, facts were neutral things that spoke for themselves. On the other, random pieces of informational flotsam were elevated to the status of genuine facts only once they were vetted by credentialled people with special access to the truth.

There was, however, an alternative theory. The internet was not primarily a channel for the transmission of information in the form of evidence. It was better described as a channel for the transmission of culture in the form of memes. Users didn’t field a lot of facts and then assemble them into a world view; they fielded a world view and used it as a context for evaluating facts. The adoption of a world view had less to do with rational thought than it did with desire. It was about what sort of person you wanted to be. Were you a sophisticated person who followed the science? Or were you a skeptical person who saw through the veneer of establishment gentility?

This perspective has come to be associated with Peter Thiel, who introduced a generation of conservative-leaning acolytes to the work of the French theorist René Girard. This story has been told to hermeneutic exhaustion, but the key insight that Thiel drew from Girard was that people—or most people, at any rate—didn’t really have their own desires. They wanted things because other people wanted those things. This created conditions of communal coherence (everybody wanting the same thing) and good fellowship, which were simultaneously conditions of communal competition (everybody wanting the same thing) and ill will. When the accumulated aggression of these rivalries became intolerable, the community would select a scapegoat for ritual sacrifice—not the sort of person we were but the one we definitely were not. On the right, this manifested itself as various forms of xenophobia and a wholesale mistrust of institutional figures; on the left, as much of what came to be called cancel culture and its censorious milieu. Both were attempts to police the boundaries of us—to identify, in other words, those within our circle of trust and those outside of it.

The upshot of all of this was not that people had abandoned first principles, as liberals came to argue in many tiresome books about the “post-truth” era, or that they had abandoned tradition, as conservatives came to argue in many tiresome books about decadence. It was simply that, when people who once functioned on a need-to-know basis were all of a sudden forced to adjudicate all of the information all of the time, the default heuristic was just to throw in one’s lot with the generally like-minded. People who didn’t really know anything about immunity noticed that the constellation of views associated with their peers had lined up against vaccines, and the low-cost option was to just run with it; people who didn’t really know anything about virology noticed that the constellation of views associated with their peers had lined up against the lab-leak hypothesis, and they, too, took the path of least resistance. This is not to say that all beliefs are equally valid. It is simply to observe that most of us have better things to do than deal with unremitting complexity. It’s perfectly reasonable, as a first approximation of thinking, to conserve our time and energy by just picking a side and being done with it.

Liberals were skittish about this orientation because it replaced our hopes for democracy with resignation in the face of competing protection rackets. But what they really didn’t like was that their bluff had been called. Their preferred solution to informational complexity—that certain ideas and the people associated with them were Bad and Wrong and needed to be banished from the public sphere—wasn’t much better. The urge to “deplatform” made liberals seem weak, insofar as it implied less than total confidence in their ability to prevail on the merits. The conservative account was all about allegiance and power, but at least it didn’t really pretend otherwise. They were frank about their tribalism.

Recent discourse attending to a “vibe shift” has tended to emphasize a renewed acceptance, even in erstwhile liberal circles, of obnoxious or retrograde cultural attitudes—the removal of taboos, say, on certain slurs. Another way to look at the vibe shift is as a more fundamental shift to “vibes” as the unit of political analysis—an acknowledgment, on the part of liberals, that their initial response to an informational crisis had been inadequate and hypocritical. The vibe shift has been criticized as a soft-headed preference for mystical interpretation in place of empirical inquiry. But a vibe is just a technique of compression. A near-infinite variety of inputs is reduced to a single bit of output: YES or NO, FOR or AGAINST. It had been close, but the vibe shift was just the concession that AGAINST had prevailed.

One side effect of the vibe shift is that the media establishment has started to accept that there is, in fact, such a thing as a Silicon Valley intellectual—not the glib, blustery dudes who post every thought that enters their brains but people who prefer to post at length and on the margins. Nadia Asparouhova is an independent writer and researcher; she has held positions at GitHub and Substack, although she’s always been something of a professional stranger—at one company, her formal job title was just “Nadia.” Her first book, “Working in Public,” was an ethnographic study of open-source software engineering. The field was inflected with standard-issue techno-utopian notions of anarchically productive self-organization, but she found little evidence to support such naïve optimism. For the most part, open-source projects weren’t evenly distributed across teams of volunteers; they were managed by at most a few individuals, who spent the bulk of their waking hours in abject thrall to a user-complaint queue. Technology did not naturally lead to the proliferation of professional, creative, or ideological variety. Tools designed for workplace synchronization, she found at one of her tech jobs, became enforcement mechanisms for a recognizable form of narrow political progressivism. In the wake of one faux pas—when her Slack response to an active-shooter warning elicited a rebuke from a member of the “social impact team,” who reminded her that neighborhood disorder was the result of “more hardships than any of us will ever understand”—she decided to err on the side of keeping her opinions to herself.

Asparouhova found that she wasn’t the only one who felt disillusioned by the condition of these once promising public forums. She gradually retreated from the broadest public spaces of the internet, as part of a larger pattern of migration to private group chats—“a dark network of scattered outposts, where no one wants to be seen or heard or noticed, so that they might be able to talk to their friends in peace.” Before long, a loose collection of internet theorists took on the private-messaging channel as an object of investigation. In 2019, Yancey Strickler, one of the founders of Kickstarter, published an essay called “The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet.” The title was an allusion to Cixin Liu’s “Three-Body Problem,” which explains the Fermi paradox, or the apparent emptiness of the universe, as a strategic preference to remain invisible to predatory species. The writer Venkatesh Rao and the designer Maggie Appleton later expanded on the idea of the “cozyweb.” These texts took a fairly uncontroversial observation—that people were hotheaded dickheads on the public internet, and much more gracious, agreeable, and forgiving in more circumscribed settings—as a further sign that something was wrong with a prevailing assumption about the competitive marketplace of information. Maybe the winning ideas were not the best ideas but simply the most transmissible ones? Their faith in memetic culture had been shaken. It wasn’t selecting for quality but for ease of assimilation into preëxisting blocs.

In the fall of 2021, Asparouhova realized that this inchoate line of thought had been anticipated by a cult novel called “There Is No Antimemetics Division.” The book is brilliant, singular, and profoundly strange. Originally serialized, between 2008 and 2020, under the pseudonym qntm (pronounced “quantum,” and subsequently revealed to be a British writer and software developer named Sam Hughes), as part of a sprawling, collaborative online writing project called the SCP Foundation Wiki, “There Is No Antimemetics Division” is part Lovecraftian horror, part clinical science fiction, and part media studies. (This fall, an overhauled version will be published, for the first time, as a print volume.) Its plot can be summarized about as well as a penguin might be given driving directions to the moon, but here goes: it’s a time-looping thriller about a team of researchers trying to save the world from an extra-dimensional “memeplex” that takes the intermittent form of skyscraper-sized arthropods that can only be vanquished by being forgotten (kinda). The over-all concept is to literalize the idea of a meme—to imagine self-replicating cultural objects as quirky and/or fearsome supernatural monsters—and conjure a world in which some of them must be isolated and studied in secure containment facilities for the sake of humanity. What captured Asparouhova’s attention was the book’s introduction of something called a “self-keeping secret” or “antimeme.” If memes were by definition hard to forget and highly transmissible, antimemes were hard to remember and resistant to multiplication. If memes had done a lot of damage, maybe antimemes could be cultivated as the remedy.

This is the animating contrast of Asparouhova’s new book, “Antimemetics: Why Some Ideas Resist Spreading,” published with Yancey Strickler’s Dark Forest Collective. She has devoted her attention, as she puts it in the introduction, to the behavior of “ideas that resist being remembered, comprehended, or engaged with, despite their significance.” She is interested in ideas that cost something. Her initial examples are a little bizarre and slightly misleading: Why do we still observe daylight-saving time when nobody likes it? Why don’t people wash their hands when they know they should? (A clearer and more salient reference might be to the newly memetic “abundance agenda,” which remains essentially antimemetic in substance, insofar as it attempts to replace procedural fetishism and rhetorical grandstanding with the hard, unglamorous, possibly boring work of applying ourselves to basic problems of physical infrastructure.) What she’s ultimately after is a much bigger set of questions: Why can’t we manage to solve these big, obvious collective-action problems? Why, in other words, can’t we have nice things? As she puts it, “Our inability to make progress on consequential topics can be at least partly explained by the underlying antimemetic qualities that they share—meaning that it is strangely difficult to keep the idea top of mind.” These antimemes are crowded out by the electric trivia of online signalling: “As memes dominate our lives, we’ve fully embraced our role as carriers, reorienting our behavior and identities towards emulating the most powerful—and often the most primal and base—models of desire. Taken to the extreme, this could be seen as a horrifying loss of human capacity to build and create in new and surprising ways.”

There are plenty of different frames Asparouhova might have chosen for an investigation into how the structure of a given channel of communication affects the kind, quality, and velocity of information it can carry, but she has settled on the cool-sounding if cumbersome notion of “antimemetics” for a reason. The decision alludes to her conflicted relationship to a clutch of attitudes that are often coded as right-wing. Like many Silicon Valley intellectuals, she thinks that figures like the voguish neoreactionary Curtis Yarvin—whose more objectionable statements she explicitly rejects—and Peter Thiel had long demonstrated a better grasp of online behavior than liberals did. Thiel’s invocation of Girardian scapegoating anticipated the rise of “cancel culture” as a structural phenomenon, and Yarvin was early to point out that the antidote to dysregulated public squares were “smaller, high-context spaces.” If she accepts their descriptive analysis of how the open internet deteriorated into a tribal struggle over public “mindshare,” she rejects their prescriptive complicity with the breast-beating warlords of the new primitivism. Memetic behavior may have got us here, she writes, “but as we search for a way to survive, it is a second, hidden set of behaviors—antimemetic ones—that will show us how to move forward.”

Asparouhova’s basic intuition is that both of the prevailing theories of information on the internet (either that it had to be sanitized and controlled or that it was simply natural for it to remain perennially downstream of charisma) have been wrong. It was foolish to hope that the radical and anarchic expansion of the public sphere—“adding more voices to a room”—would prove out our talent for collective reasoning. But neither do we have to resign ourselves to total context collapse and perpetual memetic warfare. She does not think that all communication can be reduced to a power struggle, she is not ready to give up on democratic values or civilization tout court, and she considers herself one of many “refugees fleeing memetic contagion.” These refugees have labored to build an informational and communicative infrastructure that isn’t so overwhelming, one that can be bootstrapped in private or semi-private spaces where a level of trust and good will is taken for granted, and conflict can be productive and encouraging instead of destructive and terrifying. As she puts it, “If the memetic city is characterized by bright, flashy Times Square, the antimemetic city is more like a city of encampments, strewn across an interminable desert. While some camps are bigger and more storied—think long-established internet forums, private social clubs, or Discords—its primary social unit is the group chat, which makes it easy to instantly throw up four walls around any conversation online.”

The book “Antimemetics” is gestural and shaggy, which makes it a generative and fun read. The central concept is not always clear or systematic, but that seems to come with the antimemetic territory. At times, Asparouhova suggests that antimemes are specific proposals, like the importance of extended parental leave, in perennial lack of a lasting constituency to sustain them. Elsewhere, antimemetic ideas represent the sacred reminder that we are frail and uncertain creatures deserving of grace. This is quite explicitly a pandemic-inflected project, and she often returns to the notion that antimemes have “long symptomatic periods” and are “highly resistant to spread”—if one manages to “escape its original context” and spreads to networks with high “immunity,” it can be prematurely destroyed by the antibodies of “pushback.” The concept can thus seem like a fancy way to say “nuanced,” or like a synonym for “challenging” or “hard-won.” There are places where she implies that antimemes are definitionally good—as in, a name for elusive ideas we should want to propagate—and places where she argues instead that they are morally neutral. Sometimes antimemes are processes—like bureaucracy—and sometimes they seem more like concrete goals. What makes this conceptual muddle appealing, rather than a source of irritation or confusion, is that she’s quite clearly working all this out as she goes along. The book never feels like a vector for the reproduction of some prefabricated case. It has the texture of thought, or of a group chat.

As is perhaps inevitable in even the best internet-theory books, Asparouhova’s antidote ultimately entails the cultivation of the ability to decide what matters and choose to pay attention to it. She recognizes, to her credit, that such injunctions are often corny invitations to flower-smelling self-indulgence; her icon of patience and stamina in the face of obdurate complexity happens to be Robert Moses, which makes for an odd, if refreshing, contrast with the bog-standard tract about the value of attention. More important than one’s individual attention, she continues, is one’s concentrated participation in the subtler kind of informational triage that high-context communities can perform, but she doesn’t think it’s sufficient to give up and tend only these walled communal gardens. The point is not flight or bunker construction. She envisions a recursive architecture where people experiment with ideas among intimates before they launch them at scale, a process that might in turn transform the marketplace of ideas from a gladiatorial arena to something more like a handcraft bazaar: “Group chats are a place to build trust with likeminded people, who eventually amplify each others’ ideas in public settings. Memetic and antimemetic cities depend on each other: the stronger memes become, the more we need private spaces to refine them.”

She grants that this sounds like a lot of effort. It’s an invitation to re-create an entire information-processing civilization from the ground up. But if the easy way had worked—if all you had to do was get rid of the institutional gatekeepers and give everyone a voice, or if all you had to do was remind people that the institutional gatekeepers were right in the first place—we wouldn’t be having this conversation.

“Antimemetics” arrives at an opportune moment for two reasons. The first is that private group chats have matured in precisely the way she predicted. “Somewhere out there, your favorite celebrities and politicians and executives are tapping away on their keyboards in a Signal or Telegram or Whatsapp chat, planning campaigns and revolutions and corporate takeovers,” she writes. A few weeks ago, Ben Smith of Semafor provided ample corroboration, reporting that the venture-capitalist Marc Andreessen turns to group chats for the coordinated dissemination of “samizdat”—the opinionated venture capitalist, according to one source, apparently “spends half his life on 100 of these at the same time.” As the Substack economist Noah Smith put it, “Group chats are now where everything important and interesting happens.” Not all of Asparouhova’s predictions were quite right, though: “No journalist has access to the most influential group chats,” she asserts, a statement rendered hilariously inaccurate by the events of the last two months. None of these examples seems quite like the models of high-minded exchange Asparouhova described on the basis of her own experience, but their apparent pervasiveness underlines the consensus that the public internet exists only for the purposes of yelling into the void—or for the putatively spontaneous expansion of support for campaigns that were coördinated in darkness.

The other thing that’s rendered the book particularly timely has been the development of something like a moral self-audit among Silicon Valley intellectuals, Asparouhova among them, who have come to wonder if their own heterodoxy over the past decade has had politically disastrous consequences. In a miniature drama published online titled “Twilight of the Edgelords,” the writer Scott Alexander, of the widely read blog Astral Codex Ten, has one of his characters declare that “all of our good ideas, the things the smug misinformation expert would have tried to get us cancelled for, have gotten perverted in the most depressing and horrifying way possible.” The character outlines a series of examples: “We wanted to be able to hold a job without reciting DEI shibboleths or filling in multiple-choice exams about how white people cause earthquakes. Instead we got a thousand scientific studies cancelled because they used the string ‘trans-’ in a sentence on transmembrane proteins.” Alexander has more or less done what Asparouhova would have recommended: supervise the rigorous exchange of controversial ideas in a high-context, semi-private setting, and hope that they in turn improve the quality of the public discourse. What Alexander seems to be lamenting is the way the variegated output of his community was, in the end, somehow reduced to FOR or AGAINST, and the possibility that he inadvertently helped tip the scales.

Given the revelations in Ben Smith’s reporting—and his argument that Andreessen’s group chats were “the single most important place in which a stunning realignment toward Donald Trump was shaped and negotiated, and an alliance between Silicon Valley and the new right formed”—Alexander’s honorable exercise in self-criticism seems more like a superfluous bit of self-flagellation. From Asparouhova’s perspective, the lesson we should draw is not that bad ideas should in fact be suppressed but that good ideas require the trussing of sturdy, credible institutions—structures that might withstand the countervailing urge to raze everything to the ground.

For all of its fun-house absurdity, qntm’s “There Is No Antimemetics Division” seems legible enough on this point. Humanity, in the novel, has lived under the recurrent threat of catastrophically destructive memes—dark, self-fulfilling premonitions of scarcity, zero-sum competition, fear, mistrust, inegalitarianism. These emotions and attitudes, which circulate with little friction, turn us into zombies. The zombie warlord is an interdimensional memeplex called SCP-3125. The book’s hero understands that her enemy has no ultimate goal or content beyond the demonstration of its own power, and in turn the worship of power as such: “SCP-3125 is, in large part, the lie that SCP-3125 is inevitable, and indestructible. But it is a lie.” The antidote to this lie is the deliberate commemoration of all of the things that slip our minds—antimemes such as “an individual life is a fleeting thing” and “strangers are fellow-sufferers” and “love thy neighbor.” In the universe of the novel, these opposing forces—of what is too easy to remember and what is too easy to forget—have been locked in a cycle of destruction and rebirth for untold thousands of years. For the most part, it has taken an eternal return of civilizational ruin to prompt our ability to recall the difficult wisdom of the antimeme. The march of technology insures that every new go-round leaves us even more desolate than the last one. This time, Asparouhova proposes, we might try not to wait until it’s too late.

[probablyasocialecologist]

The “wealthiest 10%” of people on the planet are “responsible” for 65% of the 0.61C increase in global average temperatures over 1990-2020, according to new research. The study, published in Nature Climate Change, uses a field of climate science called “attribution” to determine the contribution of the world’s “wealthiest population groups” to climate change through the greenhouse gases they emit. The authors also calculate the contribution of these high-income groups to the increasing frequency of heatwaves and droughts. For example, the study finds the wealthiest 10% of people – defined as those who earn at least €42,980 (£36,605) per year – contributed seven times more to the rise in monthly heat extremes around the world than the global average.  

[...]

The authors find that if the whole world had emitted as much as the wealthiest 10% of people over 1990-2020, global average temperatures would have risen by 2.9C, instead of 0.61C. If the global population had emissions as large as the wealthiest 0.1%, temperatures would have risen by 12.2C. Meanwhile, the study calculates that if the whole world had emissions as low as the poorest 50%, global temperatures would have remained close to 1990 levels.

7 May 2025

[joy-haver]

Life is getting harder, and so, we must get better at it.

Climate change and species extinction and ecosystem collapse are happening quickly. They are spiraling out of control. Even many Ecosystems that are supposed to be the most stable in their regions are facing decline. There are runaway effects, each thing that gets worse makes the next thing get worse faster, more disastrously. Each of these systems becomes less resilient the more of its redundancies are stripped away.

And yet, we can also have cascading effects. I am seeing controlled burns turn the plantation pines into savannas again, for the first time in 200 years, they are burning now, right now, where they would never have imagined to burn a year ago. I am seeing people talk about planting native plants. The nurseries here are selling out of them faster than they can restock. If you ask, they will say “This did not happen last year”. The foundations that have been being built by ecologists over the past half century, and maintained against brutal colonialism by indigenous peoples, are seeping out into the community. I see people talking about river cane, and pitcher plant, and planting paw paw and persimmon and sassafras and spice bush. These things are returning. Even now, in the worst drought in known history of my area, I see more butterflies than last year, because we have put in more of their host plants, their overwinters. We are learning. We are beginning. We are being born into a world of ecology; we are breaking the green wall of blur that defines our settler nonrelationship with nature. The irises are returning to Louisiana, the black bear too. The oysters are returning to Mobile Bay. I hear talk of gopher apples and river oats from the mouths of children. I see the return of the chinquapin, and her larger sister chestnut. It is slow but it is also so fast. It is growing at new trajectories, new rises. Each of these becomes it’s own advocate when planted in space and put in relationship.

We are not doomed. We must claw back from the brink. We must find each other and we must exchange seeds. We must learn to pull invasive species. We must win others over through earnestness and full bellies, through kindling the spark of ecological joy, and then we must show them the way. We must be learning the way ourselves in the meantime. We must teach the children the names we were not told, that were forgotten; how to recognize these friends.

When things are spiraling towards despair and death we must be that spiral towards life and utter utopia. We must build ourselves into full participants in our ecological systems.

As life gets harder, we must get better at it.

[literaryvein-reblogs]

Worldbuilding Worksheets

Worksheets & Templates Geography; World History; City; Fictional Plant

GEOGRAPHY

Major…

Geographical features:

Geographical events:

Climate / flora zones:

Landscapes:

Resources:

Boundaries:

Routes:

Questions to consider…

How does the geography change over time?

What lies outside the boundaries of the world?

Are there unexplained geographical phenomena?

How does geography affect transport?

Are there cycles of change?

How do people interact with the landscape?

How do their activities alter the landscape?

How well are people adapted to the landscape?

How do people study and record their world's geography?

How well do people know the geography of their world?

What are some misconceptions about their landscapes?

Does the landscape provide enough resources?

How does the landscape change people?

Are there unreachable or unexplored places?

How do people feel about the landscape?

How does geography inform science?

How does geography inform art?

Settlement:

Resources:

Features:

Borders:

Geographical Features:

How was it formed?

When was it formed?

How do people use it?

Draw a map of your world (or settlement).

Doodle of a landscape.

WORLD HISTORY

Major...

Eras:

Cultures:

Wars/Cultures:

Events:

Movements:

Disasters:

Leaders:

Alliances:

Polarisations:

Advances:

Regressions:

Discernible Patterns:

Questions to consider...

How is history recorded?

How far back do records date?

Is any history lost and forgotten?

How biased are different cultures' historical accounts?

Is historical knowledge available to everyone?

How seriously do cultures take the study of history?

What are some points of contention?

Are there "natural" historical records?

What is considered the purpose of recording or studying history?

CITY

What is the city’s name?

What defines the settlement as a city?

Who lives here and what are they called?

Why do they live here?

What do the inhabitants do?

What are the city’s resources?

What resources need to be imported?

What is the main source of income?

Where is the city?

Who are its closest neighbours?

Why was the city built here?

How large is the city?

What do the dwellings look like?

Why do they look the way they do?

Are there threats to the city?

If yes, how has the city adapted?

What is the prevalent architectural style?

Who are the city leaders?

Who are the outsiders?

Where do they live?

Is there crime?

If yes, what do the criminals want?

Is there a large rich-poor gap?

How are the thoroughfares arranged?

Where do the inhabitants work?

What are the modes of travel?

How has transportation shaped the city?

Is it easy to leave & re-enter the city?

Are there many foreigners?

How are religions and rites accommodated?

What are the main districts?

What other factors might have affected the city’s development?

What are its landmarks?

What is the air like?

Does the city create its own microclimate?

How is the city regarded by its inhabitants?

How is the city regarded by outsiders?

How old is the city?

Have parts been redeveloped?

Has the city been planned?

How are resources distributed?

How are dwellings laid out?

What materials are used in construction?

What flora and fauna live in the city?

What is characteristic of the citizens?

How does the city reflect the tastes of its inhabitants?

Is the city famous for anything?

What is the city’s emblem / mascot / coat of arms?

What language is spoken?

Do the citizens have a distinct dialect / accent?

FICTIONAL PLANT

Who or what planted this plant?

What does this plant see or sense?

How does this plant get on with its neighbours?

How is this plant adapting to its environment?

What is at the root of this plant?

Who was this plant’s last visitor?

Where are this plant’s parents or progeny?

How did this plant look when it was younger?

Follow this plant through the seasons.

If this plant could talk, what would it tell you?

What makes this plant unique?

Look up the botanical description of this plant.

What makes this plant perfect?

What makes this plant imperfect?

What is this plant’s greatest desire?

What is this plant’s greatest fear?

How does this plant defend itself?

How does this plant deal with adversity?

What will happen after this plant dies?

What is this plant’s favourite memory?

What does this plant think about itself?

How does this plant move?

What do you feel when you touch this plant?

What can this plant sense that you can’t?

How is this plant like you?

What can you learn from this plant?

Source Writing References: Worldbuilding ⚜ Plot ⚜ Character