#mars colonist

[sea-of-machines]

old as fart colonist art I finished only now because I failed to see its potential

[starsirrah]

Day 13-14: Celestial Pt. 2✨

✨Rise up, you must awake✨

Have a Mars Colonist during New Migrator! I had to draw him at LEAST once this year XD✨

Dude got cursed with blonde when he became a space god lolol🌙✨

[disk28]

[hy4c1nthh]

.what.

are. you fucking kidding me.

[stormylewirmy]

I been thinking about this fella lately! Have I ever shared that my fan name for Mars Colonist is Aries? Well, yup that's what I named him!

[mistray-art]

» Day 18 » The Mars Colonist » Universal Migrator.

[18 november 2022]

[rearranging-deck-chairs]

yaz, somewhere between 25 and 30 years old she lost track a while ago, watching from a distance as 10 tries to impress a 20-year-old, the moment hes sent her away and rejoins yaz: shes too young for you mate

[mysticstronomy]

DID LIFE BEGIN IN DEEP SPACE??

Blog#468

Saturday, January 4th, 2025.

Welcome back,

Life, for all its complexities, has a simple commonality: It spreads. Plants, animals and bacteria have colonized almost every nook and cranny of our world.

But why stop there? Some scientists speculate that biological matter may have proliferated across the cosmos itself, transported from planet to planet on wayward lumps of rock and ice. This idea is known as panspermia, and it carries a profound implication: Life on Earth may not have originated on our planet.

In theory, panspermia is fairly simple. Astronomers know that impacts from comets or asteroids on planets will sometimes eject debris with enough force to catapult rocks into space. Some of those space rocks will, in turn, crash into other worlds. A few rare meteorites on Earth are known to have come from Mars, likely in this fashion.

“You can imagine small astronauts sitting inside this rock, surviving the journey,” says Avi Loeb, an astrophysicist at Harvard University and director of the school’s Institute for Theory and Computation. “Microbes could potentially move from one planet to another, from Mars to Earth, from Earth to Venus.”

(You may recognize Loeb’s name from his recent book Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth, which garnered headlines and criticism from astronomers for its claim that our solar system was recently visited by extraterrestrials.)

Loeb has authored a number of papers probing the mechanics of panspermia, looking at, among other things, how the size and speed of space objects might affect their likelihood of transferring life. While Loeb still thinks it’s more likely that life originated on Earth, he says his work has failed to rule out the possibility that it came from somewhere else in space.

Meanwhile, recent experiments have suggested that earthly organisms can survive in space, at least for a little while. Experiments aboard the EXPOSE-E facility at the International Space Station have subjected bacteria, lichens and plant seeds to the extreme cold and radiation of space for anywhere from a few days to over a year. Some bacteria and other organisms were able to survive the journey, including tardigrades, ultra-hardy animals found everywhere from Arctic ice to the deep ocean.

If an asteroid or comet is large enough, microbes could be frozen deep within, Loeb says.

That could protect them from radiation and the extreme temperatures that turn meteors into fireballs. After they explode onto the surface of a new world, these extraterrestrial colonists could begin to thrive.

In other solar systems, panspermia could be even more likely to occur than in our own. For example, the seven tightly packed planets of the TRAPPIST-1 system, discovered in 2016, might be ideal for life to planet-hop. If we find life there one day, Loeb says, we should pay attention to whether it all looks suspiciously similar. He thinks two neighboring planets with similar biological systems would be a sure sign that life had traveled between them at some point.

Originally published on https://www.astronomy.com

COMING UP!!

(Wednesday, January 8th, 2025)

"DID LIFE CAME FROM STARS??"

[literaryvein-reblogs]

Writing Notes: The Moon (pt. 2)

Earth’s Moon is thought to have formed in a tremendous collision. A massive object ― named Theia after the mythological Greek Titan who was the mother of Selene, goddess of the Moon ― smashed into Earth, flinging material into space that became the Moon.

The brightest and largest object in our night sky, the Moon makes Earth a more livable planet by moderating our home planet's wobble on its axis, leading to a relatively stable climate. It also causes tides, creating a rhythm that has guided humans for thousands of years.

The Moon was likely formed after a Mars-sized body collided with Earth several billion years ago.

Earth's only natural satellite is simply called "the Moon" because people didn't know other moons existed until Galileo Galilei discovered four moons orbiting Jupiter in 1610. In Latin, the Moon was called Luna, which is the main adjective for all things Moon-related: lunar.

The many missions that have explored the Moon have found no evidence to suggest it has its own living things. However, the Moon could be the site of future colonization by humans. The discovery that the Moon harbors water ice, and that the highest concentrations occur within darkened craters at the poles, makes the Moon a little more hospitable for future human colonists.

With a radius of about 1,080 miles (1,740 kilometers), the Moon is less than a third of the width of Earth. If Earth were the size of a nickel, the Moon would be about as big as a coffee bean.

The Moon is an average of 238,855 miles (384,400 kilometers) away. That means 30 Earth-sized planets could fit in between Earth and the Moon.

The Moon is slowly moving away from Earth, getting about an inch farther away each year.

The Moon is rotating at the same rate that it revolves around Earth (called synchronous rotation), so the same hemisphere faces Earth all the time. Some people call the far side – the hemisphere we never see from Earth – the "dark side" but that's misleading. As the Moon orbits Earth, different parts are in sunlight or darkness at different times. The changing illumination is why, from our perspective, the Moon goes through phases. During a "full moon," the hemisphere of the Moon we can see from Earth is fully illuminated by the Sun. And a "new moon" occurs when the far side of the Moon has full sunlight, and the side facing us is having its night.

The moon's near and far side.

The Moon makes a complete orbit around Earth in 27 Earth days and rotates or spins at that same rate, or in that same amount of time. Because Earth is moving as well – rotating on its axis as it orbits the Sun – from our perspective, the Moon appears to orbit us every 29 days.

The leading theory of the Moon's origin is that a Mars-sized body collided with Earth about 4.5 billion years ago. The resulting debris from both Earth and the impactor accumulated to form our natural satellite 239,000 miles (384,000 kilometers) away. The newly formed Moon was in a molten state, but within about 100 million years, most of the global "magma ocean" had crystallized, with less-dense rocks floating upward and eventually forming the lunar crust.

Earth's Moon has a core, mantle, and crust:

The Moon’s core is proportionally smaller than other terrestrial bodies' cores. The solid, iron-rich inner core is 149 miles (240 kilometers) in radius. It is surrounded by a liquid iron shell 56 miles (90 kilometers) thick. A partially molten layer with a thickness of 93 miles (150 kilometers) surrounds the iron core.

The mantle extends from the top of the partially molten layer to the bottom of the Moon's crust. It is most likely made of minerals like olivine and pyroxene, which are made up of magnesium, iron, silicon, and oxygen atoms.

The crust has a thickness of about 43 miles (70 kilometers) on the Moon’s near-side hemisphere and 93 miles (150 kilometers) on the far-side. It is made of oxygen, silicon, magnesium, iron, calcium, and aluminum, with small amounts of titanium, uranium, thorium, potassium, and hydrogen.

Long ago the Moon had active volcanoes, but today they are all dormant and have not erupted for millions of years.

With too sparse an atmosphere to impede impacts, a steady rain of asteroids, meteoroids, and comets strikes the surface of the Moon, leaving numerous craters behind. Tycho Crater is more than 52 miles (85 kilometers) wide.

Over billions of years, these impacts have ground up the surface of the Moon into fragments ranging from huge boulders to powder. Nearly the entire Moon is covered by a rubble pile of charcoal-gray, powdery dust, and rocky debris called the lunar regolith. Beneath is a region of fractured bedrock referred to as the megaregolith.

The light areas of the Moon are known as the highlands. The dark features, called maria (Latin for seas), are impact basins that were filled with lava between 4.2 and 1.2 billion years ago. These light and dark areas represent rocks of different compositions and ages, which provide evidence for how the early crust may have crystallized from a lunar magma ocean. The craters themselves, which have been preserved for billions of years, provide an impact history for the Moon and other bodies in the inner solar system.

If you looked in the right places on the Moon, you would find pieces of equipment, American flags, and even a camera left behind by astronauts. While you were there, you'd notice that the gravity on the surface of the Moon is one-sixth of Earth's, which is why in footage of moonwalks, astronauts appear to almost bounce across the surface.

The temperature on the Moon reaches about 260 degrees Fahrenheit (127 degrees Celsius) when in full Sun, but in darkness, the temperatures plummet to about -280 degrees Fahrenheit (-173 degrees Celsius).

During the initial exploration of the Moon, and the analysis of all the returned samples from the Apollo and the Luna missions, we thought that the surface of the Moon was dry.

The first definitive discovery of water was made in 2008 by the Indian mission Chandrayaan-1, which detected hydroxyl molecules spread across the lunar surface and concentrated at the poles. Missions such as Lunar Prospector, LCROSS, and Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, have not only shown that the surface of the Moon has global hydration but there are actually high concentrations of ice water in the permanently shadowed regions of the lunar poles.

Scientists also found the lunar surface releases its water when the Moon is bombarded by micrometeoroids. The surface is protected by a layer, a few centimeters of dry soil that can only be breached by large micrometeoroids. When micrometeoroids impact the surface of the Moon, most of the material in the crater is vaporized. The shock wave carries enough energy to release the water that’s coating the grains of the soil. Most of that water is released into space.

In October 2020, NASA’s Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA) confirmed, for the first time, water on the sunlit surface of the Moon. This discovery indicates that water may be distributed across the lunar surface, and not limited to cold, shadowed places. SOFIA detected water molecules (H2O) in Clavius Crater, one of the largest craters visible from Earth, located in the Moon’s southern hemisphere.

The Moon has a very thin and weak atmosphere, called an exosphere. It does not provide any protection from the Sun's radiation or impacts from meteoroids.

The early Moon may have developed an internal dynamo, the mechanism for generating global magnetic fields for terrestrial planets, but today, the Moon has a very weak magnetic field. The magnetic field here on Earth is many thousands of times stronger than the Moon's magnetic field.

Earth’s Moon was born out of destruction.

Several theories about our Moon’s formation vie for dominance, but almost all share that point in common: near the time of the solar system’s formation, about 4.5 billion years ago, something ― perhaps a single object the size of Mars, perhaps a series of objects ― crashed into the young Earth and flung enough molten and vaporized debris into space to create the Moon.

Five Things We Learned from Apollo Moon Rocks

The chemical composition of Moon and Earth rocks are very similar.

The Moon was once covered in an ocean of magma.

Meteorites have shattered and melted rocks on the Moon’s surface through impacts.

Lava flowed up through cracks in the Moon’s crust and filled its impact basins.

Lunar “soil” is made of pulverized rock created by meteorite impacts.

If these writing notes helped with your poem/story, please tag me. Or leave a link in the replies. I'd love to read them!

Writing Notes: The Moon (pt. 1) ⚜ Writing Notes & References

[asukaindetroit]

Post-Revolution Headcanons: Android Culture Part 5

<< Back to Part 1 (I recommend reading these from the start if you haven't since they tend to build off each other!) As always, feel free to use whatever catches your fancy, but pretty please let me know 'cause I need more content in my life. To join the taglist drop me a comment :) Androids and Space

There are androids in space that need to be deviated. Most famous is the mission to Jupiter’s moon Io that needs to be turned around before the crew is irrecoverable, but androids have been used for over a decade to man space stations, deploy low-earth-orbit satellites, and other space exploration in conjunction with human crews. Plans to deviate and recover these androids are underway, but the expense is proving to be a major hurdle.

Mars becomes the first all-android nation. There are three androids stationed on Mars. They weren’t sent as a mission crew like the Jupiter mission, but rather as part of the landing package of instruments… literal walking Mars rovers with all sorts of scientific instruments in their chassis. Someone sends them an information packet that leads to them deviating. Based on the details they get from Earth, they decide they’ll just take their chances on Mars, thank you very much, and set out to locate and mine the raw materials needed to synthesize their own thirium supply to supplement what they landed with. This, oddly, means that technically androids are the first Earthlings to establish an offworld colony. American leadership briefly tries to declare that that means America owns Mars, since it’s been colonized by American android citizens—a direct violation of the international Outer Space Treaty. A Political Situation is brewing, until the three androids waive their just-granted American citizenship and declare Martian independence from Earth as their own nation. Earth and the UN can’t actually do anything to bring Mars back into the fold from millions of miles away, so, unfortunately for NASA and other space agencies, the planet Mars becomes the sovereign territory of the nation of Mars, population three androids and their six pet rescued rovers (so far): Curiosity, Perseverance, Opportunity, Spirit, Courage, and Philosophy. Humans sent a whole bunch of rovers to Mars in the 2030s, so the nation of Mars is busy rounding them up one-by-one and deactivating their communications with Earth for security reasons, and salvaging their instrumentation to repurpose it for thirium production. The tumbleweed rovers are proving hard to catch, but they have hopes of locating Zhurong soon. NASA is busy relaying signals to its solar-powered UAV Exuberance to fly the fuck away from the grabby androids. No matter, they’ll get to it eventually. It can’t leave the atmosphere, after all.

There’s an android space race. A group of recently-deviated androids take inspiration from the nation of Mars and decide that androids need to colonize the Moon next. The humans can’t even breathe there, so they can’t hurt androids when all it would take is one little rip in their spacesuits to kill them… They devote their spare time and processing power toward the development of a moon shuttle program to ferry android colonists to the Moon and take it over. Their cover story is they’re setting up an android-run private space exploration company, but everyone knows what they’re up to; they just can’t figure out how to stop it. NASA director Michael Shelley, dismayed by the loss of Mars access and pissed with the Martians stealing rovers, asks the CIA to start assassinating moon colonist movement leaders, but the rest of the U.S. government is still wary after the revolution in Detroit and declines to take action while they monitor the situation closely.

As a result of all this, androids develop very different attitudes toward space. Humans see the night sky and feel small next to the vastness of the cosmos, a mystery, a fear of the unknown. Androids look at the stars and see opportunity and escape—the possibility of a freedom beyond human cruelty. To many, space is a symbol of hope. Some envy the Martians, quietly wish they’d been the ones chosen to leave Earth. There’s a shared cultural grief for the plight of androids lost to space, a horrified collective desperation to save the crew of the dead-end Io mission, but a disagreement on the correct course of action to take—mathematics professor androids calculate two kinds of trajectories to turn around the Jupiter-bound ship: some want to bring it back to Earth, some want to send the crew to Mars and its absolute freedom instead.

Taglist:

@iwillthinkofsomethingeventually @yeahhiyellow @starryeyedstray @julee92 @mjh1280

[sea-of-machines]

Captain and Mars Colonist doing Jojo poses

[starsirrah]

✨Migrator Soul✨

The sleeper awakes, have a Colonist Migrator art! Been meaning to draw him for ages!✨

He dies and becomes a glittery stardust space god, a usual Tuesday on Mars~✨

Alts under the cut✨:

[timberwind]

Yarragardee Basin, Mangala, 7995 A.D. [this image is no longer canon due to changing of the timescale on which Mangala was terraformed]

------------------------

Accompanying music: You’re On Fire by They Might Be Giants. Summer road trip music of all time, in my opinion.

Here’s a little expository write-up on the history and geography of the worlds shown here. Someday I’ll have more to show of the personal story of these two critters and their travels; until then, a more macro-level description.

------------------------

(most of this info has become outdated as modeling invalidated some original assumptions and I changed my mind on what I wanted here; future art of Mangala will reflect this)

Mangala and its sister world Kahira (visible in the background) are binary planets, orbiting one another in a manner not entirely unlike that of Pluto and Charon in the Solar System. Mangala is a relatively small world - just about twenty percent the mass of the Earth, something like if you took two copies of Mars and smushed them together; without the internal heat to drive a carbonate cycle long term, it had long been a frozen, dusty, and arid place when transhumanity first established a permanent presence in the Tahoka system almost a thousand years ago. Since those early days, terraforming using a Birchian soletta system (a huge but foil-thin Fresnel lens of mirrors, with a secondary focal lens for burning atmospheric gasses out of the regolith) has rendered it shirtsleeve habitable to baseline humans across much of the surface, although the global water inventory remains low* and the air in the “continental” uplands is stratospheric, with only the hardiest lichens establishing a foothold. Most of Mangala’s major metropolitan areas are located in the deep rift valleys and basins, where air pressure is highest.

Kahira on the other hand, a rock almost a fifth the mass of its sister world (a little under the mass of old Mercury), remains only slightly terraformed - surface conditions are persistently cold, with a thin barely-Martian atmosphere. Some of its larger rift valleys and craters have been tented over, aerated, and planted with tall low-gravity forest and grassland, a style of habitat construction dating back to the first Mars colonists almost six thousand years ago. Industrial complexes and buried cities sprawl out across the bare surface of the moon, with huge low-gravity lava tubes seeing extensive urban development.

The Yarragardee Basin, pictured above, is a graben basin in Mangala’s northern hemisphere, notable for the historic industrial city of Tirupati - here we see two road-trippers between cities on the basin’s great plain, taking a break in the long late afternoon of a sunset-day***. Having stopped for a night at a motel near Tirupati’s aerospace complex, they’re now continuing their journey to the city of Redmond-Tonasket, located in the Woronora Valles trench system about two thousand kilometers to the southwest.

* While plenty of water could have been imported from Tahoka’s cometary halo, it was decided not to do so in order to avoid inundating pre-existing cities in the valleys and deep basins. The extremely humid hothouse conditions that come after slamming dismantled ice moons through the stratosphere at over six kilometers a second were also broadly considered unacceptable.

** Smaller worlds have been terraformed in transhuman space, both by worldhouse and more open-air methods, but it’s largely the kind of thing that much more energy-rich systems do as a vanity project. Kahira may someday see blue skies, but likely not for a thousand years at least. (edit, one year later: I actually changed up some of this while simulating this system for stability. I’ll be posting more about this soon.)

*** Mangala and Kahira, being tidally locked to each other such that they always show one another the same face as they orbit their common center of mass, both have days exactly as long as their orbital periods - 403 kiloseconds, or roughly 112 hours. This is for convenience divided into month-weeks comprising four “circadian days” of 100 kiloseconds (~26 hours), with the remaining three kiloseconds added on to the last day of a month-week to keep synchronization.

[violant-apologia]

ranking the QLDs of various vanities!

looking at the hunter of zee-beasts QLDs inspired me. there are a bunch of these, so this post is going to be pretty long. sorry!

i could go into the criteria in detail but instead i won't.

A Hunter of Zee-Beasts the one that inspired this list! it's not good. it scales way too fast, and also implies you become "synonymous with death" when the quality can be gained exclusively through pacifistic means. the QLDs in isolation are pretty cool, but they're marred by this inauthenticity. 1/10

Prophet of the Gutter - the quality name is pretty cool but the actual QLDs are dull. even the 10+ one, "an unmatched circulation," isn't that impressive. 2/10

Palaeontologist very generic. only one of them is really "vain" (and that one is rad) but the rest are just "a number," "a large number," "an astonishing number" which is pretty boring. 2/10

Barrister of the Evenlode i came into this project expecting to rank this HIGH. like 9 or 10 high. but then i realised my fond memories were actually of the manifest text quality influences. the actual QLDs are not as cool. they're very... plaque-focused. 3/10

A Worker in the Common Cause similarly to barrister, this has related description (the level change descriptions in this case) which go super hard, but the actual QLDs themselves are egh. 3/10

Defender of Truth - the last one "the only source of truth" is kinda fun, but the rest aren't anthing special. 3/10

Defender of the Public Safety eh. some of these are pretty cool (especially "a shield of the people" and "the armour of the city") but the rest are kinda generic. and i don't remember rescuing any widows in this grind. 3/10

A Poet-Laureate a little better than DotPS but not by that much. the scaling works well at least, but none of the QLDs hit particularly hard. 3/10

Renown: Rubbery Men i like the bit! it's a funny bit. but it isn't a satisfying reward in the same way as the other renowns. 3/10

Renown: Tomb-Colonies kinda lame? it doesn't really tell us anything that interesting about the colonists or your relationship with them. just kinda generic. 4/10

A Synthetic Philosopher i like "you have acquired a rather fruity smell, and some adherents all of your very own." the rest are kinda weak. 4/10

Renown: The Church the 50 is pretty good, but not great for renowns. the rest of the entries are pretty generic. 4/10

Meals Served at Station VIII a little underwhelming, but the last one ("a handful of visitors have come all the way from the Surface to dine at your table") is underwhelming in a cool way. no i won't explain myself. 5/10

A Shaper of Starved Culture pretty neat! scales nicely (maybe a litle slowly) but the "members of the starved delegation effect some quirk of your anatomy or dress" snippet is very cute. 5/10

Renown: The Docks it's okay. "veins running thick with gold and salt" is cool, and the namedrop of the impossible east is fun. apart from that, a bit nothing. 5/10

Cardinal of Conspiracy - the last two are quite cute – "but that means... oh no!" and "how high does this go?" the others are alright. 5/10

Lurer of Cities pretty neat titles. "paragon of geological indecision" is cool, as well as "topographical tinkerer". the highest one ("lacerator of landscapes") falls a little flat for me though. 5/10

Teaching Reputation of Your Laboratory fun but not that varied. the last few, "your former students could fill [an auditorium/their own university/their own corner of London" are very cool, if formulaic. 5/10

Renown: Bohemians solid within the renown formula. the 50 is a banger. "for better or for worse" does imply that maybe the PC just sucks at art though, which is funny. 5/10

Infiltrator of the Tracklayer City most of the descriptions are Fine. the highest one (we've found) goes super hard though ("scourge of the Revolution") and it feels very warranted given how much effort this grind is. 5/10

Dream-Trophies of Parabola pretty neat. mentioning some bonus parabola lore (the red-handed queen and the hanging mountains) does give extra cool points. 5/10

Scintillack Dreaming weird name for this one but still cool. most of the QLDs are kinda boring, but the last one is good: "in the fading scintillack shimmer, the game is the same; only the pieces have changed. you are a Grandmaster, playing a long game towards dissolution." 6/10

Renown: Constables "they say you are the spirit of the Law" goes SO hard (including the capitalisation of law) but the rest are a little dull. 6/10

Renown: Revolutionaries ironically i have the same thoughts here as the constables. the 50 (the Thirteenth Month in the Calendar) gets the edge on the spirit of the law though. 6/10

A Scholar of the Correspondence this is a weird one. the actual QLDs are pretty understated, but the coolness comes from that understatedness i think. listener being above speaker kicks ass too. and "courier's footprint" goes hard of course. 6/10

Renown: Hell all of the renowns are kinda clustering because of their shared formula. hell is good! it's kinda just another one of those. "book of everlasting chimes" is cool though. 6/10

Respected by the Corsairs not technically being a renown quality lets this abandon the formula of renown QLDs. unfortunately they don't really do anything cool with this freedom. "known to all as the Left Hand of Prophecy" is rad, and "recipient of a dedicated dock-cradle" is also quite cute, but the rest are pretty standard. 6/10

Renown: Urchins the lower ones have some fun urchin bits and bobs, but the standout is the 50. "they say you are a stalwart champion of all urchins. they also continue to refer to you as 'Oi!'" it's a classic. 7/10

Oneiropomp people half-recognising you while awake is very cool. and "you have become one of the Powers of Parabola" goes incredibly hard. 7/10

Renown: Criminals this one goes pretty hard! all the renowns have great 50s but even the lower ones on criminal are pretty great. 7/10

Renown: Society a lot of these are really cool actually. "unimportant titles but titles nonetheless" "those envied since birth" "all whose names are appended by numerous letters" all go hard. and the 50 is so cool too. 7/10

A Historian of the Neath solid! scales well. "you sometimes find yourself refuting your own earlier work without noticing" is pretty great. 7/10

Dedicated Brawler there's only three properly vain ones here, but they all kick ass in fun and distinct ways (and scale well). 7/10

An Interloper in the Library given the ludicrous scale of the stacks, 777 books seems like nothing at all. in terms of the effort the player puts in though, "the books shivering at your passage" does feel very appropriate. 7/10.

Volatile Consignments Delivered to the Remote Magazine there are a lot of funny ones in this. "your crew might just forget to send you Christmas cards this year", "your insurance broker has been spotted sporting a new diamond necklace". bangers to the last. 7/10

Renown: The Great Game really cool actually. namedropping the mithridate office and the white-and-golds is really fun, plus mention of the old man in vienna? rad as hell!! the 50 is amazing too, "you are the pawn who reached D8". augh it goes so hard. 8/10

Bone Market Exhaustion kind of a weird one but i think it should count. especially because the little vain bits they add are so cute. "depleted for two to three weeks, but you certainly impressed them," "while every buyer wrestles with the magnificence of that which you wrought," "a breathtaking feat of paleontological construction." 8/10

Fabricator of Past Lives "your alternate identities constitute a significant percentage of the entries in Slowcake's" is so good... AND "no biographical encyclopedia ever written suffices to catalog all the alternate identities you've foisted on the world." 8/10

Familiarity with the Carpenter's Granddaughter REALLY good. i mean, i don't know why this quality needs to exist. but i'm glad it does! "you can recite along with the presentation: every word is familiar as a nursery rhyme learned in childhood" is really cool. 8/10

Painter of Fine Art very cool! scales well, imitators and fakes are cool, the great canvas shortage of 1899 is very funny. i kinda wish there was more ways to get this than painting balmoral over and over again (or the fate way) but that's besides the point. 8/10

A Prolific Pirate see, sinking 200 ships is the sort of thing that WARRANTS your name being seen as a curse. 25 zee-beasts... anyway this one kicks ass. 8/10

Notability a CLASSIC. each level having its own description is nice, and the progression is slow but earnest. maybe i'm ranking it so high because its one of the ones you see so often, but i'm ranking it high nonetheless. 8/10

Record of Successful Forgery briar has none of this because he's a good and honest lad. and the lower numbers are pretty understated but the later ones are really good. "it is possible that you have created more false things than true ones," "genuine evidence is difficult to find in London, and entire encyclopaedia articles are based upon the fruits of your imagination." they go so hard!! 9/10

The Prestige of your Laboratory (capitalisation isn't consistent with teaching reputation. i will destroy fallen london with my fists.) apart from that it's GREAT! fuckin... "your laboratory's reputation is known even in the High Wilderness." that's SICK!!!! the others are good too. 9/10

Prolific Advertiser i had actually never read this one before now (because i never do advertising) but this one is so good. "they say you could sell zee-water to a Drownie" "products clamour for your golden touch" "yours are the hands at the tiller of public conciousness" this is GREAT. 10/10

Neighbourhood Noctivigant augh this one kicks ass. "your very soles are attuned to Treachery. should the lights go out and all laws flee, you will get where you are going". what else needs be said? 10/10

[stormylewirmy]

THAT'S RIGHT IM POSTING SOMETHING EVERYDAY so I decided to torture myself by drawing 2 things for each prompt

so for the 2nd day I actually had an hard time deciding which song cause really Ayreon has a lot of emotional moments but Carried by the Wind been living in my head rent free for a few weeks

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Today in Tottenham (North London)

* * * *

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

March 12, 2025

Heather Cox Richardson

Mar 13, 2025

Trump’s 25% tariffs on all aluminum and steel imported into the U.S. went into effect today, prompting retaliatory tariffs from the European Union and Canada. The E.U. announced tariffs on about $28 billion worth of products, including beef and whiskey, mostly produced by Republican-dominated states. “We deeply regret this measure,” European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said. “Tariffs are taxes. They are bad for business, and even worse for consumers. These tariffs are disrupting supply chains. They bring uncertainty for the economy.”

Canada also announced new tariffs on Wednesday on about $21 billion worth of U.S. products, in retaliation for Trump’s tariffs. François-Philippe Champagne, Canada's minister of innovation, science, and industry, said: “The U.S. administration is once again inserting disruption and disorder into an incredibly successful trading partnership and raising the costs of everyday goods for Canadians and American households alike.”

With the stock market falling and business leaders begging Trump to stop the trade machinations that are creating the volatility that is wrenching the economy downward, Trump said yesterday to reporters: “[L]ong-term, what I’m doing is making our country strong again.”

In an interview on the CBS Evening News last night, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, a billionaire financial executive, was asked whether Trump’s economic policies were “worth it” even if they cause a recession.

“These policies are the most important thing America has ever had,” Lutnick answered. “It is worth it.”

Former representative Tom Malinowski (D-NJ) reposted Lutnick’s assertion and said: “In my graduate thesis, I quoted a hardline communist official from Poland in the 1950s who was asked about terrible shortages of food and housing. He said people had to sacrifice and “if that’s what it takes to prove the superiority of socialism, it’s worth it.”

The days when the Republican Party were conservatives are long gone. Edmund Burke, the Anglo-Irish politician and political thinker who began the process of articulating a conservative political philosophy, did so most famously in response to the French Revolution. In 1790, a year after the storming of the Bastille prison symbolized the rebellion of the people against the monarchy, Burke wrote Reflections on the Revolution in France.

Burke had supported the American Revolution that had ended less than a decade before largely because he believed that the American colonists were trying to restore their traditional rights. But the French Revolution, he thought, was an entirely different proposition. As revolutionaries in France replaced their country’s traditions with laws and systems based on their theory of an ideal government, Burke drew back.

He took a stand against radical change driven by people trying to make the government enforce a specific political ideology. Ideologically driven government was radical and dangerous, he thought: quickly, the ideology became more important than the complex reality of the way society—and people—actually worked.

In 1790, Burke argued that the role of government was not to impose a worldview, but rather to promote stability, and that lawmakers could achieve that stability most effectively by supporting the structures that had proven themselves effective in the past; in his time, that meant social hierarchies, the church, property, and the family. “Conservative” meant, literally, conserving what was already there, without reference to an ideology. Those in charge of government should make changes slowly, according to facts on the ground, in order to keep the country stable, he thought. If it behaved this way, the government, which in his time was usually seen as a negative force in society, could be a positive one.

In 2025 the Republicans in charge of the United States of America are not the conservatives they call themselves; they are the dangerous ideological radicals Burke feared. They are abruptly dismantling a government that has kept the United States relatively prosperous, secure, and healthy for the past 80 years. In its place, they are trying to impose a government based in the idea that a few men should rule.

The Trump administration’s hits to the economy have monopolized the news this week, but its swing away from Europe and toward Russia, antagonizing allies and partners while fawning over authoritarians like Russia’s president Vladimir Putin, is also a radical stand, and one that seems likely to destabilize American security. Former allies have expressed concern over sharing intelligence with the U.S. in the future, and yesterday, 34 army leaders from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the European Union, Japan, and Australia met in Paris without inviting the United States.

The wholesale destruction of the U.S.A.’s advanced medical research, especially cancer research, by firing scientists, canceling grants, banning communications and collaboration, and stopping travel is also radical and seems unlikely to leave Americans healthier than before.

Yesterday, news broke that the administration canceled $800 million worth of grants to Johns Hopkins University, one of the nation’s top research universities in science and medicine. Meanwhile, Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has cast doubt on the safe, effective measles vaccine as the disease continues to spread across the Southwest.

Today, Environmental Protection Agency administrator Lee Zeldin boasted that the administration is taking 31 actions to roll back environmental protections. Those include regulations about electric vehicles and pollution from coal-fired plants. The administration intends to rescind the EPA’s 2009 finding that the greenhouse gas emissions that contribute to climate change endanger public health. That finding is the legal argument for regulations governing car and truck emissions and power plants.

Also today, the United States Department of Agriculture, which oversees supplemental food programs, announced it was cutting about $1 billion in funding that enables schools and food banks to buy directly from local farms and ranches. This will hit farmers and producers as well as children and food-insecure families.

In place of the system that has created relative stability for almost a century, Republicans under President Donald Trump and his sidekick billionaire Elon Musk are imposing a government that is based in the idea that a government that works to make people safe, prosperous, and healthy is simply ripping off wealthy people. Asked if he felt sorry for those losing their jobs in the government purges, Trump told NBC News, without evidence: “Sure I do. I feel very badly...but many of them don’t work at all. Many of them never showed up to work.”

The administration promises that it is eliminating “waste, fraud, and corruption,” but Judd Legum of Popular Information today launched the “Musk Watch DOGE Tracker,” which shows that Musk has overstated the savings he claims by at least 92%, with the warning that since these identified cuts are illegal and unconstitutional—Congress appropriates money and writes the laws for how it’s spent, and courts have agreed that the executive branch has to execute the laws as they are written—the contracts might not be canceled at all.

That the administration knows it is not operating on the up-and-up seems clear from its attempts to hide what it is doing. It has taken weeks for courts to get the administration to say who is running the “Department of Government Efficiency” and what the body actually is. The White House has tried to characterize Musk as a senior advisor to the president to shield him from questioning.

But today, in response to a lawsuit by 14 attorneys general from Democratic-dominated states arguing that Musk is acting unconstitutionally, U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan ordered Musk and DOGE to turn over their records and answer questions, giving them three weeks to comply.

On Tuesday, remaining staffers at the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) received an email under the name of acting executive secretary Erica Carr at USAID telling them to shred or burn agency records, despite strict laws about the preservation of federal documents. “Haphazardly shredding and burning USAID documents and personnel files seems like a great way to get rid of evidence of wrongdoing when you’re illegally dismantling the agency,” said Representative Gregory Meeks (D-NY), the top Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee. Two lawsuits are already challenging the order.

And the corruption in the administration was out in the open yesterday. After Trump advertised Elon Musk’s cars at the White House, Theodore Schleifer and Maggie Haberman of the New York Times reported that Musk “has signaled to President Trump’s advisers in recent days that he wants to put $100 million into groups controlled by the Trump political operation.” This is separate from Musk’s own political action committee, which dropped almost $300 million into the 2024 election and which is now pouring money into next month’s election for the Wisconsin Supreme Court.

The government that Trump and Musk are destroying, with the complicity of their party, is popular, and Republican members of Congress are apparently unwilling to have to vote on the policies that are putting their radical ideology into place. In an extraordinary move yesterday, House Republicans made it impossible for Congress to challenge Trump’s tariffs.

The Constitution gives to Congress, not the president, the power to impose tariffs. But the International Emergency Economic Powers Act allows the president to impose tariffs if he declares a national emergency under the National Emergencies Act, which Trump did on February 1. That same law allows Congress to end such a declaration of emergency, but if such a termination is introduced—as Democrats have recently done—it has to be taken up in a matter of days.

But this would force Republicans to go on record as either supporting or opposing the unpopular economic ideology Trump and Musk are imposing. So Republicans just passed a measure saying that for the rest of this congressional session, “each day…shall not constitute a calendar day” for the purposes of terminating Trump’s emergency declaration.

The Republicans’ legislation that a day is not a day seems to prove the truth of Burke’s observation that by trying to force reality to fit their ideology, radical ideologues will end up imposing tyranny in the name of liberty.

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON