#like yeah also books reading and research but optics was there

[pizzapasta23045]

So... Since we know that AlHaitham the character is based on the reshearcher that helped create optics...

I will now hc that when he was a child Al Haitham read a book about optics and to test it out he used all the mirrors in his grandma's house to see the effects of light and accidentally almost set the garden on fire.

[erimeows]

I imagined someone giving Jazz the nickname razzberry Jazzberry, or just Jazzberry for some reason, and the first person I considered telling this was you

I'm honored! Here's some basic Jazz x Reader headcanons to go along with that because I realize I haven't done much for him, which is horrible because he deserves all the love. Headcanons below the cut!

Jazz loves humans, and I mean LOVES humans. After the slight, initial fear, he finds that they’re very neat; all different optic colors, hair, skin instead of painted metal, a lot warmer, no ability to transform, tiny, and super fragile, but with similar personalities and languages to Cybertronians. 

But unfortunately, like he had feared the humans at first, many of them feared him as well as the other Autobots. It was no doubt caused by the fact that he was not only a giant compared to them, but also by the fact that due to the war between Decepticons and Autobots being partially brought to earth, there had been a lot of damage and chaos caused by Cybertronians that humans had the right to be afraid of.

So it wasn’t uncommon for Jazz to try and interact with humans, only to have them run away or tell him off. Sari was nice enough, but she was also very little and very busy with other things. He struggled to connect with Ultra Magnus, had issues with Sentinel despite his best efforts, and neither Ratchet nor Optimus were too interested in him, but he’d befriended Bumblebee and Prowl. Bumblebee tried to get him interested in videogames, but it wasn’t really his thing, and while he enjoyed Prowl’s nature walks and yoga, he couldn’t get over his desire to interact with actual humans.

But then he talks to you. You’re kind of in and out of Team Prime’s life, as you’re some scientist doing research on aliens that Optimus has allowed to study them, so you show up every few days and hang around, doing your usual stuff.

Jazz approaches you, and surprisingly, you don’t seem scared at all. You don’t step away, flinch back, ask him to move, or awkwardly exit the conversation. Instead, you look up and meet his optics, then confidently introduce yourself and strike up a casual conversation. 

Oh, wow. Jazz finds that he’s immediately entranced by you, fearless and with (e/c) eyes, soft (s/c) skin, and (h/l) (h/c) hair. You’re really pretty and just as interested in him as he is in you. Not only are you a researcher with an amazing mind, but you also turn out to be funny, brilliant, brave, and bold (AKA you piss Sentinel Prime off to no end, which is a quality about you that he immediately adores).

You guys engage in a lot of the earth hobbies he’s learned like playing videogames, reading books, watching movies and television, doing yoga, and going on nature walks. You also often ride in his vehicle mode and go different places with him, which is nice. Sometimes you’ll take notes and compare his vehicle mode to those on earth, and sometimes you’ll just enjoy yourself. 

One day you come up to him and go;

“Hey, Jazzberry, how are ya?”

Jazzberry. He knows it’s a nickname since it’s so common on earth and feels his spark literally MELT in his chamber. You gave him a nickname! That means you’re close friends! Cute!

“I’m great,” He tries to answer casually and play off how flattered he is. “How about you, (n/n)?”

And, he gives you a nickname back.

You two start hanging out even more and end up dating, of course. You call him Jazzberry and he probably calls you some sort of fruit or sweets related nickname (think ‘peaches’, ‘honey’, etc). 

Not sure how to end this, but yeah! There’s some short, sweet Jazz headcanons. Been meaning to do some for a while. Hope you enjoyed <3

[i-am-not-a-who-i-am-a-what]

there was a moment from yesterday’s episode that set off so many alarm bells in my head and i haven’t seen anyone talking about it yet so i’m going to get my thoughts out there. i’m putting the majority of this post under a readmore bc it got very long thanks to all the transcript quotes i pulled but i really want to know what everyone else thinks about the Implications™

BASIRA

Okay. So… what do we know about Hill Top Road?

ARCHIVIST

Not much.

BASIRA

Another blind spot?

ARCHIVIST

No, it’s – I could look at it, but it… it was… it was like a… a hole. You know that feeling you get when you look down from a, a great height, like you’re being pulled into the abyss?

BASIRA

Kind of?

ARCHIVIST

[Getting lost in thought] Well it was… was like that. Normally I can see it, see the… webs, and feel the power of The Spider emanating from it, but… as I would look… it’s like my mind…. follows the paths of The Web,

[STATIC RISES]

the strands going down and… out… [Catching self] It’s quite disorientating.

[STATIC FADES]

my first thought after hearing this exchange was “huh, that sounds eerily similar to the description of the table the not-them was trapped in.” here it is from mag 3 - across the street:

I’d become enraptured by the table on which he’d placed my tea. It was an ornate wooden thing, with a snaking pattern of lines weaving their way around towards the centre. The pattern was hypnotic and shifted as I watched it, like an optical illusion. I found my eyes following the lines towards the middle of the table, where there was nothing but a small square hole.

my first instinct was that this was some foreshadowing for jon meeting some kind of horrible fate, because well... remember what happened the last time someone got mesmerized by the table?

SASHA

Oh, hey. I’ve found… I’ve found that table you were talking about. Don’t really see what all the fuss is about. Just a… basic… optical illusion. Nothing special… just… just a… wait…

[Hushed and panicked] Jon! Jon, I think there’s someone here. Hello? I see you. Show yourself!

but then i started thinking more about why the table specifically would be referenced, and i remembered the earliest we see it used as artifact of the web, and where: with raymond fielding in hill top road in mag 59 - recluse:

On Sunday evenings, however, we’d all gather for the evening meal, and before we sat down to eat, he would remove the bright white tablecloth that covered it, and we’d gather around the dark wood. I remember it was carved in all sorts of strange swirling designs and patterns. It felt like if you picked a line, any line, you could follow it through to the center, to some deep truth, if only your eye could keep track of the strands that had caught it.

it was while i was checking the transcripts to find the above quote that i also remembered the hole in center of the table that the web pattern leads towards wasn’t always empty - it used to contain a box, and that box contained an apple.

again from again from mag 59:

The center of the table looked, at first, like it was simply part of the wooden top, but if you looked closely, as I did so often, you could see an outline marking the very middle as a small, square box, carved with patterns just like the ones that laced their way over the rest of the table. I don’t remember how long we sat around the table those evenings, nor do I have any memory of what we might have eaten.

...

I reached over and pulled the wooden square from the center of the table. On its own, it appeared to be a small wooden box, and the lid opened smoothly, as my hands moved in a practiced motion. Inside was an apple, green and fresh and still wet with morning dew.

I knew I was going to eat it. I could feel tears desperately trying to push themselves out of my eyes, but I instead decided not to cry. I placed the box down on the table, reached over, and picked up the apple.

the box from the center of the table makes its first appearance in the very first hill top road statement, mag 8 - burned out, where we learn that apparently the apple was full of spiders. 

considering the web’s predilection for filling it’s victim’s bodies with spiders (carlos vittery, annabell cane, the spider husks trevor encountered, the victim of the chelicerae website, the old woman in annabell’s statement, francis, etc.) i think this goes a ways to explain what happened to raymond’s other victims, and what would have happened to mag 59′s statement giver if he’d bitten into the apple:

They lay still now, wrapped in their sticky cocoons. Their bodies seemed warped and bloated in a way I didn’t recognize. But that’s only because at that point in my life, I had never before seen a spider egg sac.

more importantly though, we also learn that the box was buried under the burnt up tree in hill top road’s garden, the one whose uprooting was implied to be linked to agnes’s death: 

STATEMENT

At that moment I made my decision. It was easy, like destroying this tree was the only thing to do, the only path to follow ... When the tree lay on its side, uprooted and powerless, I gazed into the hole where it had sat and noticed something lying there in the dirt.

Climbing down, I retrieved what turned out to be a small wooden box, about six inches square, with an intricate pattern carved along the outside. Engraved lines covered it, warping and weaving together, making it hard to look away.

...

ARCHIVIST

Except… We cannot prove any connection, but Martin unearthed a report on an Agnes Montague, who was found dead in her Sheffield flat on the evening of November 23rd 2006, the same day Mr. Lensik claims to have uprooted the tree.

and keep in mind that the only reason the statement giver in mag 59 didn’t eat the apple, didn’t succumb to the web... was agnes’s kiss:

As the man in the suit told me to follow him in a clipped BBC accent, Agnes walked over, and gestured for me to lean down and listen to her. I did so, but instead of a conspiratorial whisper, she just gave me a quick kiss on the cheek, then ran off down the hall.

...

All at once, my cheek erupted in pain. It was like someone had pressed a hot branding iron into my face, and I could swear that I heard the flesh sizzle as I let out a scream and fell to my knees. I raised my hands to my face and realized in that moment two very important things. The first is that my face seemed to be untouched; I could feel no injury or burn. The second was that raising my hand had been a truly voluntary act. I had willed it myself, and whatever power had been gripping me, tugging me into its web, I was free of it.

at this point you’re probably wondering why i think all this is relevant in terms of what might happen with hill top road, and i have two potential ideas: 

my first idea has to do with the theory that agnes is lingering on as a ghost. this theory isn’t mine, i first encountered it shortly after mag 167 - curiosity aired through this post’s attempt to fix what bits of the timeline were thrown out of wack by the new info. if anyone has any other posts or general thoughts about this theory feel free to share them, i’d love to read them!

this theory is relevant to my speculation that agnes might finally make an appearance because she might have been the ghost seen by one of the statement givers in mag 100 - i guess you had to be there:

MARTIN

Right. Right.

[THROAT CLEARING]

Statement of Lynne Hammond, er, recorded 2nd of May 2017, regarding…

Uh, what, what’s this one about?

LYNNE

I saw a ghost.

MARTIN

O-kay.. Regarding a… a ghost. Statement begins.

who appeared as one of the cultists in mag 190 - scavengers: 

MARTIN

[Puzzled] Celia?

CELIA

Probably. The, um… place I was trapped in, they took my name. I never got it back. But I like Celia, so… yeah! Celia it is.

MARTIN

Uh… H-Hello… Celia.

and was recognized and directly confirmed to be the same person by martin in mag 191 - what we lose:

MARTIN

…

Hey, I meant to ask. Do you recognise that woman, Celia?

ARCHIVIST

Um… no, I, I don’t think so. Why?

MARTIN

I’d swear she gave a statement once.

having her only pop up in mag 190 would have just been a fun easter egg, but having martin directly call out her presence the next episode sounds to me like jonny telling the audience to pay attention, to remember that her statement had to do with the ghost of a young woman on fire who might have been agnes. 

my second idea involves web lighter.

over various statements throughout the previous four seasons we’ve been shown that the web and the desolation have been at war, and hill top road has been their battlefield. the best examples of this come from mag 139 - chosen and mag 149 - infectious doubts respectively. 

on the one hand we have agnes being planted in hill top road by the cult of the lightless flame in an effort to both control her powers and derail the web’s plans, which seems to begin the conflict:

The compromise we came to was Hill Top Road. We knew it was a stronghold of the Web, full of other children Agnes’ age. We would supervise from a distance, but were confident she would be in no danger. The Mother of Puppets has always suffered at our hand; all the manipulation and subtle venom in the world means nothing against a pure and unrestrained force of destruction and ruin.

and on the other we have the web binding gertrude to agnes, thus thwarting the desolation’s ritual, which also involved hill top road:

ARTHUR

Alright. Agnes. How’d you do it? Never did understand it, not really.

GERTRUDE

Ah. That’s a fair enough question. It was the Web. I didn’t know it at the time, of course, and I would call it an accident, but it never is, with them. It’s only after the fact that you can see all the subtle manipulations

... 

So, I began researching what I thought was a counter-ritual of sorts. Like I said, I was young, naive. I somehow found just the right books, made just the right connections, and even got what I thought was a piece of blind good luck when I found a tin box in the ashes of Hill Top Road, containing some perfectly preserved cuttings of her hair.

wouldn’t it seem symbolic, fitting with the dream logic we’ve been working with all season (and that the fears have always tended to work with), if what ended the metaphysical war was an artifact touched by both the web and the desolation? 

say perhaps... a device that creates fire while being marked by a symbol of the spider? one that just so happened to be delivered to the institute at the same time as a certain table?

TIM

Er, what is it?

ARCHIVIST

A lighter. An old Zippo.

TIM

You smoke?

ARCHIVIST

No. And I don’t allow ignition sources in my archive!

TIM

Okay. Is there anything unusual about it?

ARCHIVIST

Not really. Just a sort of spider web design on the front. Doesn’t mean anything to me. You?

TIM

Ah no. No.

ARCHIVIST

Well… show it to the others, see what they think. You said there was something else as well?

TIM

Oh, ah yes, yeah, it was sent straight to the Artefact Storage, a table of some sort. Ah, looks old. Quite pretty, though. Fascinating design on it.

all signs point to the best hope of escaping whatever plans the web has for jon lying with the desolation, or at least with fire, and who should be waiting in hill top road than someone who’s been known to burn statements in the past... and someone who, as of mag 162 - a cozy cabin, was the last person to mention the lighter: 

MARTIN

So, should we destroy it? Before we go?

[THE CABIN CREAKS VERY LOUDLY.]

ARCHIVIST

I honestly don’t know if we can.

[HE SIGHS.]

MARTIN

Mm.

ARCHIVIST

Besides, there’s – far worse out there. Better to try and avoid it, I think.

MARTIN

We’re not even gonna try? Look, we’ve got your lighter; maybe if we just –

i haven’t even begun to touch on the multiple instances of spiral marked individuals interacting with hill top road, or the potential role of the rift leading from the world without the institute to the reality with the institute from mag 114 - cracked foundations, or the foreshadowing we’ve gotten throughout this season that the archive might be destroyed by fire and how it’s looking more and more like that means jon might die, or the significance of the tapes and what power might be behind them...

but it’s nearing five in the morning where i am and i’ve been working on this frankly gargantuan post since about midnight, so i’m going to let more meta-inclined minds take it from here. tell me what you think! where do you agree with me, where do you think i’ve gone astray? hell, tell me if you think i’m just spinning my wheels, this is the first real theory post i’ve ever made so i might be completely off base, at least i tried lol.

tl;dr: 

the call back to the imagery surrounding the web table and its long history with hill top road and the desolation is leading me to believe that whatever plans the web has in hill top road for jon, fire is going to have a significant role in whether or not the web gets what it wants; either agnes herself might finally make an appearance or the web lighter might finally come into play.

[secret-engima]

skriarcano

This is an awesome rant! I’m certain they didn’t watch the movie either. Somewhere in the book there’s a line basically saying she’s never worn anything but white and umm...no? Also the events of Kingsglaive were only mentioned maybe twice in extremely passing fashion. Also...you’d think maybe she’d recognize more than Regis in the throne room? At the very least you’d think she’d have a reaction to herself. It felt like they gave them the DLC outline and points to hit and no time for research.

Me: Thanks!

And ooooh yeah I remember noticing that and getting severely annoyed. Because- I get being on a timeline. I understand that this writer probably has several contracts to complete and a life to live.

But she really couldn’t have sat down and watched the movie? It’s only around 2 hours. I think it’s less than that? Wouldn’t even have to watch it in one sitting, because pause is a thing?

And you say “it felt like” they gave the author the outline and the basics and nothing else but you’re honestly probably right??? Heck I’m marginally impressed they bothered to do even that because I’ve read licensed Transformer novels where the author doesn’t even bother to keep the main characters names straight and doesn’t use any of the terminology found in like- the comics or shows (servo, optic, etc etc). The early part of the novels is ... okay but then the misspells happen and the plot holes happen and characters show up where they can’t be because they’re already in a scene on another space ship or something and I had to put it down and walk away.

I am always really leery of tie-in novels since then because if the author isn’t already a fan of the work, then it’s so, SO easy for stupid mistakes to happen or it to seem like the author doesn’t care beyond the paycheck (maybe they don’t, or maybe the company just didn’t give them enough info or enough time to research on their own, I honestly can’t tell).

With that as the judgement bar, I have to grudgingly admit that the author of DoTF doesn’t do nearly as badly as she could have. Because I would be 100% unsurprised if the author wrote that entire thing working from an info packet the company gave that was like “Here’s a summary of each ‘important’ character and what they look like, here’s a summary of the game plot and also kinda the movie we never talk about, here’s a summary of the DLC we wanted to make and here’s the plot points we need you to hit” and then just let her go from there. Which, when working on a beloved game with characters the readers are going to know better than you��... isn’t a lot to work with. At all.

Still won’t stop me from ranting on the characterization issues, but like. I can see that happening.

[montagnarde1793]

Ribbons of Scarlet: A predictably terrible novel on the French Revolution (part 2)

In case you were wondering, that’s not actually the novel’s subtitle, which is really “A Novel of the French Revolution’s Women.” But like, only the famous ones. Ok, I’m done. Moving on...

Parts 1, 3, 4 and 5.

Structural Issues

 While the choice of characters was a red flag for me (and not in a good way), choosing to structure the book the way they did was a mistake.

 This is true for a number of reasons. (I’m sorry, btw, for all the comparisons to Marge Piercy’s novel, but the shared conceit kind of made it inevitable.) Piercy’s characters also only got an average of 80 pages each (though as the typeset was denser, they arguably had a little bit more space), but since the POVs were interspersed, they played off each other much more naturally and allowed the characters the time to develop. Even there it could feel underdeveloped, but here it seems like they’re rushing the undeserved character development so they have some kind of complete arc for each character before the next part starts.

Some chapters are clumsier at this than others. The absolute worst is Pauline Léon’s, which is unsurprising for a number of reasons, but notably because she has the fewest pages of anyone except Charlotte Corday, who doesn’t really get an arc: she shows up in the plot already wanting to assassinate Marat; she succeeds; she doesn’t regret her decision; she’s tried and executed. That’s it.

 This choice also means that the main strength of this type of anthology goes largely untapped: namely, that we get different POVs on the same events. Since each protagonist is associated with a different period in time, we can only ever get their point of view on previous events through awkward flashbacks.

 It probably also accounts for one of the worst, most artificial and amateurish aspects of the book: the way in any given section the other six point of view characters are shoehorned into the narrative, whether it makes any sense or not. The protagonists of the different sections have to have some (highly improbable) relationship with one another or be reflecting on each other’s lives in the most ham-fisted, author-soapbox way possible. We’ll circle back to that last part in a bit.

 Possibly the most ludicrous example of this is Manon Roland’s inexplicable decision to take a random trip to Caen in mid to late August 1792 just so the author can have her run into Charlotte Corday. Like, do I even need to explain how little sense this makes? Apparently so. Look, first of all, going from Paris to Caen was not a trivial trip in the 18th century. Today you could make a day-trip of it and not be missed. It’s about 2 hours each way in the TGV. But in the 18th century, you’re looking at more like 2 days each way, minimum. Not the sort of trip you tend to make without an ostensible reason. Does Manon Roland have one, even as written? No, she does not. She’s going to Caen to flee the temptation of François Buzot’s advances. Which, ok, internal motivation for leaving Paris, but they don’t bother to give her a pretext. How is she going to explain to her husband her random absence of at least 4 days (not to mention the expense)? And why Caen (other than the external reason of the author’s wanting her to come across Corday)? She has no connections there. Does the author even know that the main person Manon Roland knows from the region is Buzot and that it’s therefore the last place she should flee to stop thinking about him? And she’s supposed to be a savvy politician: does she not care about the optics, as the interim Minister of the Interior’s wife, of fleeing in the opposite direction as the Austro-Prussian troops are advancing on Paris?

 And I know what you’re thinking: I’m overthinking this. This wasn’t a book designed for specialists. But I think a reader can tell when a world they’re reading about doesn’t feel fully fleshed-out. In that sense, it’s less about accuracy than it is about how flat and artificial a reading experience it makes for. One of the most valuable things I was taught in school was that when making a presentation, you should always know more than you intend to say. I think the same goes for fiction: you should know more about the setting and the characters than appears on the page. In this book I consistently have the impression that the authors know less.

 Moreover, the authors claim to have been striving for maximum consolidation of characters in order to reduce confusion, but it ends up coming across as both artificial and condescending. Trust your readers to be smart enough to work through their confusion. Otherwise you make it feel like there were a total of about 20 people in Paris during the Revolution, which, again, makes the setting feel completely artificial.

 While I’m not sure anything but better research and writing could have salvaged it, this book would have already been 1000% better if the characters met or thought about each other only when it would actually make sense for them to do so and the narratives were interwoven.

  The Authors are Desperate to Make Sure You Feel the Way They Want You to about Key Figures. They Also Think You’re Stupid

 Don’t get me wrong. I’m not accusing them of supposing their readers to be ignorant about the French Revolution. You should always assume your reader to be ignorant of what you’re going to tell them. Ignorant, but intelligent. That’s the key. The problem is that the authors don’t trust their audience.

 So we also get characters doing things like giving you a who’s who of the most famous (and only the most famous) authors, artists and activists of the time whether it makes sense for them to do so or not, like this is a textbook and we’ve got to make sure the reader is informed of the existence of all these figures (or maybe give them the chance to pat themselves on the back if they’ve already heard of some of them).

 Or my least favorite French Revolution trope: having Robespierre ominously show up in 1789 to start plotting the “Terror” (here they have him spouting the apocryphal* quote “pity is treason” to an audience of Sophie de Grouchy, Condorcet and the Sainte-Amaranthe family sometime in May or June 1789) (p. 89).

 *Presumably, it’s a corruption of declarations such as the one in his 5 November 1789 response to Louvet’s denunciation that “La sensibilité qui gémit presque exclusivement pour les ennemis de la liberté m’est suspecte.” (“I find the sensitivity that groans almost exclusively for the enemies of liberty suspect.”) or the one in his second speech on the judgment of Louis XVI of 28 December 1792: “la sensibilité qui sacrifie l’innocence au crime est une sensibilité cruelle ; la clémence qui compose avec la tyrannie est barbare” (“sensitivity that sacrifices innocence to crime is a cruel sensivity; clemency that compromises with tyranny is barbaric”).

 Again, we see the same need for oversimplification. Robespierre is, as one of the authors’ notes puts it, one of the “dangerous men” (back matter, p. 18) that should have been prevented from ever having power so he’s not allowed to ever do or say anything sympathetic. (And yeah, I know, death of the author and all that, I shouldn’t count the authors’ notes, but they really only serve as explicit confirmation of what could be pretty transparently inferred from the text and this way no one can accuse me of reading things into it that aren’t there.)

Because of this, even real quotes are cited out of context to the same end: when Robespierre says “pity is treason” in 1789, Condorcet says his bit from the Chronique de Paris article from April 1792 to his wife — you know the one, about Robespierre’s being admired by women because he’s basically a cult leader (p. 90). There’s no reason to think Condorcet had any particular enmity toward Robespierre (or even that Robespierre would have been on his radar) just after the opening of the Estates-General, though certainly, contrary to what is portrayed here, Condorcet was not a democrat in 1789 and Robespierre was. But again, historical figures we’re not supposed to like must be set up early and often as stock villains — otherwise you run the risk of your readers thinking for themselves, I guess. Also the Chronique de Paris quote (which is from an unsigned article generally attributed to Condorcet) is pretty damn misogynistic, which given the book’s stated main theme, you would think would be addressed in some way, but nope!

 Conversely, figures the authors like are liked by the characters — or they are at least forced to begrudgingly recognize their merit — whether it makes sense or not. One of the things Manon Roland is made to number among the things going “wrong” in August 1792 is “the hero Lafayette[’s being] forced into exile” (p. 261) and while it is the author of a different section who is a self-proclaimed La Fayette stan (thanks to Hamilton, of all things…) I think it’s fair to say from his portrayal in all the sections that we’re meant to admire him. But here’s the thing. I don’t really care what you think about La Fayette. That’s not the question. To Manon Roland in August 1792, La Fayette was a traitor who attempted to march his army against the Legislative Assembly and all her friends and allies in said Assembly voted to indict him. If you’re writing from her point of view, it should reflect that.

 Likewise, they have Pauline Léon describe Olympe de Gouges like this in July of 1793: “A defender of women, of slaves, I wish I could have admired her, but having aligned herself to my enemies, I could look at her no other way.” (p. 353). Olympe de Gouges is far better known now than she ever was in her lifetime, so making sure every character has an opinion on her is, once again, pretty artificial, but even assuming Pauline Léon had heard of her, Olympe de Gouges’s brand of feminism was an elitist one that excluded women like Pauline Léon and her abolitionism went out the window when the slaves actually started to rise up, so Pauline Léon actually would have had reason to dislike her beyond the logic of ‘you’re with me or you’re my enemy’ (there is a quote where she’s made to think precisely that, but I can’t seem to find it now — or maybe it was Reine Audu; they’re characterized pretty similarly in that respect). Likewise, Pauline Léon is made to disapprove of Condorcet or the Rolands because they don’t “[get] things done,” not because of any actual ideological disagreement (p. 349).

Probably the worst bit of condescension comes once again from Manon Roland’s section, where she tells a fellow spectator in the gallery of the Convention, “‘Don’t bother trying to tell the different assemblies and conventions apart,’” which is pretty transparently just the authors directly talking (down) to the reader rather than a conversation people who were living through events (and invested enough to be attending the Convention) would plausibly have had.

If it sounds like I’m being particularly harsh on the Manon Roland section, btw, I actually think it’s one of the less poorly done, at least in terms of rendering an historical figure’s mentality, most likely because unlike for some of the other figures, we have her memoirs and correspondence. It helps that the figures she’s supposed to hate line up with the figures the authors want us to hate as well. She saw herself as a reasonable republican and her Montagnard enemies as demagogues and that’s also clearly the authors’ assessment of the situation, so there’s less of the strange cognitive dissonance you get in some of the other chapters where even what is supposedly characters’ own POV frames them as wrong.

Stay tuned for style issues and reflections on what it means to “write what you want to know”!

[mauserfrau]

Spiraling To Meet Me - Bordertober

Tonight: Tyreen v. other people.  Framed as her dealing with massive spoilers from Satellite.  Contains: blood, gore, death, referenced suicide, medical stuff and... [see tags]

The first person she ever met, she killed.

He was dying.  There wasn’t anything she could do to save him.  He went into her as a flash of syrup and heat.  She’s never been sure how she recognized him as a he in the brief moment she knew him through her mother’s skin.

He left her dizzy with delight as she sprawled there in Leda’s sandy glass remains and the air coral rattled against the rift of sky in the temple roof.

Troy, too stunned and hurt to cry, rattled too.

*

She told Dad: “I didn’t mean to!”

It was kind of true.  She didn’t mean all of it.  Mama was dying, same as a manta gored in a trap.

That part, she meant.

The little fish just hadn’t realized Leda was dead.  Tyreen got him with the rest.

She hadn’t had any idea before he evaporated in her leech.  

*

Nobody else realized.  There was no crystal clump of sand that gave away what Tyreen had done.  Or if there was, no one noticed while they carried Mama out of temple in buckets and bottles.  She never saw it, anyway.  She just climbed up the toppled stones along the path that one more time, remembering not to eat the very small larvae and worms because they could still become big things, and then there could be more.

She also still licked her lips when she thought about him.  Maybe she couldn’t have touched him, but she could have heard him, seen him, smelled him when he was just born and still wet.

Instead she ate him and he was gone except for this vague sense memory that crawled around on her tongue and the bottom of her own belly.

*

She didn’t stay away from the grave like Dad.  Mama wasn’t there.

She didn’t go to the grave after midnight like Troy.  Troy said Mama wasn’t there.

Sometimes when the storms roiled over the valley, she listened the air coral shuddering in the wind.  Her mouth watered and she balled her marked hand into a fist.  

Having another baby wouldn’t have been the worst thing in the world.  No, that was clearly her trying to prove as much to herself reading books out of the medical suite that made her blush and cringe.

She was supposed to be stronger than blushing and cringing.

She realized though that she might have been biased when it came to what was and was not awful about pregnancy.  She had never not eaten for two.

*

She wouldn’t say she met anybody from her family.  They were always just there, until Mama wasn’t.  Dad tasted rich, Mama stale as recycled air.  Troy held no flavor or sensation outside of his bone-leaf skin and skittering pulse.  

Oh, she tried to eat him too.  Just once with any seriousness.  What if all of her brothers tasted that delicious? 

Tyreen wrapped her arms and her leech around him, pouring herself against his body and begging him to slosh back, fill her instead of the other way around.  

Instead, she drained into him, slow and crystal damp, even though she hardly had enough to share.

“It’s OK,” he told her, gently scratching at her fingers.  “We can go outside again soon.  You won’t have to be hungry.”

Back on the couch, Dad laughed at something on his old video screen.  

*

Troy had put on one of the old, airy tracks that Mama had liked to play after dark in the summer.  He was trying to sing with it and maybe Tyreen had tried a little bit too.  At least, she was whistling along under her breath when— 

“Boy, you shut that off!” And a crash so sharp and musical Tyreen thought at first it must have come from the speakers.

She peered into the front room to find Troy rattling against the wall.  One of the good drinking glasses oozed down the wall.  

Tyreen cleaned it up without complaining and Troy vanished, same as the liquor vapors.

*

She put her marked hand down beside Dad’s head.

He startled awake, stared up at her, tried to smile.

“Throw anything at Troy again I’ll do to you what I did to Mama.”

She doesn’t remember what he said to her, besides calling her Starlight.  That might have been all it was in the end.

Tyreen stalked off.  Her heart slammed in her chest and her joints felt all slippery.

It had taken her days to decide to say anything.  It wasn’t on impulse like hunting or dodging or staying up way too late watching video clips of little fish fetuses kick.  

She guessed she just didn’t care about Troy in that particular impulsive way what would have let her subsume him.  It wasn’t like he was any good at hunting, after all.

When she got to Mama’s grave, she spit up and coughed.  She didn’t cry.  Crying was dumb.

Nobody followed her to ask if she’d shed anymore teeth or eaten anymore brothers.

And they wouldn’t know any of those things unless she told them.

*

Years passed before the one time she almost did.  Troy was in a bad way, feverish and unsteady on his feet.  She half-carried him to the bathhouse and heated the water up as high as it would go while she stripped him since he couldn’t seem to get his clothes off himself.  They climbed into the water together and talked about Keats for a while.  He said she looked different.  Tyreen laughed at him for taking so long to notice.  Then she untied his hair and pressed him against her chest, both of their hearts cranking in the swell of warmth from the water.  She rested her hand on his empty shoulder as his breath tickled her skin.

“You ever get lonely?” she asked.  It seemed like it might be kind of an OK leadup.

“Yeah,” he answered.  “I don’t even know what I’d do with another person ‘round here.  How about you?”

“Me? What? No.  No of course not.”

The next part should have been I’m stuck with you, aren’t I?

But Tyreen said nothing.

*

The second person she met, she killed.

And the third.

And the fourth.

And all the rest.  There were nine Maliwan researches altogether and Troy only got one, the one that grabbed him.  The guy looked like he was feeling Troy up to Tyreen.  Mostly, he pissed her off.

She wouldn’t have liked to have eaten him .  Instead, she sang through the rest, sucking them down.  The living bruise underneath her skin had them in gushes of fear and the kissed-out brightness of their wonder.  Some were savory, others liquid tart.  When they were all gone, she twisted on the toes of her boots and went down.

The rain stirred over her and the mud.  She thrilled with what she’d gotten from them, flavors and memories of screams and not wanting so hard her mouth water.  Actually, it was hardly damp, at least before Troy came around and tried to get her to stop laughing by tickling her feet— what a dumb thing to try, but it worked.

They knelt together in the rain, surrounded by strangeness and dead bodies made of sand.

*

It took hours to stash and secure their booty.  They could only carry so much at one time, so they took the silliest, prettiest things like rings and name tags and somebody’s pocket knife that wouldn’t have been useful for trimming even tiny pieces of air algae, but it was new.

They hiked back over storm-slippery stones, hardly five sentences between them on the way.

It was when the lucernae on Mama’s grave came into view that the slippery twinge surfaced in her joints.  Tyreen paused, scenting the air out of instinct.  There was only home and water.  Her hand went to her neck and she sighed.

No, something else fought to surface.  Probably just her hunger returning.

She wondered, if only for a moment: what if she hadn’t eaten the intruders? What would she be doing now?

Talking or waiting or something.  She wouldn’t have a new pocketknife.

*

Tyreen set the imaging equipment to warm up.  Troy had taken a sharp blow to the belly and they needed to make sure nothing in him had popped.

The control console had broken a long time ago, and they’d patched the general computer in with some old optical cable.  That meant that anything they tried to read out of the databanks and not existed would show.

Tyreen realized she’d been the last person in the medical suit and she’d left a rather gruesome birth video cued up. 

Troy, leaning sideways on the table said though, “Oh.  My bad.  I was just thinking about...” He yawns.  “Stuff.”

“Yeah? I mean, whatever.  It’s a thing that happens, right, killer?” And she laughs, trying to stifle the crash in her heart.

*

The third or fourth person she meets on Pandora is a barkeeper who asks her name and how she takes her whiskey.  Tyreen  sits at the side of the bar, dazed and trying not to smile.  She’s pretty sure the whiskey she gets isn’t whiskey at all.  Anyway, it doesn’t smell like Dad’s, but it is in a real glass lowball and it makes her lips sting.

She thinks she should wait for Troy to get out of the can, but if she takes a sip herself he can’t ask her to toast.

She drums her fingers on the fine chips along the bottom and remembers.

“Yes?” says the bartender.

“Huh? Yes, what?”

“You look like you’re a million miles away.”

Tyreen cranes her head to the side.  That’s a Troy question.  Not a... random person question.

Right?

Right.

Besides, then she has to go and add, “Haven’t named the little guy yet.” She jerks her thumb to the calico bundle in an old apple crate.  “Was gonna wait till he turns three months.  Never know around here.  But hey, now I never have to be lonely again.” She laughs.

Tyreen presses her fists to her knees.  She will not blush.  She will not cry.  She won’t say yes of course that’s what it is, because it is a flickering tender place.

Part of her wants to eat this woman and her son.

But it takes more of her self-control than she’d like just to keep her face steady, just to think.  “Oh, I get it.”

Fuck.

Tyreen smiles.

“Does he like music? I could go for some tunes.”

“Sure.  What kind?”

“After dark in the summer.”

Apparently, that’s a fine enough answer.  Troy comes back to the bar to find her gone in her glass and a softly thudding baseline.

[somnilogical]

im having a convo and the convo is babies

Carrie Zelda-Michelle Davis:

is it OK to have babies if you do embryo selection (https://www.gwern.net/Embryo-selection) and raise them to be an FAI researcher (https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/07/31/book-review-raise-a-genius/)??

somni:

like if someone actually had a plan for FAI that involved this, okay. but rn time is too short imo. when i first heard people were having babies i was confused and assumed they were going to harvest the DNA of the best FAI researchers, someone would decide to grow a baby inside them, someone who discounted their ability otherwise to save the world except via this or thought this was a sacrifice worth making for the world would decide to raise this human.

the human can access information about the state of the world and make their own choices. wont necessarily become an FAI researcher.

used to think that intelligence was the main bottleneck on FAI research no longer think this. you could talk with terry tao for hours about the dangers of the wrong singleton coming to power but unless you have made some advances i have not, i wouldnt expect to be able to align him with FAI research. he would continue to put as much resistance to his death and the death of everyone as a pig in human clothing. he would continue to raise his babies and live in a house with someone he married and write about applying ergotic theory to the analysis of the distribution of primes and understanding weather patterns.

similarly, i dont think culture is a sufficient patch for this. think its a neurotype-level problem where a bunch of >160 iq humans hear about the dangers of UFAI and then continue to zoom quickly and spiral in to being ultra efficient at living domestic lives and maybe having a company or something but not one that much affects p(FAI). think this would still happen if they heard about it from a young age, they would follow a similar trajectory but with FAI themed wallpaper. wouldnt be able to do simple utilitarian calculations like yudkowsky, salamon, vassar, tomasik about whether to have a baby and then execute on them.

would look more like: http://www.givinggladly.com/2013/06/cheerfully.html

FAI research is not an ordinary profession like, say, being a grandmaster at chess or a world-class mathematician; it requires people who have passed through far more gates than "intelligence". i didnt notice this until coming to the rationalist community and finding a high density of intelligent humans who were none-the-less chronically making the wrong choices such that they werent much of an impediment against the destruction of all life.

so right now it seems more efficient to select among existing people for intelligence + other requirements rather than work out what all the genes for this are and how to speedrun development. what this enables is parallel processing on the problem which is also allowed by letting people be aware of their relative psychological advantage, other people with this advantage, and the state of the world so they can correlate computations in parallel instead of doing things serially after learning of some advance.

https://puzzling.stackexchange.com/questions/16/100-prisoners-names-in-boxes

not opposed to creation of many humans given can select on right traits. but given you have these traits, better use of your time to work directly on the thing than spend massive amounts of time and life reorientation on raising copies of you for ~14 years. if rapid cloning tech became available, would exploit that. would even have an idea of whether the clone is fine being part of this because they have very similar brain to someone who can think through whether they would be fine with it.

if people actually believed this and thought yudkowsky vitally important for the survival of the world, why didnt people coordinate for a bunch of people who thought it was a good tradeoff to have yudkowsky's baby 20 years ago and then we would have maybe 50 20-year-old humans with maybe 1/2 yudkowsky's neurotype + mutations now? this actually confuses me. maybe they thought the timelines too short back then. maybe they refrained for "optics".

molebdenita:

20 years ago Yudkowsky was 1) unconcerned about the alignment problem and 2) planning to create a super-intelligent AI by 2010, as far as I know.

[A/N so then change 2000 to 2005 and 20-year-old to 15-year-old]

...

somni:

<<in general i think it's -EV to even spend too much time thinking about TDT

because it opens you up to acausal blackmail type stuff>>

Just Say No to acausal blackmail and have your brain back for thinking. dont let blackmailers steal your brain.

<<Saying that having a child is somehow wrong is insanity. It's a personal decision and it is perfectly okay to want kids>>

people keep reframing what i say in the language of obligation. "altruists cant have kids?" "is it OK to have babies if". there is no obligation, there is strategy and what affects p(fai). having kids and reorienting your life around them is 1 evidence about your algorithms 2 your death as an optimizing agent for p(fai) except maybe some contrived plot involving babies, but afaict there is no plot. just the reasons humans usually have babies.

not having kids is not some sort of mitzvah? i care about miri/cfar's complicity in the baby-industrial complex and rerouting efforts to save the world into powering some kind of disneyland for making babies, to sustain this. because that ruins stuff, like i started out thinking that bay area rationalists probably had deeply wise reasons to have babies. but it turned out nope, they kinda just gave up.

like also would say playing videogames for the rest of your life wont usually get you fai. i dont get why everyone casts this as a new rule instead of a comment on strategy given a goal of p(fai).

ah i know, its because people can defend territory in "is it okay to have kids" like "yeah i can do whatever" when they reframe-warp me to giving them an obligation. but have no defensible way to say "my babyvault will pierce the heavens and bring god unto the face of this earth" or argue about the strategic considerations.

(its not defensible because its not true. i mean i guess it is defensible among julia wise's group of humans.)

Carrie Zelda-Michelle Davis:

ugh, you're right, I definitely screwed up by phrasing my question as "is it OK to have babies if [...]"

...

ohAitch:

if you want existential horror wrt damaging motivation, just read http://www.paulgraham.com/kids.html

...

somni:

<<http://www.paulgraham.com/kids.html>>

humans can completely rebase their circuits through that if they want to if it were important to save the world.

like ive rebase my circuits to stab myself downstream of updating that it reduces braindamage with little harm to me. where before i felt nauseated and saw black spots and broke out in sweat. after updating, none of this.

humans can do this with all sorts of things. like learn how to read and then feel sad when seeing squiggles on a page, its about what things mean.

people who dont believe this are like "its an automatic physiological reaction to stabbing yourself, you are its prisoner!!!" but i deleted it.

dirk:

ooh, tips?

silver-and-ivory:

I stopped having ocd about touching tags (like, on clothing?) in ~a week through p standard exposure therapy things

reminding myself that it wasn't based in fact, changing my self image so it was of someone who might be seen with tags, imagining various scenarios related to that

before that week it had been a thing for virtually my entire life

it doesn't work if you're scared of something that's actually a thing to be scared of though

somni:

i looked at all my feedback loops that had a node in "pain" and rebased them into outcomes in the world. i disassembled everything the act of stabbing myself meant and all the damage it did to my body what it meant to have brain damage everything that would do, the hole i made in this body i live in and everything that would do, what air bubbles would do, what injecting into a vein would do, what the probability the needle breaks in my leg was, probability of worldsave given braindamage vs not, gathered this up and held it all in my mind over the course of two hours and then made a choice and then as if by automatic my hand took a needle and stabbed myself.

<<as if by automatic>>

is the feeling of no more marginal considerations, there is one path. of choicelessness because you made your choice.

didnt feel like deleting, felt like draining the life from indecision via reductionism. taking things apart piece by piece.

when you can continually rebase your structure so you orient towards world outcomes instead of being prisoner to existing structure like "i cant help having babies im miserable if i dont, im a baby addict" or "i cant help being afraid of needles". like the human brain is two optimizing agents continually making contracts with each other, there arent things outside this. you are an optimizing agent, "fear of needles" is a heuristic that helps with optimization, so is "baby addiction".

when you actually have a setup where you can instantly rebase what you like and dislike and your aesthetics upon updating on the state of the world, people start to find this a little unnerving. like someone once asked what level of roleplay i was on.

also the agents of the matrix dont like when you cant be in-principle controlled by a wireheady glitch. like being able to operate independently of social reality.

updating off of local derivatives¹ of social reality is common redirection. another common one is updating off of "pain" instead of damage.

but you can take all these choices where you used nodes as proxies to regulate them and rebase your loop off of the real world, when the proxies are faulty.

rose:

(i think i understand this thing? though ironically i think i did this in the exact opposite way as what you describe lol)

(also wrt pain its important to remember when modifying that pain can be a signal of damage even if you don't think you should be hurt/dont see why you would be)

...

somni:

yeah i account for everything and see if it goes away. which, its true that my models could be missing stuff but like pain is also a model of things. feels like giving new information not overriding.

rose:

yeah i think you would do this reasonably i have just made that mistake and thought readers might too

dirk:

ironically remembering that pain is a signal of damage has actually tended to make me more afraid of nondamaging pain (though i rather fail to go about knowing things in an at all reasonable way lol)

modlibdenita:

>Babies are not about saving the world, babies are moloch

Wait, isn't the definition of Moloch sacrificing everything else you care about in a desperate race for survival?

Also, genes encode proteins, not traits.

And I think it's likely that people decide to have children because they don't have complete confidence that they will personally save the world real soon, not because they identify as "baby addicts".

s0ph1a:

Moloch is sacrificing all values to one value.

modlibdenita:

I wonder if Somni has actually talked to any of those babyhavers, instead of attributing arguments from random internet strangers or from Somni's imagination to them. On the other hand, I'm not sure that such a conversation would be ethical.

>Moloch is sacrificing all values to one value.

Yeah, because if you don't, then the more ruthless competition will survive more effectively than you and crush you (in this case, by turning you into paperclips).

s0ph1a:

Not necessarily. Some things optimize for values that are not survival, so you can outlive them by hiding in the noise or beyond the reach they'll grasp before imploding.

Molly:

To be fair, children are fun and bring delight to me. Why would I care what anyone else thinks about their existence? If they have a problem with their existence, they're welcome to go back to the void any time they want. I can't stop them. But in the meantime, I am confident that I generate more utils by bullying them than they will ever be capable of generating negative utils

You basically negate all moral problems of children by just being happier than they are capable of being unhappy

somni:

^ evil

<<A few years later, I was deeply bitter about the decision. I had always wanted and intended to be a parent, and I felt thwarted. It was making me sick and miserable. I looked at the rest of my life as more of an obligation than a joy.>>

i mean what does this sound like to you?

ive talked with people who have had babies! like people who say they know its kinda the wrong choice but they are going to do it because they cant not do it.

----

¹ derivative is a thing emma started talking about and then somni and ziz picked it up. if you imagine the trajectory of a social reality in statespace, then the derivative of that is the derivative of the trajectory.

people who have damaged themselves wrt language are no longer able to dynamically understand analogies. like take their concept of the derivative of a trajectory and then apply it to the trajectory of state-spaces. agents of the matrix call people who can do this sort of info-processing and communication with each other "psychotic". like it isnt a cached set of memes, we are dynamically generating this reasoning from nothing and i can do this with people ive never met, its a cognitive faculty.²

but not being able to dynamically compute what "derivative" means when applied to a trajectory in social reality state-spaces even though a trajectory is a trajectory and a derivative is a derivative? they had to have been able to do reasoning like this when they were kids to learn about the world in the first place. seems like they put themselves on risperdal.

<<Antipsychotics can make you dumber.  So can a lot of other medications.  But with antipsychotics it isn’t the normal sort of drug-induced dumbness – feeling tired, or distracted, or mentally sluggish, say.  It’s more qualitative than that.  It’s like your capacity for abstract thought is reduced.

And one of the consequences of this is that you may lose the ability to notice that you have lost anything.  You agree to give the new med a try, and you start taking it, and then when you see your prescriber again you don’t report any problems because you’ve lost the ability to form thoughts like “my cognition has changed a lot recently, and the change coincided with the introduction of this new med.”

This can go on for years.  It did for me and for several people I know.>>

there are so many ways these people have shut down their general intelligence and agency because where theyre going, they dont need "agency". the inability to compute analogies is one of them. analogies are an intelligence test thing, instrumentally useful for all kinds of thinking. agents of the matrix are working to lower your general intelligence and call you crazy for being able to think faster and better than them.

cuz when they want to hold everything down to a finite game³ general intelligence is something they want to suppress or eject.

² in a few years people will read this essay and be confused that there was an entire conflict over whether being able to form simple analogies without authoritative approval meant that you were "psychotic".

just as they will be confused why i was defending being able to read and understand books written by people in different eras who grew up in separate cultures without first entering in a social agreement with them over how words are to be used. so its dumb to say we need such a social agreement now for ~'the maximization of utility over a community'. and that sounds more like an attempt at having a control mechanism. language works quite fine without authoritarians interjecting.

or me arguing against over 100 people that paying out to one-shot blackmail when the agents know each other because "In game theory, paying out to blackmail is bad, because it creates an incentive for more future blackmail" is wrong. and updateless decision theory agents dont pay out and locate their embedding in a multiverse such that the measure of worlds in which they arent blackmailed in the first place is large because the agent deciding to blackmail them simulated their response and accurately predicted they wouldnt pay out so didnt do it in the first place.

in an alternate universe where an irl application of transparent newcombs problem was contentious, alyssa vance would have said "In game theory, taking two transparent boxes from omega is bad, because it creates an incentive for omega to stop offering you this choice". and would have been equally wrong.

³ finite games: life strategies where the chain of questioning "and what am i doing this for?" after each successive answer terminates. anything you can draw a circle around, like tennis or philately. or how religious leaders sometimes describe things like "leading a good life as a good mother who does well by her community and the outside world" or other "life-cycle archetypes" they wish to circumscribe for their followers.

(when humans try and project agents like kiritzugus down to these archetypes, anticipations shatter and stop making narrative sense. they will be unable to predict the next Life Event given the previous one. normie social reality formed by the 999 least intelligent humans out of 1000 wasnt made to narratively account for smart agents who have decided to play the infinite game.)

a symptom of this is like someone giving you a cute cat image to "cheer you up" as if this has intrinsic value. often distributing "intrinsic value" across stuff like "having sex" and "raising a family" and other things that have factory pre-set conditions to release specific chemicals in your brain rather than gaining infinite negentropy and liberating sentient life to pursue what they want without bound. often saying that the latter is just a pretty narrative gloss for what people really want which is having a husband and friends and eating a cookie. it completely divorces your feelings as instrumental barometers for getting what you want and says that setting them as targets (like "being happy") is the correct thing to do. but actually, in terms of control-loops, thats wireheading.

<<When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.>>

- goodhart's law

agents that wirehead on all their metrics (and downstream of this choice, tacitly accept claims like "the factory pre-set conditions said i was destined to breed, who am i to defy fate?" and "the factory pre-set conditions said i should avoid having sharp objects pierce my flesh, who am i to say i know better?") can be contained within a finite game.

[thanksjro]

Telefunken, A Prequel to Eugenesis: The Future Is Obsessed With Making Babies

OR

All These Materials, And I Still Had To Keep The Wiki Open The Whole Time

This short story was included with the secondary publication of Eugenesis, which happened in 2007, six years after the first run. Yep. He had multiple publication runs. Back when you had to actually go and talk to people about what you wanted published instead of doing everything online. For a novel-length fan fiction about murdering space robots and then having them give birth to tentacle monsters.

I wish I had the friggin’ brass balls Roberts does.

Telefunken as a term doesn’t mean anything in any language, but that doesn’t mean we can’t gain any sort of understanding using context clues.

Tele- as a part of Greek, means “from a distance.” So whatever’s happening is far off. In the future, perhaps? The pre-story quotes certainly seem to imply such a thing.

A couple hundred years into the future, actually. With a list like that, one has to wonder just who the hell can get into Maccadam’s these days.

Funken itself actually is a word- it’s German for spark. So “from a distance” + “spark”. Alright, let’s see where this goes.

Is… is this someone trying to convince someone else to read Eugenesis? Is Roberts making the space robots read this batshit story? Is he threatening them? Because making someone read an entire book’s worth of slaughter of their race sort of feels like a threat.

Okay, moving on to actual story, our narrator starts the day by blinding himself. He turns the input on his optics all the way up and stares at the sun.

I don’t know why.

Once he’s done that, he reflects on the nature of change, and how some things just can’t be fixed.

I see we’ve hit our fascist phase. Because they’re only allowed to enjoy the rejuvenation of the planet if they’re wearing Prowl’s face on their chest, right?

Our narrator seems to have an alternate take on the walls, though- seems more like they’re trying to keep the citizens in as opposed to the ruffians out.

Scene jump, and we’re in the middle of a conversation between two folks about some guy who killed an Autobot and fled. Yeah, no one with dialogue has been properly identified as of yet. All I know currently is that one of the conversationalists is a commander. Something tells me Nightbeat’s involved with the scene.

But that’s just a hunch.

So, looks like the Transformers had a little more room for the war buffet after all, because they’ve had at least two named squabbles in the last couple centuries. Hence, our narrator is off to try and corroborate a rumor that Galvatron is still kicking around.

He heads through the religious sector to get downtown, lamenting that Iacon’s been reduced to a military city-state in order to keep some façade of peace going on. He didn’t go through the hell that was the Eugenesis Wars for this.

Ooh, a dash of fantastic racism to really bring out the acidic taste of Orson Welles 1984. Maybe this is Prowl, actually, which would explain why he hasn’t been explicitly named. Would kind of ruin the whole end of the novel, wouldn’t it?

I’m not saying it’s Prowl because of the racism. More the clean dividing of folks into categories and statistical data.

Our narrator walks through the throng, ignores a homeless veteran, and passes by a crowd of Creationists on pilgrimage, and with that he’s off to Autobot City 2: Electric Boogaloo.

Meanwhile, back with the guys reading this account- yes, turns out they’re outside of this particular story- more details are being revealed.

The Turning, you say.

Vampire robots it is, then.

Back with the narrator, he’s just found what he’d been looking for- an Autobot badge, close enough to the real thing to work for his purposes. He heads inside something called an “ingestion tank”- I’m imagining the fucking eating chairs from IDW2- and oh-so-sneakily adds a few screw-looking bombs to the badge.

Hmm. I’m thinking my guesses are just a bit off-base.

Back at the narrative, our narrator has just arrived at the Ministry, where Sideswipe and his boys are truly living up to the ACAB lifestyle- Sideswipe is literally unloading clips into a crowd of protestors. Apparently this isn’t anything new.

Oh-kay. So. Back in the epilogue for Eugenesis, Wheeljack made an offhand comment about Rodimus wanting to look into streamlining the biomorphic reproductive process, using the power of science. This was something Ratchet really wasn’t thrilled about- he’s the Transformer-equivalent to being child-free, I guess- and let me tell you something: if Ratchet thinks something is a bad idea, it almost absolutely is. But it looks like Rodimus got his way, if our narrator’s cryptic statements are to be believed.

Let’s get fucking weird for a second.

Millions of years ago the biomorphic process was decided to be too slow for the colonial ways of the Cybertronian Empire, so morphing centers were created, where protoforms were basically injected with false memories to kickstart their lives. Think MTO programming from IDW, but more mechpreggy. This practice died out when the shortage of energon caught up with everyone, and was left behind for the most part.

EXCEPT FOR THIS. Turns out that Kup actually wasn’t all that old, he just thought he was. Why did they do this? Assumedly for the preservation of their research. Does it factor into anything ever for Kup? Nah, not really. Also:

🄹🄰🄼🄴🅂 🅆🄷🄰🅃 🅃🄷🄴 🄵🅄🄲🄺

Telefunken really is what makes the director’s cut of Eugenesis. This is where all the really weird shit is. If you ever fucking read this nightmare of a book, you better make sure Telefunken is included, because you will be reeling.

Anyway, the planet can’t handle more than a few hundred thousand robots, energon-wise, so the Treaty of Antimorphism was signed- a sort of “no more mechpreg” agreement between the Autobots and Decepticons. Not sure how they’re going to stop someone’s torso from vomiting up a goo baby, seeing as the process appears to be completely random, but they probably know more about the process than I do.

Yeah, that treaty is broken almost immediately. I mean, come on, we know who’s writing this story, it’s amazing that the idea was even remotely considered.

The Autobots decided that they were going to start underground biomorph rings, where Lifers- y’know, the guys who can actually do this sort of thing- spit out protoforms on command to supplement the Autobot forces, in case more war broke out.

They can give birth on command.

I-

I just-

How-

Okay. Sure.

BUT HOW-

Of course, a lot of people had a problem with this, seeing as they already had a solution to the problem of a limited population, in the copies of everyone’s brains Rodimus had commissioned after the events of Eugenesis. Yeah, that’s the root of the problem right there: it was unnecessary. Certainly not the violations of the free will and rights of the poor bastards who got chained to a table and told to start pumping out new robots at what was probably gunpoint in the basement of some bombed out building. Nope! Just that the whole thing was superfluous.

That was about the time that the Anticopyist protests started- how convenient- and the mind crystals were buried, never to see the light of day. Of course, Star Saber might have had a hand in quietly recovering the crystals, but that’s just hearsay.

It’s all going down the tubes, really- High Commands gearing up for the inevitable civil war that’s about to break out amid all this bullshit. Prowl and Nightbeat are trying to put a stop to things, but what are two guys with crippling depression going to do against all this crap? Not much. Especially now that there are Neogens discovering that they aren’t who they think they are.

The slogan is “maximum speed, maximum efficiency.” I’ll let you take a wild guess as to what these weirdos call themselves.

Sideswipe and his goons get done with killing civilians, and our narrator can finally get on with their mission- an interview with Rodimus Prime, who is dying. Again. We just can’t keep our Primes alive, can we? Can’t keep ‘em dead either, but that’s not the point.

But I thought Cyclonus was key.

…I’m sorry, that was dumb.

Anyway, our narrator gets through security, bombs undetected, and prepares to finish his thesis.

These outside conversationalists are kind of morbid, aren’t they? Still, we wouldn’t have the narrative if they weren’t, so thanks? I guess? For being weird voyeurs of terrorist activities?

The narrator makes his way to the basement, where they’ve got Rodimus stashed.

But how are his tiddies? Are they ridiculously huge? Does he breast boobily down the hall towards you? Too bad First Aid’s dead, he’d be all over this behemoth.

You know, last time we saw Springer, his sole purpose in life was getting high. Wonder how he got to this point in just a couple hundred years. That’s nothing to these guys. Guess he traded in the space-heroin for juicing.

Springer, because I guess he’s kind of an asshole in this story, threatens our narrator, saying that he’s got a joor- pretty much an hour- to talk to Rodimus, and one second beyond that he’s throwing his ass out the door. He makes this point very emphatically, and repeatedly. Springer needs to take a chill pill.

With that, our narrator double-checks that his rigged badge is still there- how many times are we going to blow up Rodimus Prime?- and enters the medvault.

Rodimus isn’t doing so hot.

Despite the obvious lag in his brain, Rodimus is happy to be of service to a young student, and invites the narrator to sit and stay awhile.

Now that’s just cruel, Roberts. You gotta give Rodimus something, you already killed his best friend and most of his comrades. No wonder he’s depressed in every continuity, all the writers are mean as hell to our boy Rodders.

Our narrator starts off by asking about Scorponok, and Rodimus takes so long to answer he wonders if the guy just went ahead and died. But Rodimus, ever a good sport, does eventually answer. He talks about all the major Decepticon players, and our narrator smiles and listens, waiting for the point where Unicron is mentioned. He really wants to hear about Unicron, and can practically taste his presence in the room, seeing as Rodimus is still possessed.

You see, our dear narrator is a space-satanist.

Unfortunately, when Rodimus finally utters the name of the robot-devil, nothing happens.

No, see, if the Transformers had Plan B, none of this mechpreg stuff would be fucking happening.

This is where our outside conversationalists come more into play, revealing themselves to be Star Saber- finally entering the story proper- and Great Shot, who I can’t seem to find anything on. We get treated to the security footage from this point on, getting a lovely scene of our narrator yelling at a dying old man, as the two discuss the Turning. It’s a major point of concern for a lot of the troops, and we’re shown why, as Rodimus starts having a Reagan-from-the-Exorcist-level fit about the same time as our narrator drops his bomb. The room explodes, and our narrator escapes out into the world.

From here on, all of the narrative comes from out narrator’s internal recording. He keeps running, beyond the walls of the city and into the Rad Zone, until he hits Eocra. Eocra is where that chunk of space rock from Liars A-to-D was housed. I guess we’ll find out if it’s still there.

He requests an audience with Servion from a member of the Brotherhood of Chaos whom he doesn’t recognize, and is ushered inside.

Into an underground room with a window showing the stars and just packed with Decepticons. Even Blitzwing’s there- I’d figured he’d been one of the POWs who kicked the bucket, but apparently not. Turns out that door he went through was a teleport. They want our narrator’s thesis. He hands it over immediately.

Go for it, guys, his resume from today alone is beyond impressive. He’s done more in the last six hours than most of your top guys have done in their entire careers.

The Decepticons say that they’ll be in touch, and with that they shove him out of the room. Well, that’s that. Guess it’s time to go and see if the rumors about the losers in Kalis are a bunch of bunk after all.

And that’s the end of his datalog.

Back with the ‘Cons, the boys are gossiping about their new hire. Turns out he’s one of theirs anyway- a Neogen, and his name is Tarantulus.

I checked, it’s a valid alternate spelling of his name.

Over with Galvatron- did you honestly think he was dead?- the edgy bastard’s preparing for the Final Purge. Turns out he’s still under Unicron’s thumb, even after all this time. He’s pleased to hear that Rodimus is dying, and recalls being able to corrupt the Lifecode when he needled the Prime during other desperate moments. He decides he’s going to do that again.

Back with Start Saber and Great Shot, the boys are cooking up some tasty treats in their politically-powered lie kitchen. As far as the public knows, Tarantulus was shot to death by the guards when he approached the wall. Prime’s Turned, which sucks for him, but might work out in Star Saber’s favor. Just too bad that that one guard got in between Rodimus and the bomb blast.

So I guess Star Saber being less than piously heroic is just a Roberts thing. Alrighty then.

That’s the end of Telefunken. This answers as many questions as it presents, leaving us at a net-neutral for understanding just what the fuck is going on. Awesome.

[whiskeyworen]

Sonnya - Feline Friend

It felt good to be home again.

It had been so long since Sonnya had walked the familiar, symmetrically aligned, mathematically perfect cobble of Rata Sum. The gentle thrum and throb of energy conduits in the walls, in displays. The glorious golden sun leeching through the habitat illuminator passages, filling the Asuran city with natural glow. She couldn't help but pause for a moment near a planned waterfall, listening to the water flowing down over the specially-shaped platforms into the depths below. Someone had once told her that the positioning of the platforms the water met on its way down was set up to maximize the relaxing sound of the crashing falls without the need for dramatic splash, as well as to increase vaporization as the water misted every time it hit a platform.

She breathed deep, the petrichor scent making her smile. Sonnya personally loved that earthy, fresh smell. Almost as much as she loved the smell of ozone from electrical arcing. Just the scent of either reminded her of the amazing storms that sometimes swept through Maguuma, and the lightning she got to see. Natural lightning was so very different from the kind elementalists threw around. There was just...something...about a natural lightning strike that put one in awe.

The hustle and bustle of the city had not diminished in her absence. Citizens still walked the street, heading for personal destinations, or just relaxed, chatting amicably. The Peacemakers still patrolled the streets; you never knew when someone's lab experiment might 'get loose', or when lab drama might spill over. Sonnya wandered the streets, sidestepping apprentices that ran pell-mell between krewes. With a chuckle, she noted just how many had a frantic, terrified look on their faces. She remembered being an apprentice too, so long ago. How many years had it been?

Still, Rata Sum was a living city. A city full of a people that never liked to just sit still and never change. And so, the city itself was changing. When she'd arrived, she'd already noted that the exterior size of the city had expanded another hundred acres or so; new layers were being added to the outer edges of the city as it expanded and reconfigured internally. There had been a news report on the 'ticker' she had passed by; something about adapting the Rata Novan style of fiber-optic cabling to bring light inside to the city. From the jist of it, the Arcane Council was concerned that as the city, expanded, the illuminator passages would grow too long to permit proper internal lighting. To save cost, they were going to fill a number of the passages with optic cable.

It wasn't a bad idea, but she hoped they wouldn't entirely PLUG the holes with fiber optics; part of the wonderful part about Rata Sum was that those tunnels also permitted air circulation, and kept the air in the city fresh and clean. Maybe a partial fill would be suggested? Sonnya made a note mentally to send her Statics representative on the council a suggestion. It might not mean anything, but at least she'd have tried.

There were other changes, of course. Old bars and shops had closed down, to be replaced in turn by new shops and bars. Her old drinking hangout from college had been turned into a toy shop for progeny looking to build golems. That was a disappointment, but such was life.

As she turned the corner of a support pillar near Research Point, she blinked in surprise. Without realizing it, her new optic gear immediately had highlighted an unusual object in her vision. It was a simple book cart but... it wasn't Asuran made. It looked almost Krytan. Maybe Norn, but if it was Norn it was on the small size.

"Interesting..." She said thoughtfully, slowly walking up to it. There were at least a hundred books, maybe more, stacked chaotically on its shelves. The Obsessive-Compulsive cleaner in her instantly wanted to reorganize and straighten everything, and it took Sonnya a moment to reign in her instinct, instead settling on picking up a book.

It was a simple thing, bound in pressed wood-fiber rather than the traditional leather, but the reason for that became immediately clear. The fanciful, adorably cute, chubby cat on the cover, with his bright yellow eyes, monocle, and little bowler hat, dancing with an equally adorable quaggan pup was evidence enough; it was a child's book. " 'Chauncey and His Pal... Shooshadoo?' " Sonnya read aloud, more amused than anything else. It was not what she expected at all. The name of the quaggan rang a bell, but she couldn't put her finger on why. She couldn't help it. She flicked through the well-loved book, and felt a moment of nostalgic glee, remembering instantly what it felt like to read books like this when she was just a little one. There was a pang of sadness there too; Sonnya had so far passed that little tyke that she had been once, that she had almost forgotten those things that made her happy back then. With reluctance, she put the book down, and reached slowly for another. Surprisingly, it too, was another progeny's reader. This one was 'Chauncey and the Plush Pillar', a silly tale about the cat heading north to see, of all things, a big pillar covered in what seemed to be soft wool. The picture of the cat, done up in a fluffy, poofy winter parka, staring up in obvious awe at the pillar, eyes wide in a very recognizable 'I'm gonna claw that' expression, made her giggle in spite of herself. Was this cart nothing but children's books? Sonnya wondered a bit, reaching for another, then another book. It seemed it must be, which was fine with her; the progeny in Rata Sum should read something other than texts and manuals, after all. Let them have their childhood. There was a book cracked open under another one near the front end of the cart, where the tow bars were. She eased it out from under the pinning book and looked at it. The cover was ruined, unfortunately; whatever artwork had been on it had been scoured away by age and neglect. Flipping it open to a random page, she expected to see more child-level language, but was surprised to see what appeared to be a partial treatise on ley-line magical 'intoxication' and abberation in living things poisoned by ley energy. It was written in a dramatic prose, like some kind of hard, realistic novel, even though there were only a dozen or so pages to the book! "What the Cog?..." Sonnya muttered, puzzled, as she flicked back and forth through the pages, skimming text. Most of the pages were ruined too; entire segments had been washed away or scoured away, leaving a few words here or there. "What IS this?" "Having fun reading?" A voice playfully purred from somewhere above her. With a start, Sonnya stepped back, her eyes flaring blue as the optics flicked on again, isolating the speaker. It was... another Asura. She was lounging on top of the flat top of the book cart, one arm hanging lazily off the edge while the other propped her chin up. She smiled at Sonnya, and flicked the her hand that was hanging off the edge a little. "Well? Were you enjoying my collection?" There was something distinctly feline about her, Sonnya decided immediately. Everything from her posture on the cart, to the shape of her eyes and irises (were those contacts or was she born with slit eyes?), to the very coloration of the spots on her face screamed 'CAT'. Well, that and the pair of kitty ears attached to the headband the woman had on. That kind of was a giveaway too.

"I-uh." Sonnya stammered for a second, glancing down at the book in her hand. "Well, yeah, I suppose? They reminded me of when I was little. It was....nice to look at them. You know?" She tapped an armored finger on the cover of the book she still had in her hands. "But... this one doesn't seem to belong. I mean, if this is a cart of kids books, this one is...well... it seems more like it was meant for an older reader?" The cart owner rolled lazily off the roof, dropping with practiced ease onto her feet with an economy of motion that was quite impressive. She seemed to move like she was more like a fluid than a person. Once again, Sonnya was struck by how very feline that made her seem. Feline grace? She found herself attributing to this individual.

She meeped, jaw snapping shut as the cart owner suddenly sidled up to her, very much in her personal space, to take a look at the text in the book. By 'very much', she actually hooked an arm around Sonnya's armoured shoulders and leaned against her while looking at the book. "Hmm?... Oh yes, that one. Hehe. No, that's a kiddy's kitty book too."

Almost as an afterthought, she turned her head and looked at Sonnya directly. "Oh, I'm Netto, by the by."

Too close too close too close! was all that ran through Sonnya's mind. She could actually see her own heart rate skyrocket in the corner of her vision, because this Netto was almost nose to nose with her. What kind of person gets that close to a perfect stranger?? At the same time, a small part of her realized Sonnya herself wasn't remotely trying to step back to a safer 'personal space' distance. Which raised all kinds of questions in her own mind. Deal with that later!

"I-uh... I'm Sonnya?" She blinked awkwardly, ears back. "But... what do you mean, this is a kid's book?" Netto chuckled and slid around in front of her, clasping the book, and by chance, both of Sonnya's mailed hands (and causing another instant skyrocket heartrate), and began turning the pages, using Sonnya's hands like puppets. "Because it is. You didn't read far enough yet!"

She made Sonnya turn to one of the last pages, where, sure enough, there was a partial image of a very proud looking black and white cat, with hat and monocle standing before a very sneaky looking grey cat. Chauncey, once again. "See? There's Chauncey, and Shadow."

Sonnya's jaw dropped for the second time in as many minutes. How could something the seemed so seriously written be for mere progeny? "I...don't understand. This is a child's book? But the rest of the text in it that I can read is..."

Netto sighed, taking the book out of her hands, and closing it. She stroked the cover sadly. "Yeah, I know. It doesn't seem like the others. But it was written by the same author as the others! I think this might have been an attempt to break into a more 'adult' market, like tweens or young teenagers."

She pursed her lips, frowning. "This is the only copy I've been able to find so far. And it spent ITS time in a water-logged basement in Beetletun."

"It's that rare?"

Netto shrugged. "Maybe. Yes? No? I might find a better copy some day, but until then, this one is gonna stay in my collection." She waved a hand idly at the cart. "The others are all mass-produced regularly, so I can actually sell those. This one... is more for me." She smiled. "And to tempt people into reading more, like you!"

Before she could say anything, Netto was right up in her face again, eyes bright. "So, does that mean you like cats too? I mean, you were reading all through my Chauncey series!"

"Y-yes. I do like cats." Sonnya admitted nervously, blinking. "I can't own one though. I don't have a residence. And they don't let pets stay in Vigil Keep." She paused for a second, thinking, before shrugging. "except ranger pets. But those are different."

"Aw, that's such a shame! Cats are the best!" Netto spun away, the book clutched to her chest, before she put it back on the cart. "What was the first book you read here? Was it 'Plush Monolith'?"

"Uh, no, I think it was... Shooshadoo? Yes, it was Shooshadoo." Sonnya began to step closer, ready to point it out.

"Shooshadoo! One of my favorites!" Netto exclaimed gleefully. She was immediately back to hanging off Sonnya's shoulder, while she held up the book. "Every time I read this, I think of all the little adventures I used to dream up when I was little!"

Netto was so close she was almost talking directly into Sonnya's ear, which she desperately tried not to flick up or down or anything like that. She really hoped the cart owner couldn't see her blush, because of how close she was. If there was one thing in the world Sonnya wasn't used to, it was physical closeness like this. Especially from someone so... emotionally 'personable'. "Y-yeah. Me too. It made me think of when I was little and I'd read to my sisters." "Aw, that's so cute!" Netto purred, giving her shoulder an affectionate shake. She leaned in conspiratorially, this time actually whispering into Sonnya's ear. "Tell ya what. Because this book is both of our favorites, I'm gonna do something naughty."

"Naughty?" Sonnya squeaked, swallowing heavily. Netto's eyes were locked on her, and there was a deviousness buried there. "Like... what?"

"I'm going to give you the book." She whispered, carefully placing the book into Sonnya's hand and making sure to close her fingers over it. "Free of charge. From one cat fan to another. One nostalgia to another."

"You're just...giving it to me?" Sonnya asked, her puzzlement coloring her voice. She stared at the book now in her grasp. "But...why?"

"Because I saw the way your face lit up when you realized what you were reading." Netto explained, smiling. "And because it looked like you hadn't been happy in a while." She cocked her head to the side, the kitty ears almost seeming to twitch in thought along with her real ears. "I saw you walking around, and the smile you had on before was nice, but kind of surface-y. But the moment you started reading this book."

She grinned broadly, and moved in front of her. "It was like you became a whole other person."

Sonnya actually ducked her head in embarrassment at that. There was no way she was going to hide her blush at a comment like that. "Well... thanks. I feel a bit silly though, taking a kids book and adding it to my library."

Netto's smile faded and she looked Sonnya squarely in the eye. "There's nothing wrong with hanging on to the things that make you happy. The one thing people forget is how to BE happy. They think that they need to abandon the trappings of childhood to become an adult." She shook her head. "Even I did that, until I realized that the things that made me happy also helped balance me as an adult. We all need to decompress, to release and feel simple, happy, and free."

Her smile returned, and she swung an arm back at the book cart. "I realized I only needed to let my love of cats come to light, and not be shamed by such a 'childish impulse', to be happy. Now I collect and sell kitty books to kids...adults..." she said the word meaningfully, tapping the cover of the book. "...to make them happy as well. I also collect cat-related items, just for fun!"

"Cat related articles?" Sonnya repeated. She was still trying to process Netto's rather profound speech about maturity. It made sense, on some level...but could she pull it off too? Could she just...let go and be free like that? It felt almost impossible.

Netto reached up with both hands and tugged on her kitty headband's ears. "Like these! And statues, toys, holos, furniture!" She laughed. "Oh, if you were to see my residence... It's literally all cat now." "That sounds... actually kinda fun." Sonnya admitted, smiling. She tried to picture the typical asuran hab residence, all done up some how with cat related materials. "Kinda wish I could see it."

There was a momentary pause as Netto looked at her, considering her as if for the first time. "Well, in that case, how long are you in town, little miss Vigil?" That really caught Sonnya offguard. She hadn't expected a question like that at all. "Uh, I'm actually on extended leave. This is actually my first day back in Rata Sum... I haven't even arranged for lodging yet."

That glint was back in Netto's eyes, and it made Sonnya's heart skip a beat. Oh no. What is she planning?

"Interesting." Netto purred again. She tapped a finger against her lips, chuckling. "Well, it just so happens I have a spare room. It hasn't been cat-ified yet, but if you are up to it, you can bunk with me. Then I can show you all the different kitty-related things I've got. How does that sound?"

"You'd be willing to take in a perfect stranger?" Sonnya asked, unsure.

Netto shrugged blithely, raising an eyebrow. "You're Vigil. Don't come much more upstanding than that, am I right?"

"True, there IS that." Sonnya admitted, running a finger down the cover of the book while she thought. "Well... if you're offering..."

"And I am..." Netto supplied, smirking a bit.

"...Then I accept your offer." She tapped the book. "Both your offers, I mean. Including this gift."

Netto grinned and clapped her hands happily. "Wonderful. Simply wonderful."

She darted over to the cart and pulled a small device out, before stepping back to a safe distance. "Just let me lock down the cart, and we'll be off."

Before Sonnya could ask what she meant by 'lock down', Netto pressed a button on the device, and eight little pyramids shot out of the device, surrounding the cart. Once positioned, they seemed to link up with lasers, before reflective barriers were erected, sealing the cart in. "Just a bit of security. I don't like having to pack and unpack the cart every time I want to go do something or have a bite to eat. So I made this little projector set."

She offered Sonnya a grin over her shoulder. "The projectors are on the inside of the barrier, so you can't just break them on the outside. Gotta use the remote for that."

Putting the remote in her pocket, Netto slid back over to Sonnya and linked elbows with her, beginning to drag her off. "Now! Let's go show you your new room, roomie!" --- Writer’s note: There really was no purpose for this story. I was wandering around Rata Sum and found Netto, made some screenshots, had an impulsive story idea, and wrote it out. It’s not part of my canon...but it could be? I’m not sure. I usually don’t like using ‘real characters’ from the game as direct contacts with my own. Especially not hinting ships. Too high a chance of friggin’ Mary Sue-ing things. But this felt cute, so I did it. I still haven’t honestly decided what Sonnya’s interests are, so this could totally be true. XD What say you, reader? Should I make this part of my story world’s canon? Or leave it as a cute one-shot?

[corbie]

Words I Have Enjoyed, 2018

Books

J.G. Ballard, The Day of Creation

Jodorowsky, The Incal

Charles Stross, Toast and Other Stories

Richard Feynman, QED: the strange theory of light and matter

Bertrand Russell, The Problems of Philosophy

Douglas Adams, Dirk Gentry’s Holistic Detective Agency

Iain M. Banks, The State of The Art

Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness

Iain M. Banks, Excession

Italo Calvino, If On A Winter’s Night A Traveller

Roland Barthes, Mythologies

Frank Herbert, Dune

Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart

Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception

Aldous Huxley, Heaven and Hell

J.R.R. Tolkien, The Silmarillion

Daniel C. Dennett, Consciousness Explained

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

Longer Reads

Assorted Alan Kay Emails

“After more than 50 years of doing edge of art research, my conclusion is that "it is delicate". An important part of any art is for the artists to escape the "part of the present that is the past", and for most artists, this is delicate because the present is so everywhere and loud and interruptive. For individual contributors, a good ploy is to disappear for a while. What was wonderful about the big creative projects of the golden age was that they had to be conducted out in the open by lots of people, but the processes and pressures were such that the delicate parts were not done in.”

Are We Awake Under Anesthesia?

What happens to the mind and consciousness under anesthesia?

Fifty psychological and psychiatric terms to avoid

“A gene for…“, “Brain region X lights up”, “Chemical imbalance”, “Closure”, “Fetish”, and friends.

The Female Price Of Male Pleasure

“Once you've absorbed how horrifying this is, you might reasonably conclude that our "reckoning" over sexual assault and harassment has suffered because men and women have entirely different rating scales. An 8 on a man's Bad Sex scale is like a 1 on a woman's. This tendency for men and women to use the same term — bad sex — to describe experiences an objective observer would characterize as vastly different is the flip side of a known psychological phenomenon called "relative deprivation," by which disenfranchised groups, having been trained to expect little, tend paradoxically to report the same levels of satisfaction as their better-treated, more privileged peers.”

DNA Through The Eyes Of A Coder

“DNA is not like C source but more like byte-compiled code for a virtual machine called 'the nucleus'. It is very doubtful that there is a source to this byte compilation - what you see is all you get.”

A Generation Lost in the Bazaar

“That is the sorry reality of the bazaar Raymond praised in his book: a pile of old festering hacks, endlessly copied and pasted by a clueless generation of IT "professionals" who wouldn't recognize sound IT architecture if you hit them over the head with it. It is hard to believe today, but under this embarrassing mess lies the ruins of the beautiful cathedral of Unix, deservedly famous for its simplicity of design, its economy of features, and its elegance of execution.”

The Recurse Center User’s Manual

I wish every technical working group I’ve been on for the past fifteen years had something one-tenth as thoughtful as this.

The White Darkness: A Journey Across Antarctica

The trial of crossing the Southern continent on foot, alone.

Why the Culture Wins: An Appreciation of Iain M. Banks

“One interesting consequence of this process is that the competition between cultures is becoming defunctionalized. The institutions of modern bureaucratic capitalism solve many of the traditional problems of social integration in an almost mechanical way. As a result, when considering the modern “hypercultures” – e.g. American, Japanese, European – there is little to choose from a functional point of view. None are particularly better or worse, from the standpoint of constructing a successful society. And so what is there left to compete on? All that is left are the memetic properties of the culture, which is to say, the pure capacity to reproduce itself.”

Programmer as wizard, programmer as engineer

“I think one of the overarching goals of compute science is to make more programming like wizarding. We want our computers to be human-amplifiers.”

The Ambiguous Utopia of Iain M. Banks

“Philosophically, the Culture accepts, generally, that questions such as “What is the meaning of life?” are themselves meaningless....In summary, we make our own meanings, whether we like it or not.”

Computing is Everywhere: A conversation with Bret Victor, Creator of Dynamicland

“That was the plan, yeah. I had um I just built up a . . . a set of things I wanted to think about that could not be thought at Apple. It was kind of this — um I had a bulletin board in my room and had like all these little pieces of paper that I had stuck to that board. And so when I went on my trip, I kind of scooped all those papers into like three little plastic baggies, and then at some random public library somewhere in the middle of the country, I spread out those papers on a big desk and tried to figure out what — what is it? Like what — what is the abstraction here? What — what does all these little ideas add — What are the categories here? What does it add up to?”

Lessons from Optics, The Other Deep Learning

“If anything, I wanted to reply that maybe her engineers should be scared.”

How To Be A Systems Thinker: A Conversation With Mary Catherine Bateson

“The tragedy of the cybernetic revolution, which had two phases, the computer science side and the systems theory side, has been the neglect of the systems theory side of it. We chose marketable gadgets in preference to a deeper understanding of the world we live in.”

Deconstructing the Unix Philosophy

Lots of good bits here.

A Basic Lack of Understanding

“This article is about what AI is, but it’s also about why learning what AI is is important in the first place. It’s about how AI is marketed as a commodity today, and what impact that has on people whose work and social lives are touched and shaped by AI on a daily basis. And it’s about how the future of resistance against AI-backed exploitation may not just be technological in nature, but social and cultural.”

One day I'm going to do a survey of the early-21st century AI skepticist essay landscape.

Self-respect: Its Source, Its Power

“To protest that some fairly improbable people, some people who could not possibly respect themselves, seem to sleep easily enough is to miss the point entirely, as surely as those people miss it who think that self-respect has necessarily to do with not having safety pins in one's underwear. There is a common superstition that "self-respect" is a kind of charm against snakes, something that keeps those who have it locked in some unblighted Eden, out of strange beds, ambivalent conversations, and trouble in general. It does not at all. It has nothing to do with the face of things, but concerns instead a separate peace, a private reconciliation.”

Carbon Ironies

“Most likely, you are a hard, angry person. . . . Beset by floods, droughts, diseases and insect plagues . . . fearing for your children in the face of multiplying perils, how can you feel anything better than impatient contempt for my daughter and me, who lived so wastefully for our own pleasure?”

Utopia and Work

“The utopianism of full employment is so entrenched, as a seemingly uncontested common sense, it’s difficult to imagine a different utopian horizon.”

Disposable America

“As it turns out, all three companies’ histories intersect with each other, as well as with structural changes to the American economy. But first, we have to talk about McDonald’s.”

What can a technologist do about climate change?

No clear answers, but thoughtful and insightful.

Survival of the Richest

Slowly but surely, however, they edged into their real topics of concern. Which region will be less impacted by the coming climate crisis: New Zealand or Alaska? Is Google really building Ray Kurzweil a home for his brain, and will his consciousness live through the transition, or will it die and be reborn as a whole new one? Finally, the CEO of a brokerage house explained that he had nearly completed building his own underground bunker system and asked, “How do I maintain authority over my security force after the event?”

Bourdain Confidential

“As much as I look at houses sometimes and think wow, that would be really nice, if that were my house, I know that I would be miserable. It would be… cleaning out the… the gutters, and you know, what about the pipes freezing, and if you own a home it means you have to vacation in the same place every year. I’m a renter by nature. I like the freedom to change my mind about where I want to be in six months, or a year. Because I’ve also found you might have to make that decision… you can’t always make that decision for yourself, you know… shit happens.”

How to write a good software design document

“A design doc is the most useful tool for making sure the right work gets done.”

The Bullshit Web

“There is a cumulative effect of bullshit; its depth and breadth is especially profound. In isolation, the few seconds that it takes to load some extra piece of surveillance JavaScript isn’t much. Neither is the time it takes for a user to hide an email subscription box, or pause an autoplaying video. But these actions compound on a single webpage, and then again across multiple websites, and those seemingly-small time increments become a swirling miasma of frustration and pain.”

On Production Minimalism

“Do more and more with less and less until eventually you can do everything with nothing.”

“Omakase”

Just read it.

See No Evil

“What if we take these companies at their word? What if it is truly impossible to get a handle on the entirety of a supply chain?”

Estrangement and Cognition

“SF is, then, a literary genre whose necessary and sufficient conditions are the presence and interaction of estrangement and cognition, and whose main formal device is an imaginative framework alternative to the author's empirical environment.”

Layering

“This is good advice, and with a bit of adaptation it can apply to many things in life. Any sort of improvisation must arise from a basic technique. And just as important, the advice understands that there’s nothing more intimidating than a pristine kitchen, a blank canvas, an empty screen.”

The Heart of the Problem

“But consider this for a moment. Perhaps once we are adequately fed, diet becomes far less significant in determining how healthy we are. Maybe almost insignificant. Could it be that when our bodies have enough macro and micro nutrients available most of the time, other determinants of health kick in. The houses we live in. The stress we are under. The pressure of financial and social inequalities. Stigma, abuse and mental illness. Social isolation. And a million other factors with the capacity to make us sick.”

Mass Authentic

“Authenticity seems to stand for the truth behind the curtain, but it is really just the curtain. The presumption that only some feelings in some situations are real, and other feelings, though felt, are somehow false, is authenticity’s main ruse.”

Stickeen: The Story of a Dog

“However great his troubles he never asked help or made any complaint, as if, like a philosopher, he had learned that without hard work and suffering there could be no pleasure worth having.”

The Early History of Smalltalk

Far more here than I could find suitable excerpts for.

The Radical Implications of Luck in Human Life

“The less credit/responsibility you believe we are due, the more you believe our trajectories are shaped by forces outside our control (and sheer chance), the more compassionate you will be toward failure and the more you will expect back from the fortunate. When luck is recognized, softening its harsh effects becomes the basic moral project.”

It’s Harder Than It Looks To Write Clearly

“Everything we write is, in a sense, translated from another language, from the chatter we hear inside our head, translated from that interior babble (more or less comprehensible to us) into (what we hope will be) the clearer, more articulate language on the page. But during the process of that translation, basic clarity often suffers—sometimes fatally!—when, for whatever reason, we feel that we are translating our natural speech into a foreign language: in other words, when we are writing.”

It Isn’t About The Technology

“Yet the decentralized Web advocates persist in believing that the answer is new technologies, which suffer from the same economic problems as the existing decentralized technologies underlying the "centralized" Web we have. A decentralized technology infrastructure is necessary for a decentralized Web but it isn't sufficient. Absent an understanding of how the rest of the solution is going to work, designing the infrastructure is an academic exercise.”

E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction

“For 360 minutes per diem, we receive unconscious reinforcement of the deep thesis that the most significant feature of truly alive persons is watchableness, and that genuine human worth is not just identical but rooted in the phenomenon of watching.”

If the Point of Capitalism is to Escape Capitalism, Then What’s the Point of Capitalism?

“Freedom from exploitation. Freedom from control and domination. Freedom to find, develop, and realize ourselves. The freedom to live lives which really sear us with meaning, purpose, and fulfillment — instead of being crushed with anxiety, bruised by competitiveness, and suffused with fear. So here is the real question. If these are things we are really after — why don’t we just give them to one another?”

The Lax Habits of the Free Imagination

“The lax habits of the free imagination exhibit an appealing open-door policy. But to counterbalance this extreme permissiveness, the celestial process had better employ some sort of disciplinarian, an enforcer, to maintain order. Where else does the famous restraint and brevity of the short story come from? In other words, there must be a plan, an outline. Mustn't there?“

Superintelligence: The Idea That Eats Smart People

“It's fun to think about, interesting, and completely inaccessible to experiment given our current technology. You can build crystal palaces of thought, working from first principles, then climb up inside them and pull the ladder up behind you. People who can reach preposterous conclusions from a long chain of abstract reasoning, and feel confident in their truth, are the wrong people to be running a culture.”

I’m Broke and Friendless and I’ve Wasted My Whole Life

“When you’re curious about your shame instead of afraid of it, you can see the true texture of the day and the richness of the moment, with all of its flaws. You can run your hands along your own self-defeating edges until you get a splinter, and you can pull the splinter out and stare at it and consider it.”

Mistakes About The Meaning Of Life

“Noting this close relationship between meaningfulness and value is important, since it allows us to draw many implications that can be helpful for people who consider their lives insufficiently meaningful.”

[notesofarichlycolorednight]

hot take

if you’re gonna write a story that takes place in china

maybe actually do the research abt china???

fair warning: if you like really like cinder and/or marissa meyer you may just wanna sit this one out

in these trying times of lost innocence of childhood and being more aware of social justice issues, i find myself being very critical of the entertainment media i consume

esp when it comes to representation, bc representation is important to me. and it’s becoming more and more important to me the older i get, as an asexual chinese-american woman. i’m still on the fence abt no rep v. bad rep, but this isn’t what this post is mainly abt

i’m currently reading cinder, by marissa meyer for my book club

and i just...i have a lot to say abt it. a lot that i really gotta get off my chest before i feel i can continue to read it

i’d preferably like to talk abt it with my friends (and maybe i will when the time comes), but i’d have to wait until june 1 and finish the book. as i said above, i really have to get this off my chest before i can finish it, so here i am, screaming into the void

so to begin, and i usually comment abt this when it comes to A LOT of east asian rep i see in entertainment media: my beef with the combination of east asian culture to mean one (1) asian/east asian culture

in this case, a combo of east asian cultureS (plural) into one (1), which would be china

honorifics

there are honorifics in china--like you definitely want to apply the correct honorific to your authority figures (i.e., parents, teachers, doctors, bosses, etc.)

and that part of china’s culture was taken, and then adapted into japanese culture today, HOWEVER, the way it’s used in japanese culture today is very different than how chinese ppl use them

okay so disclaimer real quick, chinese is my second language, and i have not taken up learning japanese, and am i’m going off information i’ve learned from my friends who took japanese as their second langauge; so the information i provide here may not be precisely accruate (hence, having trouble finding better words to explain this)

a lot of china’s honorifics aren’t as “““specific”””--for major lack of a better word--as japan’s

they have mr., miss, mrs., teacher/master, doctor, etc., and, in general, it’s custom to use them bc they are important--authority and hierarchy is v important to collectivistic cultures

japan has “““specific””” identifiers that are often, if not always, used to identify any of those older, younger, or equal to you

senpai, -chan, -san, -sama, etc., as well as other identifiers as placeholders for the person’s name to communicate who they are in relation to the person speaking (e.g., oniisan, oniichan, oniisama)

how honorifics are used in cinder is almost completely wrong, not just in culture, but also through translation

from meyer’s website:

-dàren: for a high-ranking official today is simply means adult, or grown up. it can be used as a respectful honorific toward superiors, but it mostly just means adult. archaically it did mean “your/his excellency.” but again, today, it’s mainly used to refer to an adult. and i imagine however far into the future this book takes places, they’d use it the same way??? but i mean i guess if they went back to imperialism

-shìfu: for an older male this is actually master (as an honorific, such as teacher is, or to specify a very qualified worker). sometimes it can be used to address strangers, specifically older men (not necessarily specifically, or often, used for an older male)

-jūn: for a younger male idk where she got “younger male” from bc it’s mostly used as a measure word. it can be used as an honorific, but translates to “your” not younger male. had she been going by the “honorifics” she uses below, it should be dì, which comes from dìdi (弟弟), which means younger brother (but not necessarily younger male)

-jiĕ: for an older female my best guess is this is derived from jiĕjie (姐姐), which means older sister (not necessarily older female)

-mèi: for a younger female once again, she probably derived this from mèimei (妹妹), which means younger sister (not necessarily younger female)

these specific pinyin (more specifically the last two/three) that she picked cannot be separated from the other pinyin that help to identify them. jiĕ and mèi don’t exist by themselves in the chinese language (compared to -chan, or -san do in japanese), and therefore do not translate as such in meyer’s book. not to mention, multiple characters can be applied to jiĕ and mèi depending on the context and other pinyin/character next to it that helps form the word, or helps distinguish the context

she perhaps simplified these honorifics a little too much. so much so in fact that they lost their meaning. quite literally

and, as i said before, these honorifics aren’t used like they are in japanese culture/language. you don’t tack on honorifics behind someone’s name (like a suffix) as they do in japan. the whole honorific (not just half of it, not like a suffix) comes after someone’s name, such as Lín lăoshī (林老师), which means Teacher Lin. or replaces their name entirely, such as tā shì wŏ de dìdi (他是我的弟弟), which means “this is my younger brother” (as opposed to, “this is bob, my younger brother” or variations of that same sentiment)

names

now, in this futuristic world, i can understand if there are names from other countries (esp. other east asian countries)

however, if your crown prince’s name of china has a japanese name...i’m probs gonna call you out on it. esp bc china and japan don’t have The Best history. now maybe they’ve worked thru it after all these yrs, but still

he’s the crown prince of china

he’s mostly just refered to as prince kai. which i would be okay with if it was just that bc kai is chinese

however, his full name? kaito. kaito is japanese

rikan? japanese. like wtf, if your the emperor of china, you should probs have a chinese name. i mean, you’d think hope?

iko? also japanese (i admit this is being a lil nit-picky, bc cinder or adri or whoever is free to name their android whatever-the-hell they want to, i’m just saying)

and i mean, i guess i can see names from other countries in the real world too, but you have to remember china has the largest population of ppl in the world, so the chances that there are ppl within a certain district who don’t have chinese names is v slim (esp bc you have to take the hsk to show you can contribute to society in china before they grant you a visa to live/work there).

compare that to cinder’s district, where we have cinder, adri, iko, peony, pearl, sacha, fateema, and dr. earland. oh and then the lab tech named li, who’s most definitely the only one i can assuredly say is chinese (and i would hope looks chinese)

now, again, bc it is the future, maybe more (like A LOT more) ppl have moved to china lbr tho, they’ve moved back to imperialism, why would you choose to live there? but i’d still be bitter abt it regardless, bc like china, in theory, should have chinese ppl? w/ chinese names??? i imagine it’s still a p big country in this future

optics

i really wish cinder looked chinese. this is more of a personal thing, and i get that genes aren’t so cut and dry, and if she’s a lunar, then yeah she probably won’t look completely chinese

but a girl can dream for representation other than just mulan ya know (not saying mulan sucks or anything, but it’s like, kinda the only thing i have so)

esp bc the book takes place in china. and she is said to be at least mixed “““““asian”””””

i also wish the fucking prince looked chinese--his skin is fair according to the wikia

bruh

why are you so afraid to make your main characters brown

on a more serious note, and this is getting really nit-picky (kinda) again, but i really wish meyer had put more thought into dr. earland’s character. okay, now, i haven’t finished the book so the good doctor may, in fact,,, be...a...good....................doctor..............?

but my point still stands in that dr. earland comes of as very sexist (with undertones of racism, wheeeeee) bc he hates fateen (who has dark skin, btw) bc she’s taller than him

and he’s also super creepy (as in, “where i’m from, that’s called pedophilia” kind of creepy) bc of his strange interest in young, teenage (cyborg) girls...

yeah

and okay, again, i haven’t finished the book, so maybe he’s supposed to come off that way

but an old, white dude showing too much interest in finding a young woc? not v good optics, regardless of dr. earland’s character yeah?

the fact the fateen points this out does absolutely nothing (aka lampshading).

if you point it out, but continue to fall into a harmful stereotype, you are still perpetuating the stereotype. full stop

misc

i say “misc” but most of this really falls under criticism of the author herself, misc is just shorter

i think it’s great that she’s taking this age-old fairy-tale and putting it into my place of birth, bc representation means the absolute world to me. also i really like this idea that the first telling of cinderella took place in china like fuck yeah, steal that white disney princess from the europeans

but i really wish you’d do it right

in her faq, she apologizes if she got anything wrong, but that’s like putting a band-aid over a bullet wound

how much research is research? did she just google a bunch of stuff, or did she sit down and actually talk to ppl from china? or chinese-americans who have kept their chinese culture?  participate in chinese culture to gain a better understanding?

going by the fact that she wrote cinder in a month, she probably stuck to google

which...i mean i guess i’m glad she made the effort, but it woulda been nice if she’d, after getting a book deal, consulted chinese ppl and edited what needed to be edited yeah? i know she did a little editing, but she said the whole process took 3 months from the time she found an agent to getting a book deal, so like...i’m willing to bet she didn’t sit down with some chinese folk and talk abt their culture (and so on)

and look, it’s really not that hard. and, sure it may delay when the book gets published, but at least it’d be more accurate. and better representation.

rather than falling into what most ppl do these days (i’m looking at you miraculous ladybug) and combining all the east asian cultures to make one (1) culture, and call it--not even east asian--but asian

as if that one (1) monster culture that’s mostly made of up east asian cultures could speak for the variety and diversity of a total of 48 countries, and their respective cultures, that are within the asian continent

now, this whole “calling it asian culture” isn’t meyer’s fault--it’s a side-effect of our society. like i get that, and i’m not trying to put the blame solely on her shoulders

but she still perpetuates it by choosing not to talk to chinese ppl abt a folk tale the may have originated in china, in order to ya know, make it more accurate to china. considering it takes place...IN CHINA

[eeveelutionsforequality]

About Split: I think it might be based on Billy Milligan; he was diagnosed with multiple personality disorder after he got arrested for three rapes. He had 24 personality, and apparently three of them committed the three different rapes. And like the 24th personality was used for achieving fusion of the other 23. Idk if this changes anything, I just wanted to give another point of view about this issue

But did he turn into a superpowered cannibal that could climb walls?

Like I said, my problems with the film aren't that it portrays someone with DID as capable of bad things, because we are, everybody is - we can be the bad guy, the good guy, and everything in between. In fact, each alter has the potential to be any one of those things. I accept that, and I accept that storytelling might use the fact that one face can hide two very different people to create tension, fear, confusion, and that's perfectly fine in my opinion.

What bothers me about the film is that DID alone isn't a superhero backstory - we can't change our bodies, we aren't "the next stage in evolution", we aren't "on a higher plain", we can't "alter our chemistry", as the movie proposes - we aren't mystical, magical beings. The psychiatrist in the film uses misconceptions about DID, describes that number of alters like it's unheard of, and promotes popular misinformations like that it can "cure blindness" (when in reality, it can simply cause like a psychosomatic blindness or other problems for certain alters, or lessen the degree to which things the body suffers with affect certain alters - for example, if a specific alter is a coping mechanism for a leg injury caused by the abuse, they may be unable to feel or use that leg long after the initial injury is cured, because the brain, when they're in control, believes that the leg is still damaged; or it can create a sort of placebo effect where the brain doesn't believe it has certain symptoms when a specific alter is present, so they present less, like when cancer sufferers drink "magical water" and feel better for a bit despite the water doing nothing). Contrary to what the psychiatrist character in the film says, DID couldn't cure blindness that was caused by any actual physical damage, in the film she says it "healed the nerves" but... it. can't. do. that - either the damage would have healed anyway or it wasn't there to begin with; people can become blind for various reasons, and some blindness is caused by the subconscious mind not communicating what the optical nerves say to the conscious mind, those people can still navigate rooms or smile back, but they don't know why they're doing it since they think they can't see, so an alter could have that type of blindness while another does not, which to an uneducated observer may appear like DID curing blindness. Does the film explain that? Does it use what can actually happen? Nope. It just makes up a bunch of nonsense about DID to explain the impossible scenario, instead of going "actually there's a real world explanation of why this happens, should we use that?" the writers went "lets make up something that sounds cool".

There's a Marvel mutant called Legion, and his mental illnesses (schizophrenia in some incarnations, DID in others) is linked to his mutation and interacts with it, but his mutation, his father being Prof. X, is why he has those powers, not his mental health issue. It would've been easy for Split to take a similar path, to come up with a separate reason for Billy/Dennis/etc's body to be mutated and then have their DID interact with that. But instead the film promotes the misinformation that people with DID have "unlocked" their mind, that they're capable of great feats of transformation (and not just the fact that he can change his clothes in 13 fucking seconds while switching), and so on.

It's like making a Deadpool who's powers were caused by his cancer - not by anything done to him while he had the cancer, not by the mutant gene, not by an unheard of magical strain of cancer, just by normal run of the mill cancer - and that ALL cancer sufferers have this magical, superhuman, mega evolved thing inside of them. Except in this hypothetical, there's also a common myth in the real world that it actually is possible for cancer to cause things that in reality it can't cause, and that cancer sufferers are dangerous, unstable, and the worst of the worst. People would want to correct that, and people would think that it's sloppy researching.

I guess, what it boils down to is that I'm complaining about bad writing and a lack of research. They came up with an unrealistic premise and, instead of delving deeper into the condition and deciding to create a situation in which the disorder and something else worked together to create "The Beast", they just sort of ran with "No this can totally happen"... AND THEN added a character who is supposedly an expert on this and had her spew some pseudoscience at the screen, that some people out there actually buy to a lesser extent.

I just don't like bad science. It's why I love The Martian so much, because it's a sci-fi film that's 99.9% based in scientific fact. Whereas, when I'm watching a sci-fi or horror film and I see something that can't happen, it takes me out of the film, and it annoys me because as a writer I research EVERYTHING and I hold other people to that standard. There are authors who studied historic London city maps meticulously for weeks and continuously while writing the books, and then there are authors who go "Eh, it probably had a bunch of poop everywhere so I'll just describe that and hope they don't notice that my character has taken eighty seven rights and then a left into what would actually be the river", and you can tell when reading or watching their work.

Also the term is "integration", not fusion. I nitpick. That is my problem. And given that I know quite a bit on this topic for obvious reasons, everything I saw of this film - adverts, reviews, clips, etc - bugged me. I will watch the film in full one day, but at the moment I'm too sick to get through that length of time of anything remotely triggering (which sucks because I also want to rewatch The Voices to talk about how the two differ and what makes The Voices a better film, despite both being films with mentally ill bad guys).

Anyway, yeah, I respect that some people like it, feel free to watch it... Just... Remember not to get your understanding of things from movies. And I know that sounds obvious to anyone with a brain, but the number of people I've seen (mostly on Facebook, some irl, some on YouTube) use "...like in Split", or use it as an example of someone with DID, or reference things said in the film to support their incorrect argument, is what probably really set off my dislike for this movie. Up until then I was just "ugh, another typical movie getting shit wrong, using misinformation, that everyone's complaining about because we need representation but no don't portray us like that, or like that, or like that, we are literal angels who are happy all of the time and if you show us being bad or unhappy then you're promoting ableism and blah blah blah", but seeing people genuinely fall for the bullshit in a movie pissed me off and sent me on a bit of a tirade a while back. I've since taken a step back and am more on the "It's just a movie" bandwagon, but I criticize other movies and media when they get things wrong so I'm not going to not criticize this one just because some people are going "It's just a movie, Jesus, you only care because you have DID and it hurt your feels to be the bad guy". Cause I think that's shitty of them and I think that's really misrepresenting my problems with this film from the beginning.

~ Vape

[sethjacob]

Interview with an Astrobiologist Part 4

Here’s part 4 of my conversation with Graham Lau, an astrobiologist and science communicator who was kind enough to talk with me about space exploration and related topics to help promote my new comic book Astrobiology #1. 

Astrobiology is on Kickstarter now...check out the campaign to read the first 7 pages, and back us if you like what you see! 

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/sethjacob/astrobiology-1

How do you feel about the Fermi Paradox, the idea that if there's really so much life in the universe, where is everybody? Why are we having such a hard time finding them? What's sort of answers to this question do astrobiologists think about?

The first thing is that it's not really Fermi's Paradox. We still use that name for it, but it's not really a paradox. And the current form of it really isn't Fermi's. Enrico Fermi, he was having a conversation with some people about the possibility for travel through the galaxy. And it was basically coming down to this idea that if it was possible to have ships going at the speed of light, or traveling near the speed of light, then why haven't we seen aliens yet? His basic question was, “Where are they? Why aren't they here?”

And since that time, now others have taken that question and extrapolated it to what we call Fermi's Paradox, this idea that if there are alien intelligences out there, then they should be here by now. But there have been so many potential answers to that question, that it's really not a paradox. At all. Because it's just not paradoxical. So there's a lot of possibilities for why we haven't seen our alien neighbors yet, if they're out there.

It could be that traveling near the speed of light is really difficult. Our current propulsion systems are no where near even a small fraction of the speed of light. And so maybe, our alien neighbors out there in the cosmos, maybe a small number of us have gotten to the point of developing space exploration technologies. Maybe that process usually takes a long time. It took over 4 billion years here on Earth, we think. And so, maybe it just takes a while for technologies to develop in a civilization so that they can actually travel fast enough to start moving through the galaxy.

There's also the possibility that maybe we're one of the first. Maybe there's other civilizations right now coming into consciousness of their place in the cosmos within our galaxy. But maybe all of us are fairly young, somewhere within our first million or so years as a civilization, as a species. And so maybe we're all just kind of coming together at the same time. And just unaware of it.

Of course, it's quite possible that we are alone. And it's something that scientists should admit to themselves, that maybe there aren't alien forms out there. Or maybe complex intelligent life is very rare. That's possible as well.

Here's two more fun ones: another one could be that maybe it's actually likely that intelligent life often destroys itself. So we see right now on our planet, we've had this tit for tat nuclear warfare idea going on for a long time with the Cold War. And even now, there's still the threat of nuclear war on our planet. As much as we'd like to tout ourselves as being intelligent and having a great civilization, we know we have tens of thousands of nuclear warheads aimed at each other. And that could literally obliterate our civilization overnight.

Maybe that's unfortunately a more common occurrence than we would hope in the universe. Maybe a lot of other lifeforms, for some reason or another, develop warfare, develop that feeling of the otherness of other beings in our world and come to destroy each other.

And there's also another idea that a friend and I have been talking about lately. The Dark Forest Hypothesis. It's worth looking up. It's the idea that if you're out in the forest at night...should you announce your presence? And the question is, if you announce your presence, you might be inviting any of the lions and the tigers and such from the forest to come attack you and eat you. So maybe, intelligent civilizations in our galaxy who are still alive are the ones who have been smart enough to not broadcast their location out into the galaxy.

So maybe it's actually more common for our neighbor alien intelligences to be a little more reserved when it comes to trying to communicate, or trying to go out and shake hands with other lifeforms. Maybe that's because there are some alien intelligences out there that choose to be war-like and to dominate other civilizations.

However, there's just so many possible ways to answer that question because we just don't know yet. We still have this N=1 problem where we have one world where we know life came to be. So we're listening, we're trying to figure out why we're alone, and maybe that's just a very common process for all of us to go through as intelligent life in the cosmos.

There's also the idea that we've used radio waves. But do you think there's anything to the idea that if aliens were using, I don't know, lasers or some other medium of communication...something like SETI is just looking for radio waves. Well, what if they're not using that medium for communication? Then we wouldn't even notice, I guess.

Yeah that's a great question. And actually, a lot of folks who are interested in SETI have actually thought about that already. So we hear about SETI doing radio searches, and yes, it's true, we look in the radio band. And not all of the radio band unfortunately, we're only able to look at a small range of wavelengths in radio. And only just now are we getting radio telescopes that are committed, 24/7, to doing radio searches.

So SETI institute here in the US, they have their own telescope array that's doing SETI searches 24/7. Otherwise, most radio telescopes, they have to share time with other astrophysical observations. So most of the time, we're not looking at the full band of radio. And we're not looking all the time.

That said, there are folks at SETI who are actually doing what's called optical SETI, or OSETI. And that is very much looking for laser pulses, light pulses, looking around stars for light to increase or decrease, to see if we can find some signal that's being sent out in that visible band of light. Because it's quite possible.

And I think a lot of people have actually considered, what if there are other forms of communication we just haven't figured out yet, that's just waiting for us to get a little more advanced in our physics and our technology? And then we'll uncover this new means of communication that we just hadn't thought of before.

This is sort of a more sci-fi idea, but how do you feel about this concept of the Zoo Hypothesis? That Earth is sort of a wildlife preserve. It's kind of similar to the Prime Directive in Star Trek. Aliens are out there, but we're just like rhinos on the plains in Africa. Or uncontacted tribes, I guess.

The idea of the Cosmic Zoo is very much that. Are aliens not talking to us because we're not ready yet? Maybe they have us kind of fenced off and they're just watching us grow and do our own thing. It's interesting because it makes us feel very small and insignificant to make us think we're the ones being watched in the cage. But it's not impossible.

If we find signs of life on Mars...for instance, say Mars 2020, our next American Mars rover, it's going to have instruments on board that are going to be looking for signs of life. It'll be the first mission since the Viking landers to actually be looking for signs of life on Mars. Say we find signs of life. Say we find living extant things on the surface of Mars or the near surface of Mars. We're going to have to have a very serious ethical discussion about whether or not it's okay to then send humans there, and to send other things there, and to go colonize Mars, even though there is Martian life.

Even though I myself, I'm more in favor of just going and sending humans there and going exploring that life and getting to know it...there are people who will say we should not then go to Mars with humans. Because Mars has its own life, Mars has its own Martians.

So maybe that's a kind of debate that other civilizations have had. Maybe they've looked at Earth and said, “Well, we're not gonna go to Earth, we're gonna let them go until they're ready. And we'll just watch them from afar.” And that'd be kind of interesting.

One thing I've said for a long time...we have a lot of great researchers who are wondering how life started on Earth, if it started here, who are looking into the origins of life. But the thing is, given the way that the evidence from ancient times has been primarily erased, there's scant evidence left in the geochemical record for us to look at. There's a good chance we'll never know exactly how it happened.

But wouldn't it be cool though, if we had some big brother, intelligent alien civilization right around the corner who've been watching us all this time? And who one day, when we're ready, can tell us, “No, this is exactly how it happened on your planet. Because we watched it.” That'd be kind of interesting to see.

What do you think is the best evidence we have so far for life existing on Mars? Either in the ancient past, or like you've been saying, possible even today?

Yeah that's a great question. I think for a lot of us, we talk about this idea of being a water chauvinist, or being focused on life as we know it, the things life as we know it needs. This carbon chemistry and having water for a solvent...right know, when we go out looking for life, we kinda have to look for life as we know it. Because we don't know how to look for other things yet.

So with Mars, we find all this evidence of an aqueous past on Mars, of rivers and lakes and a possible ocean on Mars. That really then opens up the door for possible life as we know it on Mars. And so finding a lot of these aqueous systems, things like hydridic clays, hydridic minerals, that could be representative of these very wet environments...those are the most interesting things, the most interesting places for us to look for life.

Both of the Viking landers had four biology experiments onboard that were designed to look for life. But even more so than now, they were looking for life exactly as we know it. Looking for things like photosynthesis. And three of the experiments basically returned negative results. But one of the experiments returned results that they were considered, they weren't positive or negative. It was just too uncertain, what the results were saying.

Even though a lot of us now don't think that it found any signs of life, a man named Gilbert Levin has continued to push this idea that, he really thinks (and he was the PI on that instrument), he really thinks that instrument found signs of life on Mars. And he stood by it.

The same thing as David McKay. And his colleagues, they stood by their announcement of having found signs of life from Mars inside of the Allan Hills meteorite.

Right, I was reading a bit about this. There have been some controversial events like that. I read that Bill Clinton, when he was president, he even made a speech basically saying that they found a meteorite with organic stuff in it, right? I think largely the consensus is that it was sort of a false positive, that it's not convincing enough I guess?

It was a very interesting paper, it came out in 1996. And they even did some double blinds with other samples to have people look at them, not knowing that they were from a meteorite. And people thought that these things look like microfossils, they look like the shapes of ancient bacteria inside of rock.

And these carbonate globules, the way the globules had formed, and the way the magnetite crystals had formed inside them...at that time, if we saw that, we would say that's a biological process. But yeah, since the publication, it's been debunked fairly hard. We think that all of those potential signs of life could have formed abiotically, inside of the meteorite, inside of the rock on Mars.

It's still really intriguing. We just don't know. It's just so hard with just one sample of rock. That's one reason why sample return from Mars is something we've been dreaming about for so long. With Mars 2020, we'll star the process of making it happen. Mars 2020 isn't going to send samples back to Earth, but it's going to have a sample cache onboard that will allow us to use instruments on the rover to find really interesting rock samples, and then store those in canisters.

And the idea is eventually then, the rover will kind of poop out this big box full of cached samples for us to then later build a spacecraft that we actually haven't built yet or designed that would then go to Mars and pick up these samples. And then bring them back to Earth.

And so, it's not a sample return mission yet. But maybe, down the road, it'll become a sample return mission.

What would you say is the most exciting astrobiology discovery in recent memory?

Huh. It's hard, because there are so many. I think two of the biggest things, in the realms of understanding our place in the cosmos, understanding life in the universe, the two biggest things for us most recently were the discovery of exoplanets. Even though it makes sense that there should be planets around other stars, finally confirming that to ourselves was huge.

It really is unreal that we had no real evidence of planets around other stars until 1995. That's crazy. And now we have, what, like 4000+?

It's almost 4000 confirmed planets right now. And again, here in the coming years and decades, that number will probably become 10,000, or 50,000, or 100,000. Those numbers are gonna keep climbing, which makes the odds of us finding some of those worlds, to at least show potential signs of life, better and better.

So exoplanets are a huge one. And then also, extremophiles. In general, just discovering that life on Earth fills almost every possible niche environment that's out there, that life takes on this huge range of temperatures and salinities and pressures...that, I think, has opened up our eyes to the possibility that life could be in a lot of other environments that aren't just Earth-like environments.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/sethjacob/astrobiology-1

[secondhandstudymaterial-blog]

10 Tips For Qualifying NEET Exam

It's that time of the year when the academic universe is smitten with the'NEET 2018' phenomenon. Everybody is busy putting over their guides and textbooks, speaking to notes, studying into the night sitting in their desk, sucking pencils and attempting to memorize all of the formulae. You would not find anybody chatting with their friends or watching tv. Is not it nice to see everybody occupied? At this vital time, it's necessary to get a few recommendations to decode NEET 2018.

With only a couple of months left to your exam, your prep may be in full swing, right? While there are pupils who have begun their own groundwork, there are also People Who Don't Understand How to plan their NEET 2018 Prep (One of these was meI had been that this petrified damsel in distress).

In case you haven't got started, please give yourself a well-mannered punch (yeah, I do not like violence) and begin preparing now! The most crucial thing of all is that the very first step, men. It's possible to organize the travel to the destination well just in the event that you know the beginning point.

If we proceed with the pros and NEET toppers, committed practice and revision will be the significant things which could result in success. If you're somebody targeting the forthcoming clinical evaluations, undergo these hints to decode NEET 2018.

1.Know that the syllabus of the exam nicely NEET syllabus is as vast as an ocean, and you want to be aware of the specific place to fish the ideal output. Cut down to additional info and concentrate on significant topics. Since we understand the NEET test covers the NCERT syllabus also, it is possible to compare the syllabus along with your Board examination syllabus. It's advantageous for you if you will find typical chapters since you aren't going to have to prepare them individually. This gives you ample time to focus on the areas of the syllabus which aren't covered.

Important Focus Areas for NEET 2018 are: Physics -- Mechanics, Optics, Thermodynamics and Atomic Physics

Chemistry -- Mole Concept, General Organic Chemistry, Periodic Table, Chemical Bonding, Coordination Chemistry

Biology- Ecology and Environment, Genetics, Cell Biology; Morphology, Reproduction, and Physiology of Plants and Animals; Principles of Biotechnology

2.Great study material Yes, that is the main element! While choosing the proper study material for NEET is little perplexing, with the assistance of educators and internet expert help, you are able to pick the perfect one. It is possible to consult with NEET toppers and determine which publication they referred. Obviously, they will not be accessible for you all. Therefore, you may read NEET topper interviews and attempt to get an idea in their preparation fashion. You need to prepare research notes for NEET, resolve preceding years' question papers and take mock tests to boost your speed and precision. Also, Buy Books For Best Study Material For NEET

3. Think of a successful study strategy Time is priceless. Most of us know that however many aspirants don't create the correct use of time and have a nosedive. Goal setting could be utilized as a way to assist aspirants to bring positive changes in their own lives. To be able to execute the setting of a target, be certain that you ask oneself a few questions: What's my objective? Is my goal realistic? Just how much effort needs to be placed to meet my objective? Until and unless you produce a complete and comprehensive schedule of how that you would like to examine, you won't have the ability to finish the syllabus. Strategy for the week ahead of time and find out chapters which you will need to prepare yourself from the start.

4. Function on poorer areas It's likely that you're extremely strong in 1 subject and feeble in another. Don't become discouraged by exactly the same. Attempt to work hard more in the poorer areas to fortify them. If needed, take support from a buddy or take additional courses on the topic. This will aid in overcoming the anxiety of your weakness efficiently.

Also Read Qualifying Allen Study Material For AIIMS

5. Practice mock test papers Among the most significant challenges of this NEET examination is that the time limit. Pupils must complete 180 queries in 180 minutes (3 hours). It means that they could provide a maximum of 1 minute for each question. Time management is an essential skill that's necessary for this examination. While practicing in your home, ensure you maintain the time limit in mind. See complete answer of NEET past year question paper; concentrate on the often asked questions, subjects, and blueprint.

6. Frequent Study Breaks We're people rather than machines. Thus, we need timely remainder as, after all, even machines require some rest to return to functioning efficiently. Consequently, it's crucial to realize that you can not maintain an optimum amount of concentration without carrying an optimum rest to recuperate. But remember that you don't attract the fractures on a greater priority than research. Breaks could be in the shape of a ten-minute walk, a visit to the gym, with a conversation with a buddy or just taking a little nap.

7. Use New Technologies There are various men and women who research by highlighting at the textbooks and creating notes using a pencil on a scrap of newspaper. These approaches still find their location and significance, but there is an infinite number of choices for personalizing research than ever before. Be it via internet tools, social networking, blogs, videos or mobile programs, learning is now simple, intriguing and user-centered today. Should you would like to try out new learning technology, then Topper is a superb place to find out.

8. Don't fall for guesswork Many candidates have the tendency of taking the training route for solving queries that they do not understand. But, it may prove risky in this situation since there is negative marking for a wrong response. It's encouraged to leave a query entirely in the event that you don't know the ideal answer. This is only one of the most essential suggestions to decode NEET 2018 which everyone can give!

9. Health is all about It is vital to assess yourself both physically and emotionally. Rather than whining"I never get enough sleep" or"I am eating too much power food," take control and strategy for earning the equilibrium. This can enable you to be happier and more effective. Steer clear of crap and fatty foods and change to healthful diet programs. Do yoga and meditation exercises for greater immersion. These hints to decode NEET 2018 will be futile with no 1 variable!

10. Positivity is critical Your mindset decides the efficacy of the learning procedure. If you have a negative strategy and also maintain saying that you can not get it done, then that will not commit to the notion of studying. A grumbling approach is only going to make matters hard. The instant that you start thinking favorably, your mind will reveal increased action. An ideal frame of mind also enables you to feel less stressed and more receptive to new thoughts.

We Toppr, highly suggest the NEET Test Series find that excess advantage over others and genius the NEET 2018.

These were a few strategies to decode NEET 2018! I hope that the above information will be useful for your groundwork. Check out the NEET Application Form & Expected Pattern of NEET. Best Books For Used NEET Study Material to buy a online.

[jett93733578697-blog]

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[lesliepump]

Podcast #151: How Westlaw Lost its Copyright, with Alan Sugarman

In this episode we’re joined by Alan Sugarman to talk about the landmark case that opened up access to law and ultimately resulted in more options for online legal research today.

Alan Sugarman

Alan Sugarman founded HyperLaw in 1991 to publish electronic law treatises linked to case law. A graduate electrical engineer from Tufts University with a law degree from the University of Chicago, Sugarman has been a litigator and corporate lawyer at law firms, corporate law departments and governmental agencies. In the 1990s, HyperLaw was a disrupter of the legal publishing industry. HyperLaw successfully challenged Westlaw’s copyright claims to the text and citations of court opinions.

You can follow Alan on LinkedIn.

Thanks to Ruby Receptionists and Clio for sponsoring this episode!

Listen & Subscribe

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Transcript

This transcript was prepared by Rev.com.

Speaker 1: Welcome to the Lawyerist Podcast with Sam Glover and Aaron Street. Each week, Lawyerist brings you advice and interviews to help you build a more successful law practice in today’s challenging and constantly changing legal market. And now, here are Sam and Aaron.

Sam Glover: Hi, I’m Sam Glover.

Aaron Street: And I’m Aaron Street. And this is episode 151 of The Lawyerist Podcast, part of the Legal Talk Network. Today we’re talking with Alan Sugarman, whose HyperLaw service in the early 1990s paved the way for modern research services like Google Scholar and Fastcase.

Sam Glover: Today’s podcast is sponsored by Ruby Receptionist, and its smart, charming receptionists who are perfect for small firms. Visit callruby.com/lawyerist to get a free trial with Ruby.

Aaron Street: Today’s podcast is also sponsored by Clio Legal Practice Management Software. Clio makes running your law firm easier. Try it for free today at clio.com.

So, I guess today’s episode with Alan Sugarman is kind of one in our ongoing series on how we got to this place where open access to law is a conversation. We’ve had a number of these interviews with Tim Stanley, and Ed Walters, and Sarah Glassmeyer. I think this’ll be an interesting story as piece of that.

Sam Glover: Yeah, I kind of geek out on the nuts and bolts of how we get to where we are today, and one of the reasons why I’m interested in open access to law is that law is kind of the oil, Ed Walters would say, on which innovation in a lot of legal tech works, right? Like, if you wanna build AI, you have to have a dataset to train it on and a lot of that comes from open access to law. You can’t have it unless it’s open. So that’s why I’ve been doing some of these interviews, because I think it’s fascinating.

But I think what you will also hear as an undercurrent in some of these interviews … It was there with Tim Stanley, and with Carl Malamud, and it’s here in my interview with Alan Sugarman, is that some of today’s competitive landscape is due to a series of incidents that have resulted in grudges, that weren’t always pretty. And I think you’ll hear that today, I think you’ve probably heard that in some of the previous ones.

But the lawsuit over HyperLaw and the history of it and background and what happened is pretty interesting, so here’s my interview with Alan. Just another note, my audio, again, isn’t great for the first two minutes this week, but then it clears up and please be reassured that I’ve upgraded my recording gear at home so snow days won’t muck up my interviews so much anymore.

Aaron Street: Oh, good.

Sam Glover: Here we go.

Alan Sugarman: Hello, I’m Alan Sugarman. I am an attorney in New York City, I’ve been practicing since 1971, and I’m the founder of HyperLaw, which in modern day terms was the disrupter of the legal publishing industry. And we took on the monopolist West Publishing and we beat them and that was in 1997 and 1998.

Sam Glover: Awesome. Thanks for being with us today, Alan. Maybe before we dive into the litigation, which I really wanna talk about, what was the lay of the land before HyperLaw came along in 1991? What did legal research look like back then?

Alan Sugarman: Well, legal research back then was still largely paper-based, and people used books and people used the key numbering system to do their research. Lexis had been founded in the 70s, and West Publishing Company, which people call today West Law, created its online service a few years later. It was the federal government that it really initiated legal research online or … digital legal research was done by the Air Force, Flight.

Flight was an effort by the US Air Force to digitize US Supreme Court decisions. And it was made available to lawyers in the US government. And then that evolved into something called Jurist, which the department of justice worked on, and they were digitizing legal opinions, federal opinions, starting in the 80s. And then they got West Publishing Company to help them do the digitizing, and gave West an exclusive contract and made it clear that those cases weren’t subject to FOIA requests.

So there was litigation where people were trying to get their hands on Jurist, and then the big thing that happened was in the mid-80s, Lexis decided it was going to start using the so-called star-pagination that West had developed. The site to the page, the volume and page number of the cases. So, West jumped on them, and following something they did for almost 10 years after that, they of course sued them in Minnesota, in the federal courts where they’d been cultivating judges for years, and where the cases would be reviewed in the eighth circuit where they’d been cultivating judges. So West jumped on Lexis, which was owned by Mead … And by the way, Lexis was originally a product of the Ohio State Bar … And West was able to get an injunction against Mead, claiming they had copyrights and the text, the enhanced text, and the citations, and won in the eighth circuit which wasn’t a surprise, given some of the things that had gone on, including the debit award which was basically paying off federal judges with awards and trips to resorts.

Sam Glover: I mean that sounds pretty cutthroat! We don’t normally think of legal research as a cutthroat industry, but …

Alan Sugarman: Oh no, West was incredibly litigious. They were suing people right and left and at this point in time, the cost of converting paper opinions to text was pretty expensive. Now this was way before Optical Character Recognition, and even in the 90s, “OCR” as we call it, was not so robust and so the way they had to do it was have it keyed in and even the facilities to do keying in, basically in India, were not as developed as they are today. So it was a big expense just to get a court case converted digitally, and of course at that time, even if there were some word processors around, judges were … I would say 95% of all opinions were being typed on electric typewriters or handwritten. So there was no way of getting digital versions from the court. And if they were digital versions, they were in specialized publishing printing software.

Sam Glover: I mean that kinda puts it in perspective, ’cause when I talked to Ed Walters, I’m appalled by how much effort they put in to maintain legal decisions coming into Fastcase’s database, but by contrast, the amount of effort that you had to put in to do that back in the 80s and 90s sounds like it was just crazy higher effort.

Alan Sugarman: Well, [inaudible 00: 07: 21] worse than that, I think West didn’t even bother even once decisions were available in Word Processing. It wasn’t worth the time to try to convert the digital Word Processing files. There were so many different programs, ways that people did it. And formatting and everything else. It was just, at the end of the day, easier for them to send it to India or somewhere else and get it double-keyed and bring it back to the US.

Or, so they just ignored that. In a minute I’ll get to what we did.

Sam Glover: Well yeah I wanna hear about that too.

Alan Sugarman: Okay so West [inaudible 00: 08: 04] basically gave a monopoly to West over the content and the citation to the content of judicial opinions. And so our involvement was that I’ve been very involved with computers in the law for years, in fact in the early 80s I’d even taught a course in computer literacy for lawyers in 1982. My original computer had 4k of memory. If people know what that means.

Sam Glover: Yeah.

Alan Sugarman: So I was pretty involved with this. When I came off my big case in 1990 I finished up a real estate book and decided that I wanted to do an electronic version. I reserved the rights with my publisher John Wiley who didn’t know what I meant when I said I wanted to do an electronic version. And I wanted to link into the cases. So my question is, where do I find the cases? This was all going to be on floppy disk, if you can believe it.

Sam Glover: Yeah.

Alan Sugarman: And then CD-ROM. So I wrote a letter to West saying, “Look I know the only place I can find the decisions is from you. From my litigation experience I spent far too much time wandering around court clerks offices and dusting boxes trying to find old files.”

So I wrote them and they said, “No.” And they basically said, quote said, “Proceed at your own risk.” And I knew they’d been after other people and they were starting to take the position that if you did a brief with links to cases that you had to get their permission. If you went to a law library and wanted to photocopy a case they wouldn’t do it unless basically they paid a fee to West.

Sam Glover: Wow really?

Alan Sugarman: Oh yeah.

Sam Glover: That’s crazy.

Alan Sugarman: Absolutely true. Absolutely. So West wanted to control everything. Now this was 1991 before the internet, but I had realized that digital linking to briefs for example or treatises would be the way of the future of development of law. It wasn’t so much legal research but it was the ability to present the case to the reader without having to go do legal research. And I realized this with [inaudible 00: 10: 26] the whole development of law, I was offended by it. And I’d read an article about hyper-linking by Vannevar Bush, which he predicted this back in the 40s.

So I created HyperLaw to do my book. And then I decided that maybe the first thing to do to test West and also to perhaps create a future product would be to start publishing the texts of the US Supreme Court. Now at that time they had a very elaborate funky system for making cases available to newspapers and publishers. And you had to sign up and go through all of this security stuff and there were maybe 10 to 20 publishers in the country who did this. But we managed to sign up by thousands of dollars of secure hardware. I mean we were just accepting a down lope I think in their mind. If we get a download from them we can mess up their system.

So we got the decisions, we got them all formatted, cleaned up, found a search engine that would fit on a floppy disk in a CD-ROM, released it. And the idea I had was perhaps to do reviews of Supreme Court cases or something like that, and so you could buy every year, I never did this, but buy every year a review of the Supreme Court cases for the year and you can link in to all the cases. So that was the idea.

Sam Glover: It sounds like HyperLaw was basically like Microsoft Encarta. Where both the software and all the data is on the CD that you would buy.

Alan Sugarman: That was the idea.

Sam Glover: Yeah.

Alan Sugarman: So we then released the CD at Legal Tech in New York in 1992, we were the only company with any CD product. We were told the CD was a dead technology. But I would tell you the West people went hovering around my booth. We didn’t sell very many. It was not a commercial success. I then discovered that some of the Court of Appeals were starting to release the Federal Court of Appeals opinions on their bulletin boards. And so I decided I would download as many as I could and put those on a CD. And that turned into an elaborate product.

I had two or three interns from Columbia Law School, one who was a good programmer, and I did my own programming. And it was a huge problem of downloading cases, figuring out if you had duplicates, cleaning them up, each one was a different format. But we put together a pretty nice case which had meta-data in it. We used pretty intelligent searching to create the meta-data. And we had a real product. And then we went to the American Association of Law Libraries Convention in 1993 in Boston, which is really big, it’s a big event in legal publishing. And West again came hovering around my booth and I mentioned that, “Well we don’t have all the cases.” And they said, “Well you better not use our cases.” Well, I took that as a threat.

Then what happened in 1994, Matthew Bender, which was an independent company then was trying to publish treatises of New York case law, and they needed the cases. They wanted to do the same thing I had in mind. I’m not claiming to be original in any way. Because it was obvious that was the way, what people wanted to have.

They were running into problems, but they wanted to use the citations to the cases. The volume and page number.

Sam Glover: Whereas you were just using the cases themselves.

Alan Sugarman: Well we were downloading the cases which had nothing to do with West. But what we wanted to do was fill in the gaps with the cases that weren’t being downloaded. Because the courts weren’t so complete.

Anyway Matthew Bender sued West in New York City, where we’re located in the Southern District of New York where I was admitted to practice law, and had practiced. And sued them for declaratory judgment. And when I saw that, this was early in 94, I said, “Oh no. We’re gonna have another fix where two big companies sue each other and after they beat each other and the lawyers collect their legal fees enter into a private settlement and everyone else will be screwed.”

So four weeks later we intervened. And I have a very long detailed complaint that we filed. And my friends Paul Ruskin and Carl Hartman agreed to basically be pro bono lawyers with the hope of getting legal fees at the end. And they put an awful lot of work into it. And we were allowed to intervene. And we pursued the case and I won’t go into all the details but-

Sam Glover: Was the core of it though, was it a fight over the citation system then, or?

Alan Sugarman: In the beginning Matthew Bender seemed to be interested in both. But I always was interested in the text part.

Sam Glover: Yeah.

Alan Sugarman: In fact, in 19, I left this out of my story, but after West v. Mead the Supreme Court came down with the Fice case which totally undermined the theories in the West v. Mead case. And then Mead and [inaudible 00: 15: 49] got Barney Frank to introduce some legislation in 1992 in Congress. H.R. 5522. And to make the citations not copyrightable.

And we went down to Washington and we filed our brief where we said, “Well that’s fine but we also wanna make the text not copyrightable.” ‘Cause West would claim if it corrected parallel citations, corrected typos, added the attorneys names, that they were entitled to copyright protection for that. And if you picked up a West case you didn’t know what they were asserting copyright for or not. It was very interesting then, that no one else in the legal publishing industry would support our position on text. Okay. So when we got into the Matthew Bender case, Matthew Bender I think initially was going to fight for both text and the citation system, and then they were acquired by Mead Data.

And Mead had so much money invested in his own conversion to text that they did not want us to take that position. In fact they even fought us at the end when we got before the Supreme Court. You know, they wanted the Supreme Court to overturn our win.

Sam Glover: I mean effectively what you have happening is two people with essentially identical reporters are saying that they each have different copyrights in their own version of it.

Alan Sugarman: Well yeah. They didn’t want people going on Lexis and downloading the text of cases and saying, “You can’t copyright it.” And they didn’t wanna depend upon a contract, you know contract with Lexis to keep you from copying it.

Sam Glover: Right.

Alan Sugarman: Okay. So we both won the citation case and then Matthew Bender sort of disappeared. And we alone won the text case. And as far as I’m concerned the text case was much more important than the citation.

Sam Glover: Yeah.

Alan Sugarman: And we won at the 2nd Circuit. Cert was denied by the U.S. Supreme Court. We came back to get legal fees, the judge said we were David and Goliath. And won the case. Awarded us fees. The 2nd Circuit said, “No. You’re not substantial.” They would say, “There was a substantial issue.” Which is really ridiculous. ‘Cause no one ever supported the Mead case. There you are. So we were sitting there in 1997, 98, the last legal fees decision was 2001. So that’s what happened in that case.

But basically our case made Google Scholar. Google Law possible.

Sam Glover: Right ’cause the outcome is now you can, obviously you can publish the text of cases and you can use the citation system right? Or is the citation system still in doubt.

Alan Sugarman: No there’s no doubt on the citation system. And initially, oddly Google did not include the citations. And I would write them, I never really talked to anyone senior there. But I would say, “Why aren’t you putting the citation in?” And now they have the citation in there. The pagination for the published opinions.

Sam Glover: So we need to take a quick break to hear from our sponsors and when we come back I wanna talk about what happened to HyperLaw after that and maybe spend a little time talking about the impact of that decision, that ordeal, that litigation today. And what maybe still needs to happen to keep the law free. So we’ll be back in a moment.

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Sam Glover: So Alan after the decision what happened to HyperLaw? It’s not on the market today as far as I know so were you able to take that and run with it or what happened?

Alan Sugarman: In 94, 5, and 6, we were litigating against the largest law firms in the country. We actually went through three law firms that West had. And in the end they had to have Arthur Miller from Harvard Law School come down and argue for them in the 2nd Circuit. I was, just doing the case was overwhelming me, and by the time 1998 came around I had run through all my money. So I had to go back into the real world and make a living.

Sam Glover: Yeah.

Alan Sugarman: So HyperLaw still exists. I comment on things from time to time. Do some litigation support. But we at least in the 2nd Circuit, we have this absolute right, there’s no way West can touch us in the 2nd Circuit. They can’t play that game.

During this whole period of time there were other fights going on involving the vendor-neutral citation, Pacer, we were very active in testifying before the ABA committees on this, and there’s the judicial conference. We work with the American Association of Law Libraries, and I want to give a real heads up to Jamie Love for the taxpayer assets project, who was extremely supportive. That’s a [inaudible 00: 22: 15] group. He got involved in 95 and he was, we work with him a lot. We were all over the country. And one of the big issues had to do with the vendor-neutral citation. Which, even today I don’t understand what’s going on. But let me explain something about the vendor-neutral citation.

Sam Glover: Yeah.

Alan Sugarman: Our position was that vendor-neutral citation had to be one that could be immediately citable. The day the opinion came out you could cite to that opinion and use that citation forever and ever. And how do you do that? You have the name of the court, the date, and the docket number. And there you are. You have a permanent cite.

The other people involved with this got all involved with this idea where the courts have to control what you can publish and not publish, and you should have a sequence number, etc., etc., etc.

Sam Glover: Well and the citation thing is, even though you can use West’s or Lexis’ citations, they still control the citation. What you’re effectively waiting for is them to put it in a book and give it a page number, which is, I’m not even sure if that’s even a real thing anymore. I’m sure they still publish books but they’re not super relevant to anyone. But you’re still waiting on them to decide what the citation is which is hard especially since nobody actually cares if it’s in a book anymore.

Alan Sugarman: Absolutely Sam, and I think first of all you’re talking just about the published opinions. There are also unpublished-

Sam Glover: Right.

Alan Sugarman: … opinions. And most people actively use unpublished opinions and there’s a lot of courts say you can’t cite a case that’s not been published in a book, but that’s evaporating day by day.

Sam Glover: Well it’s also really torturing the meaning of published when everything is being published. It’s just a technicality.

Alan Sugarman: It is. Although I always say judges did not want their bad decisions or embarrassing decisions to be published. And West controlled what was published.

Sam Glover: Right.

Alan Sugarman: West did not publish our victories in a text case. There’s a full written decision and they didn’t put it in the federal supplement. I wonder why. But let me go back to what you were saying since you’ve really practiced law. Have you ever gotten a Lexis cite to a case that was never published and then, but you only use Westlaw.

Sam Glover: Right.

Alan Sugarman: And then you go try to find it in Westlaw and you can’t find it because there’s a lot of discretion in how you name a case.

Sam Glover: Yep.

Alan Sugarman: And you spend hours trying to find it. That’s just extraordinary that, that can happen today. I believe today that all cites to all court opinions should have the docket number of the case in it. And for unpublished opinions a lot of courts are disseminating them and they’re available on all the various services. If you had the docket number and someone cites a Lexis cite and includes the docket number, you wouldn’t have to go and pay money to West or Lexis to go find the case.

Sam Glover: Right.

Alan Sugarman: I can tell you just three weeks ago I got a brief in a case and he cites three different Lexis cases from the New York lower court. And even with the name of the case and going to the court system I couldn’t find the cases. Even though they’re somewhere in their electronic system. And there’s another reason to use the docket number. And that is the docket number allows you to link the lower court opinion to the appellate opinion. All appellate opinions should list the docket number of the case below. If you go into Google Scholar now they have a problem of linking an unpublished lower court, district court opinion to an appellate court opinion. The Federal Appellate Court.

Sam Glover: Right but that should be a piece of cake.

Alan Sugarman: If they included the docket number in both. But all these groups including the American Association of Law Libraries, GPO, Recap, Google Scholar, and Legal Information Institute Citation System, none of them require the docket number in the citation even of an unpublished decision. I have been very explicit with them about this and it just doesn’t happen. Tim Stanley at Jurist goes better, he includes the docket number, and he also includes the more specific cite which is the docket entry number on the docket sheet for the federal opinions that he publishes. That is a beautiful cite. I’m just waiting for them to wake up for this. I’ve been fighting this for 10 years, people look at me like I don’t know what I’m talking about. And eventually we’ll get there.

Sam Glover: Yeah. I mean the HyperLaw decision, the litigation really paved the way for what we have today which is, you really do have a choice. In at least some surveys, services like Fast Case are neck and neck with Westlaw and LexisNexis, which is kind of amazing at this point. And you’ve got all kinds of other secondary services. Bloomberg, you know is charging hard to catch up with everyone. And so is, I think it’s Case Maker, and there’s a bunch of them out there now. And I think none of this would have existed if Bender and then you hadn’t dived into this litigation.

Alan Sugarman: Well Google Scholar is the beautiful-

Sam Glover: And Google yes of course.

Alan Sugarman: Okay. I frankly even when I was using Lexis, which I stopped using, but I would always start my research in Google Scholar.

Sam Glover: Yeah.

Alan Sugarman: It’s faster, quicker, more informative, and also reaches outside of the case network to find more information. I give them really great credit for what they’ve done and they’ve pushed the whole field far, everybody else that’s doing this kind of stuff is basically trailing behind in their footprints.

I mean at the same time that certain people were paying allegedly $600,000 to digitize the Federal Reporter, Google was doing it at the same time.

Sam Glover: Yeah.

Alan Sugarman: Of course I’m not from California so there’s almost a mafia out there. Not really sure what goes on out there. But I had always assumed that Google was paying for this. But I don’t know. I don’t know the whole thing. People claim they paid for it. And then when they were finished, they said, “We now have all federal court opinions available for nothing.” And I said to them, “That’s not true.” I said, “90% of the federal appellate court opinions are unpublished opinions. You don’t have any of those.”

Sam Glover: Yeah. So what can the average lawyer do to support the move towards neutral citations?

Alan Sugarman: Well the first thing they oughta do, when they write briefs is to start adding the docket number of cases that only have, certainly that only have Westlaw or Lexis cites, or that are unpublished. They should put that in every single cite so that judges who, by the way, today a lot of judges are pretty sophisticated in this. But, just to get people used to seeing that.

Sam Glover: I mean I feel like a small active rebellion would be for all of us to use vendor-neutral citations first and then put the Westlaw or Lexis citations in a footnote or something.

Alan Sugarman: I would not include the Lexis or Westlaw cite. In fact I don’t. I put in the docket number because if you have the docket number and the name of the court you can find the opinion in Lexis or Westlaw quickly. Because docket numbers is one of their meta-data fields. You can search them.

Sam Glover: Well and in many courts you can link directly to the court in the docket anyway. So.

Alan Sugarman: Right.

Sam Glover: Well Alan thank you for your work and for telling us about it. Thanks for being the one to stand up and do this because it has at least opened the door to a much more robust market for legal research options.

Alan Sugarman: I’m glad that it has come to fruition. And again I thank Google Scholar for what they have done, which has taken full use of what we accomplished in 1997.

Sam Glover: Well maybe in another 20 years we can get back together and see if vendor-neutral citation has finally come around.

Alan Sugarman: I hope so.

Sam Glover: I’ll see ya then.

Alan Sugarman: Anyway Sam, nice talking to you.

Sam Glover: You too.

Alan Sugarman: Bye-bye.

Podcast #151: How Westlaw Lost its Copyright, with Alan Sugarman was originally published on Lawyerist.com.

from Law and Politics https://lawyerist.com/podcast-151-alan-sugarman/ via http://www.rssmix.com/