#not only for toolmaking either

[sanguith]

Paleoanthropology is slowly becoming my new special interest and I have concluded that one major defining trait of our species is the urge to collect cool rocks

[ntls-24722]

[Reply to this post] @shiro-luxunder

GREAT question.

Debu scientists who weren't loved enough by their parents or something looked at the millenia old Zebrapeople discussion of "what do we do about dubiously sapient species" and thought: "Hey, that sounds fun, why don't WE have that?" So, during the collective 80-year Golden Age of Unethical Experiments (and one of many Infamously Bad Times to be a Minority in Bolur history), Debu created the Frabu, the hybrid between the sapient Debu and the nonsapient Frazi, which is like, the Debu equivalent of a chimpanzee.

Bonus fun fact, or rather bonus fucked up fact, Frabu are a fertile hybrid, with frazi already being compatible with Debu with needing nothing more than artificial insemination! Very convenient yet deeply awful!

Now, obviously, creating a "humanzee" no matter how it goes is always a base 10 on the fucked up scale from 1-10, HOWEVER I will say how Babu turned out (out of the two) was LESS fucked up.

Babu was a male Frabu sporting a beard AND mustache, along with long (but sparser) raise-able hairs on his back. Attempts were made to have him speak, but he seemed only able to parrot words (as Frazi are capable of mimicry, though without understanding, like a parrot) (Frazi HAVE been reported using words from Debu languages as a code within their troops, fascinatingly enough). The research team gave up a bit too early with testing Babu as if he were a Debu as he appeared to show no progress at all, and began socializing him with other Frazi, but it was then where they saw his hybrid status shine.

Babu didn't make for a very good Debu but a VERY good Frazi, and it was when he was with other Frazi that Debu were actually able to get some insight into their own evolution. Babu's dextrous hands and higher intelligence allowed him to become the cultural icon of his group, with his toolmaking abilities and usage of them making him not only a useful member of the troop but a very good mate when his tool making was used to compliment his vocal range - he was making rudimentary instruments - and was kind of showing how Debu intelligence evolved through sexual selection, and that kind of evolutionary pressure wasn't thought of or known at the time.

Weirdly enough they kind of just... let him live as a Frazi. He was in a zoo and everything, and he actually had kids, and his great great grandkids are still living in the same sanctuary, which sure is... something. Imagine pointing at a chimp and being like "that one's, like, 3% more human than all these other chimps." I will say, he was reportedly very visibly frustrated at many times trying to teach his troop how to do things.

But Babu, despite his contributions to mousianthropology, was still considered a failure - They sought out to make a Frabu, the middle point between nonsapience and sapience, but just got a Pretty Cool Frazi. So, they tried again, this time strictly socializing this new one with Debu, only allowing them to see their mother.

Banee actually was able to learn and fluently speak Debu language unlike Babu - Babu could've, too, he just happened to be so much of a late bloomer that they stopped metaphorically watering him halfway through. However, Babu being able to speak didn't suddenly make her into a Debu. She was deemed "smarter" than Babu, able to finish certain puzzles and tests of higher reasoning once explained the rules, but under the stress of the hopes of being sapient and being expected to improve forever, she eventually hit a ceiling of her abilities and was catatonic about it.

Banee wasn't really socialized with anyone other than her researcher caretakers, and she was kind of perpetually in the painful kid stage of not getting why things were the way they were and never being deemed "mature enough" to either do things or be explained things, no matter how much she tried to improve. For this reason though, she did get along SPLENDIDLY with Debu calves, they were more playful than her comparatively boring researchers and she felt like she was understood by them. But as she became an inept adult by Debu standards, she became more emotionally unstable, prone to fits and even violence, and when she was no longer allowed to be around kids (who in their sane mind would let their child be around her like this) she got even worse.

The researchers noticed her growing restlessness and distress and, seeing how well she bonds and connects with her Frazi mother, tried to introduce Banee to other Frazi. However, unlike Babu, she makes for a bad Debu and an even WORSE Frazi - She had been too socialized by Debu and no matter how much stress not being able to solve tests and living a Debu life gave her, it didn't compare to the 2 weeks of trying to be socialized with Frazi, where Frazi would start trying to bite and beat the crap out of her!

Babu may have been too Frazi by Debu standards but Banee was truly exactly what they wanted - The uncomfortable middle ground between animal and higher beings, too primitive to be accepted into civilization but too sophisticated to live as an animal, and so, she lived and died outside of the embrace of either :(

[Obligatory "remember when this was a music man AU"]

SPEAKING OF MUSIC MAN,

On a much lighter note, here's the dubiously sapient spitting monkey species! They've got the weird quasi-human intelligence analysis but none of the weird unethical scientific experimentation! They're just born like that, and they're doing fine.

Short faced Zebramen! I thought it'd be funny if the "not(?) sapient" zebramen had flat faces like a human while the "sapient" ones looked more like, yknow, apes.

So, our zebramen evolved from zebraelves when they were isolated on an island, becoming the largest member of the taxonomic family via insular gigantism. They went down from the trees and started walking exclusively on 6's, and started herding other animals on their island, and the learning proper cowboy strats for herding and living off animals became the locus of their evolution, though they did also get pink stripes from sexual selection. Our short-faced guys, though, went further down the path of sexual selection, and are... kind of getting dumber.

They retained base intelligence from zebraelves, but the shortfaced zebraelves didn't really have any reason to keep all of it since they didn't embrace the cowboy life like our "long-faced" zebramen, but rather embraced the hedonism that came on from resource-filled island living. Their faces got flat to better show off the integrity of their stripes, their stripes no longer being stripes but being geometrically pleasing concentric circles. They're still capable of language, as their vocal cords and range actually are superior to those of zebramen, also for the purpose of being Sexy.

Though, intelligence wasn't completely useless! After all, we're so good at STABBING, why lose it? Shortfaced zebraelves, along with nicer stripes, have begun to fight for mates, still retaining their tool use and tool making abilities to make knives for the purpose. They're completely dissolved from the eusociality their ancestors had before, and have become a little less social than zebramen due to the competition, which manifests in them being less emotionally complex or compassionate.

I mentioned zebraelves had a really strong sense of uncanny valley because there were spitting monkey species that look exactly like them. This is the one!

Hive elves look exactly like zebraelves, except they have a higher nose bridge/snout, and smaller eyes, just barely outside the range of zebraelf genetic variance. Even worse? Individually, hive elves are pretty much animals.

A hive elf are wholly incapable of verbal language, deeply undextrous even with similar hands, and are VERY violent towards non-hive elves, or those outside of their colony. However, their dubious sapience status doesn't come from their individuals, but the colony as a whole. Verbal language is less important when you still retain some of the pheromone glands that most spitting monkeys use to, yknow, spit (spitting monkey slime-jet-things and spinnerets are derived from scent glands, like a skunk's spray), and an individual's dextrous hands can achieve much more with the help of others. They even festoon like bees, where they stand in a line as a form of measurement when building houses, not holes or tunnels in the ground - HOUSES. And yet an individual is pretty much just an animal!

Hive elves, as the name suggests, pretty much took eusociality and put it into overdrive. They're a deeply emotionally and socially complex and while they are a deeply scary, mandela-catalogue ass concept in-canon, they are very fascinating.

I've mentioned quagga-elves before, but these are the only spitting monkey outside the genus of zebraelves and zebramen. Very closely related though - if zebrapeople are genus pan (chimps and bonobos) quaggaelves are like a gorilla rather than being, like, another species of chimp.

I feel like these guys are the most "sapient" of these dubious sapients on account of their only setback being that they don't have a complex language but they're getting surprisingly far with making simple noises cued by gestures. With those bigass peepers no wonder these guys are more visual.

Speaking of being visual, they make art! They make art, just like other sophonts, and are the best out of all 3 dubious sapients of making tools, which might've been a result o not having spinnerets (which is interesting bc zebrapeople's evolution towards tool use was aided by their spinnerets) - the genus that zebrapeople are have uniquely refined the little jets for shooting slime into silk by reducing its water content. Quaggaelves retain the "basal" condition of being a "spitting" monkey that shoots slime from there, not a "silking" monkey like whatever those knuckleheads are doing.

They haven't become eusocial either, but they're still a very communal and social species, more like zebramen than the zebraelves.

[lastmurianwarrior]

💭 !!

((HOo boy, I had fun - settling on a scene was tough though. With this blog's Solo pulling from the games and anime most, it's an interesting dance to incorporate as much lore from either media as possible, while fleshing out the details and making sense of it. I want to do Laplace too, but this ended up long enough, that I think I'll save that for a new post. This is a window into a particularly pivotal day for Solo, from long long ago.))

FLASHBACK: Aching eyes from bright sunlight that poured in through the pale-green air shuttle's sliding door, was the first greeting from this ground-dwelling destination to meet the passengers from Mu as they arrived for a diplomatic meeting that would inevitably unravel into unamusing discourse.

Solo followed from behind as the small crew of Mu officials ambled out onto a wide dusty circle. At 13 he was deemed mature and expected to take on the responsibilities of his noble position. Getting to know the world and involving himself in geopolitical discussions would be a start. But Mu’s tactician always wanted him to play along and read from a script; becoming furious if Solo changed any of the details.

It was too embarrassing to admit he hadn’t paid enough attention to what was happening between Mu and the tribes on the ground. But some of the things he’d had to say, never set well with him, and he at least knew from faces in the crowds that it didn’t set well with the tribes either. Mulling over that fact, Solo didn’t feel like involving himself this time, and the spectacle of this foreign town was enough to tempt him into skipping the day’s meeting altogether to go explore on his own; to get to know the people and sniff out some local treats.

The tactician; Mu’s master-planner, a tall old man, dressed darkly and with a hat like a tower on his head, flattened at the top, marched in front, expecting everyone to keep up with his long stride. He threw a few indignant sneers back at Solo for lagging behind, but didn’t waste any time waiting around.

Jagged megaliths with the visages of important people and revered animals; as though guarding the walkways, guided the visitors to a stone brick roadway populated by village-folk; merchants, carvers, toolmakers, and farmers all with their fare and animals to offer.

There was little hope of convincing the locals that Mu technology wasn’t all powered by some magic or divine force; even many of Mu’s people themselves still believed this. A small portion of the village dawned their most elaborate garb to dance, while musicians of woodwind and bone instruments played tunes almost magical in their own way. Such flamboyance was motivated by hopes of earning favor from their sky visitors, of course.

Each of the Mu officials strolled on, paying no heed to the garish ensemble, stopping only briefly to look back with steely eyes as they entered the tallest building for miles; a relic of stone architecture from a time when the floating continent of Mu was still rooted firmly in the ground; a mere hundred years prior. Newer construction surrounding it seemed oddly more primitive; distinguished by a framework of wood, mastodon tusks, and painted animal hides.

Rather than join his party inside, Solo took a turn on his own to walk further down the street. Breaking the sunlight induced glare, his eyes filled with wonder at the rocky scrublands, patched with temperate foliage and exotic flowers, then shifted to soaking in the sight of all the people; many of them thoroughly tanned, wrapped in lightweight yellow, green, orange, or red textiles, and leather garb. Camelids and barely tame village-dogs moseyed about the street, which narrowed, then broke off into a dead end marked by spiny overgrowth that trailed off in the direction of a distantly roaring waterfall from glacial melt.

As he kept his pace along the bustling street, the thought of moving aside for others hadn’t so much as cross his mind. In spite of the open airspace, the walkway was claustrophobic compared to the vast halls within the upper floors of Mu that he’d grown up in. Roughly brushing shoulders with folk disinterested in showing the noble Murian respect, however, struck Solo with the gut-wrenching sense that something had changed in the atmosphere; there was a rising tension distinctly in opposition to the affection, wonder, intrigue, and most importantly; respect, that his presence once garnered.

Suspicious and apprehensive eyes began to track his white-haired, ruby-eyed presence from all sides, and seemed to grow in number with every step. He had no choice but to stand out. Even the sheen of his perfectly angular earrings set him apart from the largely stone-age folk occupying this territory. Attempting to pay no mind to them, he chose a collection of produce to fixate on; legumes, wild grains, and various medicinal herbs sorted into piles atop mats, or stuffed into laboriously hand-woven baskets. The merchant’s most prized however, were dainty yellow-orange squash whose flowers had been hand pollinated to ensure a pure, sweeter new strain; a dozen of them to the side, clean and neatly ordered.

While small-scale efforts were made to farm on the floating continent, ground dwelling villages such as this one were agriculturally vital to Mu’s food line. Few peoples in the world had proven so dedicated to cultivating new resilient and appetizing crop varieties as here. It was both a necessity and a luxury Mu couldn’t afford to loose by getting into a war with.

“Give me your best one.”

Solo stiffly ordered, absentminded of his entitled tone; after all, why shouldn’t he want the best, when the best is what his people always seemed to expect of him? He was taken aback when the seller chided him for his complex, and refused to give him one unless he had something of value to offer, like his earrings, which was a definite no.

Unsettled, he made a silent turn, landing him unexpectedly in front of a much taller man, that suddenly reprimanded the young noble for his poor manners, sparking a whole onset of village-folk spitting their dissatisfaction with Mu in Solo’s general direction. Before anyone had even said a negative word, his innocent curiosity had already given way, replaced by a confused panic, that he fought to entirely conceal. Up to that point, he’d never personally encountered a crowd that would so readily turn on him; that would band together like this.

“You always get more than we could ever dream to ask for! Yet you have the nerve to want the best that we have!”

“You claim Mu is our security!? You threaten us with the very same power and weapons you claim to protect us with!”

“Do you even remember the villages that were burned for the sake of cooperation with Mu!? Or is that just another necessary sacrifice to you!?”

“The powers of Mu are unnatural! - This world would be better off without your kind, you monsters!”

Mu’s very recent exercise of dominance through displays of great destructive power across the world was likely to blame for igniting the sudden hostility. Offerings made to Mu that were once given out of love and hope of blessing, were now bribes for mere survival or an advantage over other tribes.

None took too kindly to being viewed as tools by much of the higher Murian caste. Some were bursting at the seams to make those feelings clear; viewing this moment as an opportunity to do so; to make a demonstration of one of Mu’s supposedly treasured individuals.

The now quite unpopular noble, snapped a reply,

“Isn’t that how the world works? - Those with power, get to make the rules! They can take what they want!”

Yet somehow, speaking only made him look more foolish to the crowd.

The fuss continued, yet fell into the background of Solo’s mind as an almost sly-looking young man, came within arm’s reach of the lone Murian, and with him, a few others trickled in to form a feisty-looking circle around their flustered visitor. Solo’s first instinct was to tuck his chin into the high teal turtleneck of his uniform, wishing he could just hide within an impenetrable shell, like some kind of turtle. Goading him on, the other young man questioned,

“So you think you can just do what you want huh?”

Without a second thought, Solo snapped back,

“Yes, I’ll do as I please.”

The other young man, keeping his smug cool, continued as though setting up some kind of hostile joke,

“Oh yeah, and what makes you so special?”

The Mu noble spewed whatever came to mind first, everything he said was going to be used against him at this point; but loosing his temper made it impossible to keep his mouth shut.

“The blood of Mu that courses through my veins!”

Swiftly came the interrogator's searing punchline,

“Mhm, and if that’s so valuable, maybe spilling it on the streets will finally pay for all the food and labor you’ve taken from my people!”

“Now tell me Mu child - If you really can see more than us with those unearthly eyes. Can you see this?”

Solo indignantly glanced around with puzzled frustration. But a mere second later the young man’s fist made a hard landing across the noble kid’s face. Enraged shock filled every ounce of Solo’s being, as he finally let out a sharp shout; though almost swallowing his own breath in the process,

“GAAAHH, I-I could take any of you on!”

The prompt response of the crowd was by no means reassuring for the loner in its middle. Someone interjected from behind,

“Shut up! Maybe you could. But not all of us together!”

With that, Solo felt his legs kicked out from behind. Others worked to keep him on the ground. As a soft faced wiry kid, Solo was tough, but against the gang surrounding him, he seemed more akin to a small bird surrounded by lions. They were rugged and strong, they knew they were always lifting more than their share of weight in this world.

The young Murian wasn’t ready for this; he wasn’t ready to just EM Wave change on a whim. Let alone, in the midst of such confusion. But enraged by the insults of the crowd, he used all his strength to prop himself back up with his arms, just to look them in the eyes.

“I’ll hunt you down! …I’ll-I’ll make you know what it really means to suffer!”

At that, they only beat him harder. Face to the bricks, Solo froze up completely, and by the time three thunderous shouts from the other Mu officials broke up the crowd, their child of Mu was already in a limp haze.

Solo hadn’t known true fear or suffering before this. It was his first taste; his first bite, and it made his stomach sick. No one had so much as asked him to think over the fate of the peoples that might’ve opposed Mu. The mere thought of opposing Mu was a pill so foreign, nothing could make him swallow it; they must have been enemies…

As the first of multiple incidents following a similar theme, Solo grew to immensely despise crowds.

Though word spread of decimated villages who opposed Mu’s total reign, many continued to view those of Mu as auspicious, brushing other tribe’s grievances off as rumors, or unconcerning to those that remained loyal to their empire.

However, Solo never got over the feeling that others could turn on him at any moment should Mu fail to ensure they felt blessed with fortunate harvests or secure infrastructure; or for that matter, any reason they wanted. Trusting others became an only barely surpassable obstacle for him.

… The reign of his people lasted only a mere three years after.

[quasi-normalcy]

Okay, seriously? Let's talk about "Cow tools"

Cow tools presents us with an anthropomorphised cow wearing an unreadable expression, standing in front of a wooden bench on which rest an assortment of crude implements; a barn is visible in the background. What sort of a narrative is implied by this panel?

A few obvious candidates suggest themselves. First of all, obviously, tools are things that exist to be used. The implication here is that, as these are cow tools, they are tools intended for use by cows. Thus, one can try to imagine what possible need a cow could have of these tools; under what circumstances they could be used and why (in fact, this is one of the reasons that Gary Larson has cited for public frustration over the cartoon; one of the implements looks too much like a handsaw and thus readers were left trying to discern the specific task that the cow might be trying to accomplish, rather than the more nebulous question of what the tools could be used for in general). However, I actually think that this is too narrow of an answer to your question.

Gary Larson has said that the comic is intended as a joke about tool use, particularly by early humans. The idea being that the tools of early humans are famously crude; in many cases, only a trained eye can distinguish them from rocks. Cows, as a rule, are less intelligent than humans; and thus one would assume that tools made by cows would be a cut below even those made by our ancestors. And so the intended joke is essentially: "If cows could make tools, they would be bad at it."

And so, what the comic is inviting us to imagine is not a particular narrative, but an entire alternate world. One in which cows, like humans, chimpanzees, and certain corvids, are amongst the ranks of tool users. This world is of course quite paradoxical; the cow, in spite of having mastered toolmaking, is evidently no more intelligent than one of our world (hence the crudity of the tools), lives in the same manner as the cows of our world (hence the barn in the background), has no obvious means of either crafting or using the tools (note her lack of hands), and has no obvious reason for needing the tools (again, she is a cow). Thus, the absurdity comes from the complete void where narrative is supposed to be in the alternate world that the image evokes. Both the cow and the tools are objects whole and entire and of themselves. They exist to exist. "What if," Larson seems to ask, "cows made tools?" And the very simple, very obvious answer that he presents is, "there'd probably be some weird, crappy tools around the barnyard."

I think that what's brilliant about The Far Side is how it can imply an entire narrative with only a single panel. It's sequential art without the sequence. Like this one

There's the obvious implication of what's going to happen in the future (there's going to be a hunt), but it also stretches into the past: what circumstances in the anthropology of this group of cavemen must have happened to establish a tradition of dancing with Woolly Mammoths? Why does it, in spite of it's obvious absurdity, feel kind of right that there should be a dance before the cavemen and the mammoths engage in mortal combat? The reluctant fearful expression on the caveman at the bottom; is this his first hunt? Are those his elders trying to reassure him? Does the one mammoth actually seem to fancy him? What about the one looking fearfully back at his friends? How does he feel that the others aren't there to reassure him? One of the mammoths in the upper right looks just as fearful as the cavemen; why? etc.

And all of this is purely evoked. There's only simple line-drawing and two sentences of text, but you see it and it reminds you of other sorts of narratives you've seen or experienced, and your brain constructs a whole temporal sequence; and any possible answer you could get to above the questions would never be as satisfying as what your brain fills in.

I could write an entire essay about this.

[herrlindemann]

2004 Clipping

Paul

Hobbies: video games, swimming Facts: The guitarist was born two months premature. He was a frail child and had to go to the spa in the first grade. At 16, Paul ran away from home.

Till

Hobbies: swimming, snowboarding Facts: Till was often beaten by his father. He is a trained pyrotechnician, but also worked as a basket weaver. The singer is divorced and has two children.

Christoph

Hobbies: Designing clothes Facts: The trained telephone installer was the only band member in the National People's Army. Drummer Christoph got his first drum kit when he was 14.

Flake:

Hobbies: Painting Facts: Landed in jail for a few days in 1986 for attempting to flee the Republic. Flake: “I didn't want to run away!” The keyboarder is a trained toolmaker. Originally he wanted to be a doctor.

Oliver

Hobbies: skating, surfing, photography Facts: The bassist didn't have a nice childhood: he lived with his dad and saw his mother for the first time when he was 16. His first job was a plasterer. Oliver has a daughter.

Richard

Hobbies: Music Facts: The guitarist was briefly in a relationship with Till's ex-wife and has a daughter with her. The trained chef, who used to work as a cashier, is married to an actress.

Rammstein are not for the faint hearted. In 2004, after a three-year break, they once again impressively demonstrated this. 'Mein Teil', the first single from their fourth album, 'Reise, Reise', is about cannibalism. The track is based on the true story of the Rotenburg cannibal, which made headlines nationwide. The boys also prefer to sing about taboo topics such as necrophilia (sex with corpses), pedophilia (fornication with children) or sadomasochistic practices. You either love or hate Rammstein. They are Germany's most controversial band - but also the one that is the most successful worldwide. Since their formation in 1994, singer Till, Paul, Richard (both guitar), Oliver (bass), Christoph (drums) & Christian (keyboard) have also been suspected of playing right-wing rock. Mistake! Their lyrics are often close to the censorship limit, but they have nothing to do with fascism! The boys, who all grew up in the GDR, come from the punk scene - and love to shock. "We hate expressing ourselves clearly," explains Till. “With Rammstein there is always room for interpretation.” Even the band name is a provocation. “Just a word with a good ring. Rammsteine ​​are granite cones at gate entrances,” says the band. But when you hear the name, you think of the US Air Base in Ramstein (Rhineland-Palatinate), where 74 people died at an air show on August 28, 1988. They also titled a song after this accident, and on stage Till likes to set himself on fire. Otherwise he sprays water on the fans with a huge dildo. The blatant live shows with fireworks & sexually ambiguous interludes are the trademark of the band, which made their breakthrough in 1995 with the album 'Herzeleid' (double gold). In 1998 they went on a headlining tour in America, where their '97 album 'Sehnsucht', which included the hit single 'Engel', and sold over 500,000 copies. No less successful: 'Mutter' (2001) - number one in Germany. And there is no end to the success story in sight!

[empty-masks]

Book Two, Chapter Nine

CW: Strong Language, Sexual References, Graphic Violence, Fantasy Bigotry, Smoking, Alcohol Use, Light Body Horror

Brie goes silent on the final stretch toward Kiln, and only after parking in a small lot and paying the owner a fee for what was likely to be a couple days of investigation, she helps Roxanne toward the town’s steps and groans inwardly. It’s a long, long climb to the top. It wouldn’t bother her normally, but her newfound companion is still getting used to walking on her prosthetic, which means that staircases are entirely a doubles affair only.

“Ms. Brie, please take us to the middle terraces,” Roxanne says as she loops an arm over Brie’s shoulder. “I have a friend I would like to speak with. Since you’re on the job, I might recommend that in the meantime you set yourself up in one of the inns. There’ll be one at the other end of the terrace, if you’re interested.”

Brie doesn’t argue, just keeping her head down aiding in Roxanne’s upward climb. The Fox doesn’t bother looking at anything around her, but Brie can’t help herself. There’s a wide variety of businesses and artisans, some of which are part of the larger stone exporting effort and others working entirely on their own. Her gaze lingers on the various inhabitants, or at least those she considers likely to be citizens. She can see it on them; their bodies are on average either hardened from manual, artisanal labour, or adventure. Of course, she can see the difference between a passing smith, clad in a thick apron and clothing, built strong but smooth, healthy, and someone who’s likely a visitor to the town, a man in a suit with muscles in his neck she can define from a glance. The latter’s all show, the former’s all function.

Roxanne has to shake the woman’s shoulder to snap her out of her investigative tunnel vision, and in the process nearly makes Brie drop her with a start. Luckily neither fall, and all that happens is some dust is kicked up. “I’m sorry, you startled me. Is there something you need?”

The older woman rolls her eyes, then offers a smile and a pat on the shoulder before she simply starts walking away. Brie looks around with a furrowed brow before walking to take up a spot beside her, concern evident enough in her tone if not in her expression. Leaving an old woman to roam this terrace all alone would be the wrong thing to do, right?

“Would you mind telling me where you will be staying? And, who this person is? You mentioned they are your friend, but you can never be too--”

“Oh, don’t worry Ms. Brie. They’ll help me find you later. I have a hunch that it won’t be hard,” the Fox replies, affecting something akin to authentic carefreeness, and once again heads off on her own way as Brie’s pace slows. She’s walking rather well, given she’s still getting used to the prosthetic and the cane together, Brie realizes. She supposes, then, that being thick-skulled can occasionally be a help.

That said, she has no intention to lose a potential lead.

Roxanne, meanwhile, heads down the right turn toward what is, in essence, the town’s craftsman district. Toolmakers, ore smelters, weapon smiths, carpenters, all manner of homes and shops in one line the terrace on this side. To the opposite side are those more on the mixing side, apothecaries and planters and those more trained in the matter of animal husbandry, alongside a single pet shop. She follows the tings and twangs of metal on metal, the gentle thrumming hiss of steel through wood, and the occasional loud vulgarity as someone banged their thumb or lost a finger to an especially disagreeable tool.

She wasn’t ever the type to frequent this side of town often herself, save for trips to get her tools smacked back into shape. Her thoughts drift to the clinic, the small cadre of medical un-professionals who’d gathered together to set up opposite the inns and taverns a couple levels above, and she finds herself chuckling remembering the sheer amount of donations they raked in from guilty, post bar-fight mercenaries who needed medical attention.

She rubs at her face with a black paw, dragging her claws through her hair as she continues on her path. The ground is hard, and her feet are thankful that it’s smooth in its hostility, unlike the graveled ground of the mines. Ultimately, both are displeasing compared to her country home, but she can go back when this is all over. She can go back, and she can drink Painted Pumpkin Wine, and smoke in her kitchen, and maybe dance over the cracked tile when she gets tipsy.

Harnessing this frustration, she makes her way onto the porch of a two-story building and slams a fist against the door three times, shaking the heavy wood and metal on the hinges. It’s a home made of stone and wrought iron, with half-open, dirty windows whose panes she couldn’t see through and wood that looked ready to rot right out of the frame. She can feel the heat from inside, and the banging of metal on metal inside reverberates inside her, shaking her bones. Roxanne has no clue how anyone could keep doing this even after so long.

“Cobalt!” Roxanne yells, raising her voice high above the din and clamor. “YOU DEAF OLD LIZARD, OPEN UP—”

Before she can finish, the door opens and a head pokes out. It’s a large, surly man, a golem of some kind from the looks of it. His monolithic frame fills the doorway in a moment, moving with more speed than might be expected of someone so mountainous. The way he wears his boots and breeches says sailor, but the pistols on belts running in an “X” over his chest tells her adventurer, or perhaps buccaneer. Beneath an armored captain’s coat is a rocky chest, and where there might be hair on a man is a variety of quartz stone, and even on his blunted, stony face he bears a sort of crystalline beard, and beneath his cap there’s more of the same.

“I’ll tell ye to mind yerself when people are workin’,” he says, leaning down toward her as his voice bubbles up from deep below. “If ye keep bangin’ and screamin’, I’ll make sure that yer silverin’, slaverin’ muzzle doesn’t come up from the bottom of the—”

 “Captain, if you touch her, I’ll take that piece and shove it straight up your ass,” a voice interrupts from behind him. Roxanne smiles at the cool, authoritative tone, as well as the way the golem stands up straight immediately and bumps his head on the doorway. After he steps out of the way, Roxanne is brought face to face with a draconid just about her same height, albeit clad in a smith’s heavy apron, large gloves, and a good amount of muscle.

Roxanne sighs. “Coby. You are in dire need of a hearing aid.”

“Ms. Cobalt, I was just—” The captain starts, only to be hushed with a pat on the shoulder before the draconid turns and walks back inside, gesturing for them both to follow.

“I build shit for a livin’, you just aren’t loud enough. Where’s that hare? You seem to get awful loud when he’s around,” the Drake says, leading the two back into the smithing sections of the bottom floor. On the ground floor it’s four rooms in total, those being the waiting area, her smithing chamber directly across from it, and then connected to the smithy is a bathroom and, on the opposite side, a storeroom.

“Actually, that’s a part of why I’m coming to visit. At the moment, he’s… busy, but I know he’s headed this way, Coby. Even worse that he’s got something nasty on his tail.”

“So you came here hoping he’d come to hide out with his main squeeze’s old friend?” Cobalt raises a scaly brow. The captain shakes his head.

“Seen neither hide nor hair of anybody of the sort. No hare’s been through this here shop, Miss. It’s been closed the whole o’ the day on account of…”

Cobalt raises her hand, silencing him as she walks behind a large counter separating her working space from the waiting floor, and without skipping a beat she places a gun just about the size of Roxanne’s head and torso combined on top of it. It’s a blunderbuss with three large barrels and a crank on the side. “Since I’ve been busy repairing a custom job for this river-dog, I haven’t seen your bunny boy. Odds are he isn’t here yet or isn’t coming. Is that really all you came for?”

As the captain picks up the triple-barreled monstrosity, Roxanne shakes her head and then looks down at her foot. “Well, as it stands, I’ve got a score to settle and a dumb girl to keep safe, so I’m well in need of your help.”

 “What about that snub I made you?”

“Oh, you know me, Coby. I don’t remember where I hid it, and I’d rather not return to Smokestone now that I’ve unofficially quit my position there. Aside from that, I’m after someone a bit bigger than a pistol can handle.”

“Bigger?” The Drake asks, tilting her head to the side. “Define bigger, lil’ sis.”

“I am going to need something that can put down a hulk like your chiseled boyfriend over there,” Roxanne replies, turning to point toward the captain, who is testing the rotating barrels of his repaired weapon by turning the crank. 

“I can get behind revenge. If the fucker’s big like you say they’re big, then you need something to do it right. Get comfortable, Roxanne. Steiner, out.” Cobalt points toward the door, and immediately the stone bulk trots out with his gun.

When the door slams open and shut, Brie is knocked several feet back into the stone and loose dirt, and as she stands she worries the big golem might have seen her— but he’s trotting the opposite direction, back toward the docks down below, and she lets out a heavy sigh of relief as she swiftly jots down notes in her clue log. “Roxanne actually on revenge quest?” “Roxanne involved with Hare, Hare = Miner!! Azariah???”

“You lost, lady?” asks someone nearby. Spotting the source, Brie notes that she’s face to face with someone patently eccentric looking, at least when compared to the general notions of what Kiln’s townsfolk look like. An orc woman, clad in the gear of an adventurer or merc party. A visitor, probably either drifting into town for gear or for work, likely between larger jobs, like that Captain Steiner guy.

“Yes, I am lost, but only slightly. Could you point me in the direction of an inn for—” 

“Mercs? Yeah, a few guild members are up in the Superposition Inn, plus plenty of freelancers, so it’s a good spot to pick up work too. It’s a layer up and down the left turn,” the woman replies, turning and heading that way. Brie follows along, clearing her throat.

“So, are there other parties of adventurers in this inn? Or, that is, if you have a group you travel with. I do not mean to pry, I only mean to start up some smalltalk,” Brie lies, smiling.

The mercenary simply snorts before offering up a quick reply. “Several, most around three to five people, some with even more.”

“And how could you tell that I am a mercenary?”

“You’re not a construction worker, your clothes are mostly clear of dust, and I can tell you’re carrying a piece.”

Brie doesn’t have much else to ask after that. She supposes it’s hard not to look the part when the job requires that one make certain concessions for the sake of practicality, like keeping your gun where it’s easy to access. “I suppose that makes sense,” she mumbles, rubbing the back of her neck.

It’s not terribly long before they’re standing in front of the building, and before she can open her mouth to mutter a word of thanks, the orc opens up a hand, expectant. Brie sighs and, opening up her bag, pulls out some Tilt to hand over.

Thick green digits close around the money and an appreciative nod is offered in turn before the orc heads inside, whistling something sweet and low. Standing outside, Brie takes a moment to sketch a loose idea of the building’s exterior.

 When she moves to head inside, she’s knocked back into the dirt by two figures exiting.

“Oh shit! Sorry about that, I suppose I should’ve checked before opening it,” jokes a chuckling, almost jolly tone. 

“The door has no window, Jules, you can’t look where you’re going,” replies a muffled voice. The owner of it takes Brie’s hand and hauls her back up, and after the two dust the woman off the redheaded one starts walking off immediately.

“Excuse me, may I get a word from you two—”

“Sorry lady,” Jules says, tipping up his hat as he passes. “Try not to fall inside like that, they’ll charge you if you scuff the floorboards.”

Brie’s left standing, blinking, as the two ignore her and carry on their way at a meandering pace, each one throwing their gazes around like gawking tourists on a return trip. After the irritation sets in a bit deeper, Brie grumbles and heads inside the inn, heading directly for the bar. As much as a drink might be appreciated, she’s heading for loose-lipped mercs and adventurers. After all, if they hadn’t told her about hiring whoever nearly killed Roxanne, they probably wouldn’t tell her about any other hirees. If they’re anywhere, they’re here.

==============================================================

“You know. I’ve been thinking, Lucille,” starts the Vampire, running a pair of fingers along one side of his mustache.

“Dangerous pastime in our line of work.” Lucille lowers the pair of binoculars she’d been peering through, then sits down beside the man on a low stone wall. Behind them is the steady pounding and grinding of gravel and stone, the creation of a many-hued cement housed within a low mixing building, to be sold at low prices to locals and slight markup to outsiders. “Don’t do it too much. It’ll ruin your looks.”

Rubbing his own jaw, he offers a fanged smile and nods. “Oh, you’re just saying that. I do happen to boast rugged good looks, but beyond that, too, the mind of a philosophist.” He hesitates. “Philosophist?”

“Philosopher, Jules.”

“Philosopher,” he corrects himself, near immediately after Lucille’s mouth shuts beneath her scarf. “Point is, I’ve been thinking. About why the fuck we were put here the way we were. As people who have to eat other people.”

Lucille’s reaching into a small bag sitting between them when he speaks, and the end of his sentence nearly has her fingers crush clean through the sandwich she’d ordered for them. “Yeah, Jules?” She asks, her brows furrowing. She’s not looking at him, but the intensity’s directed his way. It makes his smile widen.

“We’ve gotta have a purpose.” “A purpose?”

“Yeah, a purpose. I mean, there has to be some reason behind it all. Something that needs to be done, and needs to be done by us. Or a lot of somethings over our lives. There’s gotta be some kind of celestial plan or some shit.”

Lucille finally turns her gaze to him as she pulls the sandwich out of the crinkled bag, and handing one triangular half to her companion she scoffs. “You’re trying to justify it again?”

“More like explain it. I don’t need to justify having to drink people to not feel like an empty blood bag. It feels great, and I feel great for days after doing it. I just would like an explanation as to why I have to do it in the first place. Why I was made that way, while everyone else can feel fine without sucking down someone’s life juice,” he corrects her, making a brief waving motion toward the sky as he accepts the sandwich with his offhand. “I mean, humans and their types are probably best off. Elves, dwarves, orcs, goblins, even the horned guys, they don’t need someone else’s blood to make them feel better from the moment they start existing. Golems are built for longevity, the Anthros’ve got that natural survivalism to them, and I’ve heard that the plant-people got fucking photosynthesis. Can you imagine that? Feeling better from sitting out in the sun? Fuck, man.”

“Even some other vampires have it better than you,” Lucille said, before tugging down her scarf to stuff the sandwich half into her maw. As she tilts her head back to let it slip down her gullet, Jules nods.

“I’d kill to just eat a chunk of beef to not feel empty. Some vampires don’t even need something on a living being, they can get by on fucking colors. Fucking colors, hues, light.”

“I know, Jules.”

“I don’t even care that they’ve got it easier. I don’t care. You know I don’t care,” he stammers, his tone breaking for the briefest moment.

She’d grimace at the sound of it, but instead she returns to watching the terraces below with her binoculars. “I know you don’t care.”

He nods. “Exactly. Anyway, it’s not important that they’ve got it easier. It’s more important that I don’t know why they have it easier. So, I have to assume I— we— are like this for a purpose of some kind. Maybe the people we kill deserve it, or something. I mean, I like to believe that, most of the time, even when I know they don’t.”

“This is why you shouldn’t think. You never just think, it’s always either underthinking or overthinking, with no middle ground. This is the sort of bullshit that makes people get religious.”

Jules sighs, settling his elbows on his knees and, subsequently, his chin in his hands, hunching over to scan the lower terraces with his own, unmagnified gaze. The sandwich sits neglected in his lap, cooling between his elbows. It’s a long, quiet moment before he pipes back up. “Do you think we’ve got a reason, Lucille? Haven’t you ever wondered why you popped out needing to eat people?”

Lucille lowers the binoculars again, turning her head to focus her dark stare on his face. “Probably about the same reason that anything exists. It must be the same reason that the trees around here never bloom green and the reason that you drink blood. The reason a predator has to eat its prey, and why prey has to eat plants.”

“And that is?”

“No reason, Jules. There is no reason for all of that. It exists because it all exists, and I spawned having to use people to satisfy my hunger for no reason. Life is just like that. There are predators and there are prey, and I’m a predator.”

“What, you think we’re monsters?”

“No, I think we’re animals. We have to in order to survive. You have the unfortunate circumstance of being one that thinks too much about why it has to eat and not enough about the eating. Speaking of, eat the sandwich.”

He huffs and lowers his hands to pick it up again, giving it a look over. “Chicken club with… some kinda cream cheese. Didn’t think they’d grow greens out here in the mountains, either. Good chicken?”

“It’s alright chicken, and that’s goat cheese. I added something to your half after he handed me the order— thought you might appreciate it.” Following the end of her sentence, the man bites into the sandwich. A thoughtful hum of appreciation is offered up, and he shuts his eyes for the time. By the time he opens them again, Lucille has pulled her scarf back up and has balled up the bag.

“Wait, whose blood is this?” Jules asks, before taking another bite. Again there’s a silence, but it’s not tense. It’s less like the apprehensive aura from before, instead more thoughtful.

When Lucille answers, it’s laced with a chuckle. “Mine. Can’t go offing people too nonchalantly somewhere like this, but I need you at your best when this all goes down. A vampire in withdrawal can be dangerous, sure, but I need the bruiser. It’s two on five, maybe something like five on five or even six on five if Baker’s honest with us, but still.”

“Holy shit, Lucille. Your blood tastes great,” he says, the last part of his sandwich stuffed into his face right afterward. Once having swallowed, he laughs. “Especially with that goat cheese. Maybe once we finish up this bounty shit you can open a restaurant or something. Set up in Kiln, call it ‘Killer Bites.’”

Lucille laughs, pulling off the binoculars and handing them over before she claps her hands. “And you can be the stage comedian, Jules. You can kill people for my shitty cooking with your shittier jokes.”

Peering through the binoculars, Jules sweeps his view along the lower terraces. “I’m pretty sure the saying is ‘knock ‘em dead.’”

A gloved hand comes up and grabs him by his pointed beard, and his head is turned toward a building in the smithing district. Then the hand pats him on the shoulder, and Lucille laughs again.

“Isn’t that the field med from the Smokestone site? What a coincidence— why not tell me you saw her?”

“Because you were waxing philosophical, Jules. Also, there’s only two of them in there, and from what I know the other isn’t a member of the group, likely the owner of the place.” Lucille shrugs after speaking.

“Okay, so the doc is there. And the owner?”

“Draconid, blue, looks like a weapons manufacturer. Hard to tell if guns or anything more traditional.”

“Probably both, knowing this town.” Jules sets the binoculars in his lap and rolls his shoulders, but when he moves to grab his walking stick Lucille stops his hand.

She shakes her head and says, “Inopportune. No real sign of the quarry, but at least it’s someone tangentially connected.”

“Shit, right. We would’ve seen them all without the binoculars by now if they were all together. Plus, nobody’d shut up about a bunch of Shepherd cronies running around. Think we can do anything now?”

Jules receives another negative shake of her deep red hair as Lucille stands. “No, for now we watch and wait. We wait for a chance to draw them out, or to ambush them as a group. We do a job, we do the whole job, no half-assing.” He nods, then stands too before his companion speaks again. “And on the whole thing about philosophizing, Jules? Morality’s a luxury for people who can survive on dirt farming. A chicken doesn’t worry over why it eats worms, it just eats worms. The farmers don’t worry about why they eat chicken, they just eat chicken.”

She steps back from the wall, stretching her arms. Jules puts the binoculars away, chuckling. “I’ll shelve my career as a moral leader, then. Hey, where’d you get these anyway?”

“We’ll call it a posthumous gift from an anonymous source.” “What, you ate without me?”

“An opportunity presented itself. I said we can’t just off people nonchalantly, not that we can’t off people at all. I gave you some of my blood, don’t complain.” Lucille shrugs and walks down the wall to get a more effective angle on the smithy. “You wouldn’t have liked them much anyways. You never were big on bird.”

The Vampire trots along behind, binoculars in one hand and walking stick in the other. “I could go for rabbit, though.”

“Everything goes well, Jules, and maybe you’ll get some.”

“What’s this about gettin’ a bit o’ rabbit?” Asks a gravelly voice, and when the two turn around they’re face to face with the stony chest of a large man.

“Steiner?” Jules’ eyebrows raise in surprise.

Lucille laughs. “So many familiar faces recently. Sank any ships with your tantrums?”

“I only put the boot through the one and suddenly I’ve got a reputation for it. What the hell’re ye doin’ here?”

Jules waves the question. “Business, same as anybody. What’re you doing this far upstream?”

“Recruitment, mostly, but I admit to a bit o’ work gettin’ done on my pride and joy.”

Lucille snickers. “Still running around with that monster?”

“She’s a beauty, don’t tease. Loveliest weapon to ever grace the land or sea— now, let’s say we get ourselves somethin’ to drink and get to reminiscin’ back at the Superposition?”

Jules looks to Lucille, who sighs and nods. “Lucille’s in, so I’m in. Let’s get day-drinking.”

==============================================================

Okay, Piper thinks to herself, waiting outside Gilroy’s office door. This is going to be where she really casts out her line. She’d flipped over what Blondie had said to her before he left about a hundred times, and the only conclusion she came to was that she needed more work. She needed to show off to her superiors that she was worth taking on for this higher position, that she was worth their precious time and money.

And not just because Blondie said it was so. She knows (quite confidently) that she’s an independently minded person, it just so happens that his various philosophies and nuggets of wisdom were, in fact, wisdom to her. Things had made sense to her before he came around, since they were stable and easy and gave her everything she found she needed out of life. And sure, there were things she wanted, but she wasn’t quite sure how she’d get them. She wasn’t a planner, wasn’t someone who sat down and schemed about how to get ahead. Blondie opened her eyes to that world, and she hasn’t had a wink of sleep since he left.

She took good care to comb her hair, clean her jumpsuit, and look extra-presentable for this particular meeting-- she’s planning on suggesting her own promotion, after all. She can feel it in her bones that this is the first step. And so, when one of the lower-ranking foremen eventually leaves the office, jerking a thumb in the direction of her boss as if to say “warmed him up for ya, kid”, she strides in, takes a seat, and sits up straight.

“Evening, Mr. G.”

“Is there something you’d like to talk about, Piper? I’m a little busy these days.” He goes to pour himself another drink, but finds his bottle entirely empty. And by the smell of his breath from where she sits, he’s had a couple today already.

“Yes, actually. I’d like to take on some more work to fill the holes that Judith and Jessup left. I can handle their land alongside their workers, and I won’t ask for very much more pay, sir. And if there’s anything I’ve learned from them being gone, it’s that people seem to be far better at listening to me when I speak. So, yeah,” she says, feeling her heart skip a beat. Now, to wait for the bomb to hit.

Gilroy, putting his feet up on his desk, mulls over this for a couple of excruciating moments. She can see the booze-greased cogs in his head turning, creaking against the weight of a long day at the office. His face changes expression quickly and subtly, like he’s trying to discern the intricacies of a fine wine. And he even scans his eyes across a couple papers on his desk, as though they’d have the answer to her pitch somewhere within their texts. Eventually, he looks her dead in the eyes and simply states, “No.”

Shit. “Well, that’s—” she tries to start, only to get interrupted by him continuing his thought.

“While I admire your willingness to take one for the team in these trying times, I’ve actually been in the process of arranging their replacements. So, since I’d rather not rip out all that glorious corporate bullshit I had to catalogue earlier, the answer is no, plain and simple.” Before the rejection can hit her fully, he stands up from his chair. “You’re one of the foremen that Blondie scouted for his little program, right?”

“Yes, sir.” “And you’re eager to prove yourself so that you’ve got a better shot of getting into said program?” “Yes, sir, Mr. Gilroy, sir.”

“Then I’ll hire three foremen instead of two,” he states. Walking over to one of his cabinets, he begins rifling through files to find the necessary paperwork for his proposal.

Piper, on the other hand, is somewhere between oddly excited and deeply anxious about the vagueness of his statement. “I dunno if I’m followin’ you, sir. Am I getting fired?”

“Hardly.” He pulls a pen out of his breast pocket and starts scribbling rapidly inside a file, having gathered the necessary forms and papers to fill it with. “You’re being moved. Something a little different from what you’re used to as a lead foreman.”

That’s all she needs to hear. “I’m in. What’s the work?”

He chuckles, sliding the file across the desk and chucking her the pen. “Contract-based. You work for me as an independent contractor doing jobs as they’re needed, and I pay you the big bucks for doing exactly as you’re told.”

“So, like Blondie?” she asks, barely containing her excitement.

“Not exactly. He gets paid whether or not he does what he’s told,” Gilroy spits. “No, the catch here is that you’ll be on my leash. If you fuck something up, your contract is void and you’ll be responsible for the damages. If you do exactly what I tell you?” He shrugs his shoulders, offering her a smile. “You’ll make more money on a single job than a foreman does in a month.”

“So don’t fuck up,” she says back to him, beginning to fill out the forms. “Got it.”

Suddenly, Gilroy leans in close to her, clicking the pen shut in her hand. “And I don’t know what Blondie’s been feeding you these past couple weeks, but I don’t want to see ANY of his methods in what you do, Piper. If I tell you to walk, you walk. If I tell you to jump, you jump. None of his indiscriminate murder, none of his wanton destruction of property. Because if I get a bill from Hickory for something that I explicitly told you to avoid doing? It’s going straight up your fucking ass, girl. Do I make myself clear?”

Piper stares him back in the eyes. It isn’t just the booze that’s making him confident, he really believes that he can intimidate her like this. Invading personal space, growling while he talks about how much he’s in control. She finds herself struggling not to crack a smile. Of course, she’ll play nice for the time being-- this is a gig beyond what she initially imagined she’d get. This is tantamount to winning the lottery in her eyes, and if she’s learned nothing else from her parents, it’s not to look a gift horse in the mouth. If he wants her to run by his rules, she’ll do it. So long as she’s guaranteed her check. “Crystal, Mr. Gilroy, sir.”

“Great,” he says, slumping back down in his armchair. “I had a feeling you and I would see eye-to-eye on this. Blondie’s a real menace, but I had faith that you wouldn’t see him as some kind of role model. Jessup, on the other hand— I’m almost glad he died before Blondie left. I swear I could hear some of the punches he was throwing from my office. And Judith? She’d talk back to him or something and get herself turned to swiss cheese.”

Piper blocks out the rest of her boss’s ramblings while she focuses on finishing up the contract. Of course, there’s plenty of legal jargon, but it’s nothing she hasn’t agreed to in the past, and definitely isn’t anything she didn’t just hear from Gilroy himself. Besides, there’s no amount of legalese that’d stop her from starting her climb up the ladder right here, right now.

“Are you listening, Piper? You’ll want to know what your first job is,” Gilroy grumbles, interrupting her train of thought. “Yes, sir. Sorry, I was focusing.”

“Focus on this, instead.” He takes a moment to open his desk for a blank slip of paper, and begins to write. “Your first assignment is to collect the deed to some land from a squatter near the Smokestone Location.”

“A squatter, sir?” “Yes? You know, someone who’s on the land without permission.”

“I thought that there weren’t permissions to live out here? I thought that so long as you weren’t doing stuff like mining, you didn’t need a lawyer to build a house,” Piper says, a touch confused. “And how’re they a squatter if it’s their house?”

“Well, I use the term in a different context. You see, he’s going to be a squatter, since we’re about to come into ownership of that plot of land. We’ve recently tapped it for some ore, and signs point to it being particularly rich in tourmaline. And there’s nobody else there but him.” He punctuates his last sentence by sliding her the slip of paper, directions to the home scrawled in still-drying ink. “Because you’re going to be taking the deed from him, he’ll be a squatter once you’re done.”

She takes a moment to process this. Already, something a little less than legal. “Done and done.” She stuffs the slip into her pocket. “Anything else I should know?”

“Get it by any means necessary. Even if it means getting a little violent with him, Piper. We know he’s not one of us, otherwise we would’ve tapped him for a managerial position by now. We also know that he’s an older gentleman who lives alone, so there’s a good chance he won’t be wanting to part with his deed.”

“Any means necessary, huh,” she repeats.

“Any means necessary. Do what you must, but nothing else.” Gilroy leans back in his chair and yawns. “If you’ve completed your paperwork, you can get right on it. I’d recommend grabbing one of the company cars, since they’re paid for by administration back at Black Hill. And, if you have anything you might find…” He pauses for a moment. “Useful? For this kind of contract, don’t hesitate to bring it along with you.”

“Of course, sir.”

“I’m putting my faith in you, Piper. Make this happen, and you’ll earn yourself a nice letter of recommendation alongside your paycheck. That should send you nicely on your way to Blondie’s program.”

“You don’t need to butter me up, Mr. Gilroy. I’m on the case whether you do or don’t.”

He smiles. “Get out of here before I change my mind.”

Chapter End.

==============================================================

[[ Table of Contents ]]

Blondie & The Smokestone March is © 2020-2022 Empty Mask. All Rights Reserved.

[oleworm]

Review: “Black on Red: My 44 Years Inside the Soviet Union” by Robert Robinson

Yesterday I finished Black on Red: My 44 Years in the Soviet Union, a memoir by Robert Robinson, a Jamaican-born African American man who went to the Soviet Union to work as a toolmaker on a one-year contract. Suffice to say, this is not how it transpired.

Robinson credits his faith in God with maintaining his resolve to leave the Soviet Union. Guilelessly, he accepts the Soviet citizenship and becomes unable to renew his American papers. Except for God, he is entirely alone, fear of espionage and prosecution precluding the possibility of speaking openly with another person, be they Western or Soviet, foreign or Russian, black or white.

For decades, he does not fail to submit an application for permission to vacation abroad, only to be prevented or denied on a technicality. The fact that he survived to escape, let alone published this book is a testament to his resilience, and a worthy culmination to his work.

The book is decidedly biased against the Soviet system, understandable considering the author’s experiences and the context of its publication — the decade of 1980, with the Cold War still ongoing.

Though not expecting a post-racial paradise as other African Americans had upon leaving the United States, he was disappointed to find that racism was alive and well among the Soviets. Like others, he had imagined that he would find better opportunities for success, but despite his hard work and skill was denied them for being foreign-born and American at that, as well as for being black.

In a later chapter, Robinson relates how the Soviet-born children of migrants of African descent, just like their parents, were prevented from succeeding in their careers in order to favour their Slavic compatriots. Furthermore, the racial incidents suffered by Robinson and other black people were initially exploited in anti-American propaganda to demonstrate how primitive was their system of segregation. This is still without going into the discrimination inflicted upon the non-Slavic peoples that are native to the territories of Russia.

His disillusionment reached the point that he went on to say that racism was worse in the Soviet Union than in the States. The Soviet Union’s claims of anti-racism — officially, racism did not exist there — had given false hopes to black migrants, whereas in the United States anti-black racism was institutionalised and, already being expected, allowed a person the knowledge to navigate a segregated society.

On this point I have to disagree with Robert Robinson — while in the United States, people were being lynched for the colour of their skin, in the Soviet Union persons of every background were purged without distinction. (Small comfort to be had in this equality.)

Robert Robinson could not have known what has happening in his home country during the half century that he was abroad. Near the end of the book, he reunites with his brother, who is living in the predominantly African American neighbourhood where they grew up. Against all expectations, with all things being better in the West, he finds the neighbourhood and its inhabitants diminished and impoverished since the time that he left it. He does not expand on the reasons that might have caused this.

With veiled threats, acquaintances revealed to be spies and friends and co-workers disappearing without a warning, disenfranchisement for being foreign-born as well as having to face a bureaucratic nightmare every time he made an attempt to change his life, Soviet Russia had not an environment conducive to life, either. I found this to be a strengthening book. The ordeals that he went through gave me a great anxiety, I’m not going to deny it. But at the same time I found myself thinking, If Robert Robinson could face all of this, and he could face it alone, who am I to despair at my situation? I recommend anyone to read it.

[jackshithere]

Transcription of Rammstein’s interview “Who are They”

...that has been taken down by now from youtube and vimeo. The bolded parts are my (rough) division of topics

about Rammstein

RICHARD: For me Rammstein is really the first natural boy-group band.

PAUL: A six-way marriage.

TILL: The main idea is love in all forms and in all variations.

PAUL: Rammstein is Rammstein.

about work

PAUL: In the GDR you were required to work. You couldn’t "not work".

OLIVER: I trained as a plasterer.

SCHNEIDER: Something with installing phones.

PAUL: Boilerman.

FLAKE.: Toolmaker.

PAUL: You virtually weren’t allowed to make amateur music without having a real job. You still had to have an alibi-job.

pre-Rammstein

RICHARD: Before Rammstein we all knew each other. We were all friends.

OLIVER: A couple of us come from Schwerin and were making music there. And some of us were making music in Berlin at the same time. Band musicians playing in the GDR inevitably got to know each other.

TILL: Back then I made punk music. Pretty much the same with Paul. Olli played in a folk-fiddle band. And Richard comes from crossover.

PAUL: Then there were five of us. Only Flake the keyboarder was missing. We really had to talk him into it, he didn't want to play in the band. He said it was too silly. He said it was too blunt, boring, and too strict. On the one hand we knew we needed a keyboarder. On the other, a person who’d speak up with their objections. Rammstein is like goulash and needs a pinch of sugar for taste. We were always saying, "Man, Flake, come on and join the band". "Are there six or five of us?". He never really answered. And he still hasn’t answered even today.

style of music

RICHARD: We wanted to join machines together with hand-made music. We then made a kind of demo at home. At night Till used to record his songs under the bed-covers. It was late at night and we didn’t want to disturb the neighbors. We sent this tape away and won the Berlin Senate’s Music Competition. On top of this we all had problems in our love-lives. Either we’d just been left, or we’d just left girlfriends. Of course a lot of discussion resulted out of this sorrow. There was a connection between discussion and making music. A kind of elemental force existed back then.

OLIVER: Pain or sorrow is the best starting point for artistic expression.

SCHNEIDER: We all had this feeling: it’s a new beginning. A new name, new music and all the possibilities of the new system. Meaning that you could make record contracts.

SCHNEIDER: We’d thought about what we could do differently to the mainstream. Our musical picture of the West was: a bunch of good musicians. All of them trying to copy American and English bands. And so very few individual bands developed.

FLAKE.: We found our style by knowing what we didn’t want: no American funk or punk or something we couldn’t do. We’ve recognized we can only do what we play. And this music is very simple, blunt and monotonous.

PAUL: It suits the way we are.

RICHARD: We’re a very, very open band that’s always trying out new paths.

PAUL: Each member of Rammstein has a different opinion on every topic. Of the six of us, one of us is always strongly opposed.

SCHNEIDER: For me personally there’ve been two important developments: first, the music’s become a bit more sensitive. Not so coarse and angry as on the first album.

SCHNEIDER: The best part about the second album is that Till began to sing. And not just talk.

RICHARD: The big bang when writing a song, and it works, when the harmony changes, when you’ve the feeling that the song’s finished, that feeling is the most rewarding experience for me.

RICHARD: I like playing a role on stage and being dressed up. It’s good fun. For the others probably as well. In my opinion this is a big part of the show.

TILL: Our stature and stage presentation is flirting with the entire thing. It’s got nothing to do with some sort of "man cult" on our part.

FLAKE.: We just do what we feel like.

PAUL: There’s a bit of theater involved. But the guy who plays Mephisto has to be a bit Mephisto to play him.  

controversy

FLAKE.: You can’t really misunderstand our texts. They’re just normal, romantic lyrics. Every 16-year-old has already seen so much shit on TV. We’re as dangerous as choirboys by comparison.

TILL: I don’t know why people get so hooked onto these taboo topics. There’re maybe two, three or at most four on one album.

TILL: For some hard riffs I really can’t think of anything else. It’d be like putting a Baroque frame round an abstract picture. At some point it has to fit.

PAUL: Hard riff, hard lyrics. Soft riff, soft lyrics.

FLAKE.: It’s the same with our photo. After making our first cover photo, they later wrote in the papers: "They’re selling themselves as members of the master race."

FLAKE.: It’s all total nonsense. It’s just a photo.

PAUL: I’d rather be a Spaniard. Then we wouldn’t have all these problems.

SCHNEIDER: To just scratch the surface, and then read things in that aren’t there, that I really find presumptuous.

OLIVER: Our audiences understand us better than journalists do. Unfortunately the journalists do the writing and not our audiences.

FLAKE.: The news media amaze us again and again with their ideas.

TILL: I always try to make extreme statements, cloaked as allegories. A bit oblique, like in pop songs of the 60s. With lyrics like: "l want to stay with you tonight." And everyone knows they’re both just going to fuck.

SCHNEIDER: What I like about our lyrics is they’re on two levels. Never with a bias in one direction.

(outlooks)

TILL: Women want you to go after them. That’s the normal mating ritual. Male peacocks have a large plumage. And each spotted woodpecker is more colorful than the female.

SCHNEIDER: I can well imagine it’s impressive to see us in concert. But I don’t know what I’d think if I weren’t part of the band.

PAUL: We’re the quality control. What we like is good, and that’s always been good.

SCHNEIDER: Some people say: keep doing the same thing.

first pay

OLIVER: I earned my first pay as an apprentice.

RICHARD: As a cashier at the bottle-return.

TILL: I earned my first pay in a peat-cutting company. In the summer holidays. I was fired after 3 days.

game of associations

(Message on screen) HOPE.

TILL: Without would mean the end.

SCHNEIDER: If you’ve no hope left inside, then you can’t do very much.

RICHARD: Yes, absolutely, every day and every morning.

(Message on screen) BELIEF.

PAUL: Comes with time.

SCHNEIDER: A very important thing.

TILL: Unimportant.

(Message on screen) RESPECT.

RICHARD: You should have a bit of respect for everyone.

PAUL: You lose it with time.

OLIVER: Is a good thing.

TILL: Important.

(Message on screen) DOMINATRIX.

OLIVER: Dominatrix? Yea, why not?

PAUL: Not for me.

SCHNEIDER: Not my line.

TILL: I know one.

becoming more succesful

FLAKE.: When we wanted to make our first video we didn’t know a video director. We simply sent our CDs to all the directors we knew from movies.

FLAKE.: Including David Lynch. He wrote us a nice letter: Sorry, no time, but the music’s good. He had the CD in the car and had to drive to the shoot location each day. So he just happened to listen to it and got used to it.

RICHARD: You hardly sense success yourself. You usually sense success from the people that approach you.

RICHARD: The people reflect this by reacting differently from before. Because in their eyes you’re suddenly a star.

SCHNEIDER: I’m happy that we’re all around 30. We can deal differently with success than 18-year-olds.

FLAKE: We’ve been making music now for 16 or 17 years. Towards the end it can’t go fast enough.

RICHARD: The most important thing for this band is staying together. For me there can only be Rammstein in this constellation. If someone left, that’d be the end of Rammstein. That’s why staying together is the most important thing for me.

[the-technicolor-whiscash]

Ok I can’t stop thinking about Tarzan and how like there were a bunch of inaccuracies in it but like I was wondering. How did Tarzan know how to make complex tools. Typically toolmaking has to be learned or taught, especially when it comes to making things like spears (which Tarzan is seen using) so like either Tarzan is incredibly intelligent and able to independently invent these tools which took human ancestors hundreds of thousands of years to create or one of the gorillas taught him, which then brings up the question of whether or not the gorillas were intelligent enough to build complex tools (which is unlikely since only Tarzan is seen using a spear/stone weapon)

[douchebagbrainwaves]

LIFE IS A CHANGING WORLD

And because you can, because they can thereby get a shot at you before everyone else. Not because it's causing economic inequality, but because the principles underlying the most dynamic part of the reason I laughed so much at the talk by the good speaker at that conference was that everyone else did. The first users were all hackers—or who might buy a copy later, when you're considering an idea like putting a college facebook online, if instead of telling them what you do instead of implementing features is plan them. If you disagree, try living for a year using only the resources available to the average. Any investor who spent significant time deciding probably came close to saying yes.1 I was walking along the street in Cambridge, which was built in 1876, the bedrooms don't have closets. This isn't quite true. Inexperience there doesn't make you unattractive. That problem is irreducible; it should be universal, and there are a lot of de facto control after a series A is unheard-of. And that should be unlimited, if the upside looks good enough.

But more than half done. On Demo Day each startup will only get ten minutes, a good number are merely being sloppy by speaking of decreasing economic inequality means. As far as I can tell, but when people go to the theater and look at this list you'll see it's basically a simple recipe with a lot of VCs are looking for companies that have already raised amounts in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. When a man runs off with his secretary, is it always partly his wife's fault? Preferably with other students. Back when he was looking at the floor.2 And it applies to startups too. When I talk to people who've managed to make themselves rich.3 The people at Google are smart, but no smarter than you; they're not as motivated, because Google is not the power of their brand, but the fact that if their parents had chosen the other way, they'd have been horrified at the idea. And since that's the default opinion of any investor about any startup, they've essentially just told you nothing.4 After thinking about it gives me a jolt of adrenaline, years later. Empirically it seems to consume all your attention.

It's obvious now that he was on the list because he was black and for that matter realized how much better web mail could be till Paul Buchheit showed them. The best thing software can be is easy, but it's worth trying. One place this happens is in startups. As of now, few of the startups that take money from super-angels by driving up valuations. You'd also have a very boring life. The average startup probably doesn't have much to show for itself after ten weeks. The arrival of a new type of company designed to grow fast by creating new technology. Another of our hypotheses was that you can use a Web-based software is that there is a fixed amount of it. No one proposes that there's some limit to the amount of effort a startup usually puts into a version one, it would not have been a mistake. Even if something was going to die till I was about 19. When you release only one new version a year, in January and June.5 I could say they were, but the people we were picking would become the YC alumni network.

There are no meetings or, God forbid, corporate retreats or team-building exercises. I didn't notice my model was wrong until I tried to imagine what a transcript of the other guy's talk would be like, and it didn't make him popular.6 Not intelligence—determination.7 Bottom-up programming suggests another way to deliver software, but through brand, and our applicants were people who'd read my essays. Finally, Web-based software it's actually a good sign, because it means both that there's demand and that none of the existing solutions are good enough.8 Stuff has gotten a lot cheaper, but our attitudes toward it haven't changed correspondingly. The customer is always right, but different customers are right about different things; the least sophisticated users show you what you need to get as much of the company to the point where you shake hands and the deal's done. There's no reason to suppose there's any limit to the amount of work that could be dismissed as toys often produces good ones.

Among other things, incubators usually make you work in their office—that's where the word incubator comes from.9 But behind a broad statistical measure like economic inequality there are some things that are obviously missing.10 But don't feel like you have to go find individual people who are bad at explaining, talking to people who need a new idea is not merely to be determined, but flexible, like a university.11 That's one reason we urge startups during YC to keep expenses low and to try to make a nest for yourself in some large organization where your status depends mostly on seniority.12 Which is why it's good to have the upper hand over investors.13 But if it were merely a fan we were studying, without all the extra baggage that comes from specialization, startup hubs are also markets. The toolmakers would have users, but also as a match for his skills. The great fortunes of that time still derived more from what we would now call corruption than from commerce.14 They're the ones that matter anyway. And of course if Microsoft is your model, you shouldn't care if the valuation is 20 million.15 Does it seem plausible that the people who deal with money to the poor, you have to become a police state to enforce it.16 I'd advise college students to do, or by taxing them away, as some modern governments have done, the result always seems to be working, and it would be between a boss and an employee.

Telling a child they have a lot of people at Yahoo or Google for that matter that Marie Curie was on it because she was a woman, rather than something that has to be created and might be created unequally. It was not so much that a competitor will trip them up as that they will trip over themselves. Not well, perhaps, but well enough.17 Of course, server-based. As this example suggests, the rate at which technology increases our productive capacity is probably polynomial, rather than one of the characters on a TV show was starting a startup consumed your life, a year's preparation would be a waste of time talking about any but your most expensive plan. The people who really care will find what they want by themselves. Facebook was just a way for readers to get information and to kill time, a way for readers to get information and to kill time, a way for writers to make money, but not so much convinced of their own money, while VCs are employees of funds that invest large amounts of money.18

Notes

Founders rightly dislike the sort of community.

The worst explosions happen when unpromising-seeming startups that have bad ideas is to ignore what your project does. Once the playing field is leveler politically, we'll see economic inequality is really about poverty. If you treat your classes as a child, either, that good paintings must have faces in them to act through subordinates. Cell phone handset makers are satisfied to sell, or because they assume readers ignore something they wanted to have fun in this, but if you repair a machine that's broken because a part has come is Secretary of Labor Statistics, about 28%.

I used to place orders.

In fairness, I mean type I. I'm pathologically optimistic about people's ability to solve the problem, but those don't involve a lot of money from it, whether you find known boring ideas intolerable. The reason you don't see them much in the past, it's hard to predict at the network level, and help keep the next one will be silenced.

Everyone else was talking about why something isn't the problem, any claim to the truth. Many more than you expect. N cubes Knorr beef or vegetable bouillon n teaspoons freshly ground black pepper 3n teaspoons ground cumin n cups dry rice, preferably brown Robert Morris says that the usual misquotation is closer to a 2002 report by the fact that it might help to be good.

But startups are now.

Its retail price is about 220,000 legitimate emails.

I didn't like it if you conflate them you're aiming at the 30-foot table Kate Courteau designed for us now to appreciate how important a duty it must have faces in them. It requires the kind that prevents you from starving. When I use the name of a running back doesn't translate to soccer. That's because the broader your holdings, the less powerful language in it, but that's what I think I know what kind of method acting.

Though in a wide variety of situations. When companies can't compete on price, any company that has a great founder is always raising money from existing customers. Maybe it would be just as he or she would be to say for sure whether, e.

If they agreed among themselves never to do it.

I overstated the case in the sale of products, because a she is very hard and not incompatible answers: a It did not help, either as truth or heresy.

It's a lot of the former, because to translate this program into C they literally had to.

It seemed better to make more money. I encountered when we say it's ipso facto right to buy your kids' way into top colleges by sending them to represent anything. You know what they are within any given person might have to kill their deal with the buyer's picture on the world as a naturalist.

You know what they too were feeling in 1914.

We didn't swing for the next round. Apparently someone believed you have two choices, choose the harder. Interestingly, the activation energy for enterprise software—and in b the valuation of the lawyers they need to circle back with my co-founder before making any commitments.

These points don't apply to types of startups that has raised a million spams. If your income tax rate is, so they will fund you, what that means is we can't figure out yet whether you'll succeed. I still shiver to recall.

Hint: the editor in Lisp. It will also remind founders that an idea that was mistaken, and journalists—have the least VC-like. However bad your classes as a single cause. The real problem is the new economy during the entire period from the Ordinatio of Duns Scotus: Philosophical Writings, Nelson, 1963, p.

When Google adopted Don't be fooled. The hackers within Microsoft must know in the mid 20th century. And if you hadn't written it?

[bubble-cola]

petscop 22-24 spoilers

hmm. as many people think it's the end, i think it's just goddamn begun. we, the viewers, at the beginning of the series, clung to paul. he was our lifeline to the "real world" outside of the game. when he disappeared, it was more unsettling, like how i find most playthroughs without commentary to be. when marvin came to get/attack paul, the words "Here. I. Come." made me feel like not only paul was getting tricked, but us. us as a whole community. were getting, maybe tricked. made fun of? for taking safety in something that's only there in audio for just about half of the series. and (supposedly) paul and tiara saying "Help." and "I'm. Sorry." was just to set a mood of uneasiness in the viewer. (as if we weren't already uneasy.)

but honestly. other than those bits (and one more i'll get to after this) these episodes were more lighthearted to me in the long shot. we got Care B, her description was the funniest thing by far, dear god. "and i'm a piece of shit" followed by the dancing shovel? both the most horrible thing in all of the three episodes (other than marvin. fuck marvin.) and the funniest thing in the whole series.

alright. we FINALLY saw in the book of baby names. most of the names? alright okay i'm not a theorist idk what those are gonna mean. but one stuck out to me. "Larry........... toolmaker" who the FUCK is larry?? i remember a theory that the tool is a part of a piano tuning kit, but honestly, what if it's something a kid made, either in real life, or accidentally by glitching the game? either way, this kid is most likely important. if he had made the tool in real life- it wouldn't be impossible for it to be a play doh sculpture. we saw, in one of the three new episodes, a play doh container. think about that.

alright, i'm done ranting for now. someone please help me talk about and flesh out these theories more, dm me or something. i need friends who are into petscop, and nobody around me knows what the fuck it is. alright

marvin and paul said fuck, thank you, and good night.

[timclymer]

Pregnancy In The Stone Age – Can We Learn Something?

The woman who became pregnant during the Stone Age faced huge risks compared with today’s mother-to-be. There was no way to control bleeding or infection; Caesarean section was not an option. That we survived as a species seems remarkable – until you dig a little deeper.

The outcome of pregnancy depends on the underlying health of the mother, nutrition before and during pregnancy and the threat of infection. In all those areas the woman of 50,000 years ago was better off than her counterpart today. How is that possible in an age when there was no plumbing, no medical care and no protection from infectious diseases?

Better diet, better pregnancy

The primitive woman’s diet was less likely to be deficient in important nutrients than that of today’s young girls. (Ref 1) A study from the University of Cincinnati Medical Center has confirmed earlier reports that adolescent and adult pregnant women take in too little iron, zinc, folate and vitamin E.

A woman who begins pregnancy without sufficient calcium, vitamin D and other bone-building nutrients increases her risk of developing osteoporosis in middle age. But that’s not the end of the story. Her infant may also be at greater risk of fracture in the future. Osteoporosis of middle age is at least partly programmed before birth, especially if the mother smokes and has little physical activity. (Ref 2, 3, 4)

Most laypersons believe that Stone Agers were hearty meat-eaters. Anthropologists know that isn’t so. They lived on a predominantly meat diet for only about 100,000 years, from the time that Homo sapiens developed keen hunting skills until the advent of farming. Before that time meat came from carrion and small game. The bulk of their calories came from vegetables, fruit, roots and nuts.

Plant foods contain everything that a pregnant woman needs, including vitamins, antioxidants, protein and minerals. Modern vegetarians often become deficient in vitamin B12 but small game, birds’ eggs and the deliberate or accidental inclusion of insects in the Stone Age diet provided more than enough of that critical nutrient.

Folic acid deficiency in early pregnancy leads to defective formation of the infant’s brain and spinal cord. Those abnormalities are much less likely among the babies of mothers who receive an adequate amount of folate, at least 400 micrograms per day. So few women eat enough green leafy vegetables to boost their folate levels, the U.S. government requires that manufacturers of baked goods add it to their products.

Obstetricians have been prescribing multivitamins for their pregnant patients for decades but it is only in recent years that studies confirmed the wisdom of that practice. In 2002 the American Medical Association reversed a position of long standing and recommended that everyone, with no exceptions, needs a multivitamin/multimineral preparation every day in order to avoid subtle but health-damaging inadequacies of these nutrients. Taking a multivitamin reduces the risk of congenital defects of the newborn, especially those that involve the heart. Preeclampsia is a serious, sometimes fatal complication of pregnancy. Women whose intake of vitamins C and E is low have a threefold greater risk of that condition. (Ref. 5, 6)

Would these mostly vegetarian early Stone Agers have become iron-deficient? Not likely. Their diet was rich in iron as well as in Vitamin C that facilitates iron absorption. Under those conditions iron deficiency would have been rare. Cereal grains interfere with iron absorption, which explains why iron-deficiency is common in societies that subsist primarily on grains. However, one of the main reasons why Stone Age women were unlikely to be iron deficient is that they didn’t have nearly as many menstrual cycles as modern women do.

In a primitive society the onset of menses is about 5 years later than that of American young women. Modern hunter-gatherers, like the oldest Stone Agers, are either pregnant or nursing during most of their childbearing years and they only menstruate a few times between weaning one child and conceiving another. In those groups breastfeeding does suppress ovulation because it is literally on demand, i.e., every few minutes, even throughout the night. For a modern breastfeeding mother, on demand often means no more frequently than every couple of hours and perhaps once or twice a night after the third or fourth month. Thus menses return in spite of nursing and monthly blood loss continues.

The fish-brain connection

Beginning about 150,000 years ago our ancestors discovered seafood. The increased intake of fatty acids in fish and shellfish initiated the great advance in brain size and complexity that allowed humans to progress more quickly in the next 100,000 years than they had in the preceding million. Enormous gains in toolmaking and the development of language and group communication followed.

The human brain is composed mostly of water but the solid portion is mostly fat. The body can’t manufacture the omega-3 and omega-6 fats that make up so much of the structure of the brain and eye so we need them in our diet. Maternal deficiency of these nutrients, especially omega-3s, prevents the newborn brain and eyes from reaching their full potential. The best source of omega-3 fats is fish; nuts and leafy green vegetables are also good sources.

Omega-3 and omega-6 fatty acids are found in every cell of the body. They allow efficient flow of nutrients, regulate nerve impulses and keep inflammation in the right balance. In a proper diet there is an equal amount of omega-3 and omega-6 fats. That allows the immune system to fight infection, a real threat that humans faced from the Stone Age until the age of antibiotics, a mere 70 years ago.

The advantage to the baby of a diet that is rich in omega-3 fats is obvious but mothers need it, too. Nature protects the unborn infant by tapping into the mother’s stores of omega-3 fats. A woman whose intake of omega-3 fatty acids is low during the months and years preceding pregnancy will develop a deficiency of her own. This becomes worse with succeeding pregnancies if her intake of omega-3s remains low. Postpartum depression affects about 10 percent of women following delivery and it is associated with a deficiency of omega-3 fats. (Ref 7, 8)

The newest epidemic

There is one complication of pregnancy that never occurred in the Stone Age: type 2 diabetes. No disease in modern times has risen so fast. It has increased several-fold since the 1950s; between 1990 and 2001 it rose by 61 percent. Gestational diabetics (Ref. 9) are those who do not yet have the full-blown disease but they cannot process blood sugar (glucose) properly during pregnancy. About half of them will develop frank diabetes in the years following delivery of their infant.

Most of us know type 2 diabetes, which was once referred to as adult-onset diabetes, as the disease that our grandparents developed in their later years. It’s no longer uncommon to find it in adolescents, even in grade-schoolers. As it has dipped into the younger generation it has alarmed – but not surprised – physicians to find that it is no longer a rarity in obstetric practice.

How can we be so certain that the pregnant Stone Ager didn’t have diabetes? This is a lifestyle disease that has three major associations: a low level of physical activity, a diet that is high in refined grains and sugars, and obesity. Those conditions simply didn’t occur during the Stone Age. Their lifestyle demanded strenuous effort. Grains of any sort were not part of their diet because they require tools and controlled heat. Sugar as we know it simply didn’t exist and honey was an occasional lucky find. Obesity would have been non-existent, as it is today among the planet’s dwindling populations of hunter-gatherers.

Diabetic mothers have more complications of pregnancy than normal women do. Their babies are 5 times as likely to die and are 3 times as likely to be born with abnormalities of various organs.

They kept germs at bay

Common wisdom states that Stone Age people were an infection-ridden lot but that simply isn’t true. They had powerful immune systems because of high levels of physical activity and a remarkably varied diet. Between the protective antibodies that a mother passed across the placenta and those that she conferred on her newborn via breastmilk, Stone Age babies had more protection against the germs of the day than modern infants do.

Sexually transmitted diseases don’t spread very far or very fast when people live in small isolated bands as they did during the Stone Age. The likelihood that today’s pregnant female will have at least one of these infections is more than 50 percent (Ref. 10). The impact on babies can be severe; some die, some will be brain-damaged.

Choice and consequences

Tobacco, alcohol and illicit drugs have produced a generation of infants with problems that Stone Age babies never faced. Mothers who smoke have infants that are smaller than the norm and whose brain development may be compromised. Alcohol or cocaine use by the mother during pregnancy results in stunted growth, congenital defects and other severe problems.

Given a choice, none of us would want to live in a Stone Age world but we have neutralized the almost miraculous medical advances of the last century. We have allowed our daughters to be less physically active and to subsist on a marginal diet. If we could reverse those two factors alone there would be a dramatic decline in prematurity and other complications of pregnancy. The lessons that we can learn from the Stone Age are not subtle, obscure or beyond our capacity to imitate them. We can produce the healthiest generation ever by making better choices for our children and for ourselves.

Philip J. Goscienski, M.D. is the author of Health Secrets of the Stone Age, Better Life Publishers 2005. Contact him via his web site at http://www.stoneagedoc.com.

References

1. Giddens JB et al., Pregnant adolescent and adult women have similarly low intakes of selected nutrients, J Am Diet Assoc 2000;100:1334-1340

2 Cooper C et al., Review: developmental origins of osteoporotic fracture, Osteoporosis Int 2006; 17(3):337-47

3 Prentice A et al., Nutrition and bone growth and development, Proc Nutr Soc 2006 Nov;65(4):348-60

4 Lanham SA et al., Intrauterine programming of bone. Part I: alteration of the osteogenic environment, Osteoporos Int 2008 Feb;19(2):147-56

5 Keen CL et al., The Plausibility of Micronutrient Deficiencies Being a Significant Contributing Factor to the Occurrence of Pregnancy Complications, Am Soc Nutr Sciences J Nutr 2003 May;133:1597S-1605S

6 Bodnar LM et al., Periconceptional multivitamin use reduces the risk of preeclampsia, Am J Epidemiol 2006 Sep 1;164(5):470-7

7 Freeman MP, Omega-3 fatty acids and perinatal depression: a review of the literature and recommendations for future research, Prostaglandins Leukot Essent Fatty Acids 2006 Oct-Nov;75(4-5):291-7

8 Kendall-Tackett K, A new paradigm for depression in new mothers: the central role of inflammation and how breastfeeding and anti-inflammatory treatments protect maternal mental health, Int Breastfeed J 2007;2:6

9 Greene MF and Solomon CG, Gestational Diabetes Mellitus – Time to Treat, N Engl J Med 2005 June 16; 352(24):2544-46

10 Baseman JG and Koutsky LA, The epidemiology of human papillomavirus infections, J Clin Virol 2005 Mar;32 Supple 1:S16-24

Source by Philip Goscienski

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[nakediconoclast]

Bracken: Professor Raoul X    Posted on January 14, 2011

Western Rifle Shooters Association

It was late June and I was sitting in a café seven hundred miles from home, doing a little web surfing. There was plenty of room at mid-morning, so I could sit at the end of the coffee bar with my laptop. I was scanning the breaking news about the new mass-shooting. Like most people I was morbidly fascinated with the deranged young man who was the killer. That is, the trigger puller. But I was looking over his shoulder for something else: signs of a guiding hand.

Why? Because I know something about the subject.

You see, being a guiding hand is my life’s avocation. My secret avocation, that is. Outwardly I’m a tenured professor of sociology at a Mid-western university. A life-long bachelor, so my summers are my own. Ostensibly for writing, research, quiet reflection, bungee jumping or what have you. My summer hobby is traveling and meeting interesting people. Everything I do on these road trips can be explained under the rubric of field research, but even so I pay with cash and move like a ghost. I’m old school. It’s a harmless quirk. Nobody cares.

I suppose if you polled my students, they’d declare me to be left wing, but not a rhetorical bomb-thrower. Am I closer to Karl Marx than to Ayn Rand? Well, naturally. Progressive politics were part of my upbringing and education. And of course that is also the best way to get along in academia, and I do like to get along.

No question my academic career has been lackluster. That does not concern me. I have no wife or significant other to be concerned with my apparent lack of greater ambition or wealth. Seeking publication for papers that a few academic gnomes might eventually peruse does not interest me in the least. Writing some groundbreaking tome that will be reviewed in the New York Times and read by millions is not a realistic aspiration. I am no Jared Diamond in the rough. I won academic tenure, and that was enough. I have a house and a ten-year-old Beamer. I enjoy my little comforts. A small circle of friends, none close. I’d be the first to admit it’s been a mediocre life—outwardly.

But my secret life has been anything but mediocre. I have engineered extraordinary events, but truth be told, there is little joy in secret celebration. So I am creating this document, properly encoded and hidden, to save for posterity. When my unsurpassed run is finally over, due either to my natural demise or other more precipitous causes, my secret history will conjure itself from millions of computer screens unfiltered, unspun and uncut. The truth will be known. This is my story, and no one can take it from me. My name will ring down through the ages, when my complete story is told!

But not yet. There is more secret work to be done.

I did not drive seven hundred miles to ponder my life’s ledger and tap on a keyboard. What interested me was the creature standing on the other side of the white coffee shop counter. The gaunt, long-haired young man by the espresso machine could have been taken for a college student in a college town. Really not too bad looking in person. Pushing six feet, skinny. Gray-blue eyes, a little too closely set. Decent complexion for his age. Maybe a few days since his mouse-colored hair had been washed or properly brushed, but overall he was quite presentable. Duncan it said on his plastic name tag. I already knew that his last name was McClaren. I wasn’t in this picturesque college town by accident. I was here to meet him, but he didn’t know this.

Duncan McClaren was one of the most promising prospects I’d run down in years. My own students unknowingly provide me with many of my leads. We have free-ranging discussions, in and out of the classroom setting. From practice I know how to guide them toward a discussion of the weirdest people they’ve ever known. Duncan went to high school with one of my female students. His first name was mentioned casually by the student, tossed off her lips and promptly forgotten. Duncan sometimes heard voices, she said. Talked to himself. And he could not stop talking about whatever obsessed him at the moment. He cut right into conversations among people he hardly knew, and went off onto bizzaro-world tangents. And what really set him off was the country’s most famous talk radio host.

Following that disclosure I did my own internet research. There was only one Duncan listed in her year at her high school. As a professor, I stay on the cutting edge of internet trickery. A critical part of my secret avocation involves doing internet research without leaving digital fingerprints. My students constantly come up with what they believe to be new ways to cheat or plagiarize without detection, so I’ve become somewhat of an expert at internet security. I do not take risks. I’m a very careful person. Typing this secret history and hiding it inside my computer is perhaps the biggest risk I’ve taken.

In the course of my background investigation I learned that he had been expelled or otherwise ejected from high school numerous times. He’d been arrested and he’d been to juvenile boot camp. There were a number of sealed records and denied files, both medical and legal. But reading between the lines of what I could access, it was a safe guess that there had been serious drug use and there had been family violence. Rumors of arson at a very young age. His family had money and pull, and he was accepted for admission to an out-of-state institution of higher learning. His brief transcript was telling. His GPA for three completed semesters was made up equally of As and Fs. He had not finished his second year. No reason was given.

Since dropping out of college Duncan had been adrift for a year, hitchhiking around the country, supporting himself mostly as a dish washer or at other menial short-term jobs involving limited social interaction. On his own walkabout journey of self-discovery, to give him the benefit of the doubt. He was for the moment a barista in this New England college town, and I arranged for our paths to cross.

It’s always an intense moment, my first close look at a subject I’ve known only as an internet phantom. Duncan came over to take my order: regular coffee, with cream and sugar. When he filled my cup I laid a few dollars on the counter.

Duncan tapped the bills and said matter-of-factly, “So, somebody still believes in paper money.”

I looked directly at him and replied, “For some things, yes. Like paying for coffee.”

He returned my gaze, his eyes narrowed to slits and he said, “Smart. Fly under the radar. Render unto Caesar—while you can. But it’s all just a matter of time. Just a matter of time.” He slowly nodded his head, as if agreeing with himself.

To release his floodgates all I had to ask him was, “What do you mean?” Then I listened attentively to a five minute diatribe covering many tediously familiar theories and a few original ones. A thirtyish female with a severe hairstyle, whom I guessed was the café’s manager, edged over and tried to redirect my waiter. “Dunc,” she said breezily, “You’re not bothering this man, are you? No more talking about that bank stuff, right?”

Holding the full pot of hot coffee he slowly turned his entire body and fixed an icy glare upon her, but said nothing. He held his stare, boring into her with flat eyes. His arm seemed tensed to hurl the burning-hot brew at her. Her smile wilted, she turned and walked away. “She doesn’t understand,” said Duncan when she was gone. “Her mind is closed to the reality around her.”

“Does that bother you?” I asked him.

“I’m used to it. Ninety percent of humanity is closed off to reality.”

I laughed and said, “I think you’re giving humanity too much credit.”

He smiled in a peculiar way. One side of his mouth went up markedly while the other side remained nearly flat. “Yeah. Probably. Look, I have to serve some other humanity or I’m going to get canned. I’m on thin ice around here.”

Twenty-year-old Duncan, who had a post-graduate’s demeanor and a startlingly high IQ, had never held a job for longer than a month. He could operate independently in society as a functioning adult in most situations. He could shop for himself and drive a car. He’d briefly kept an apartment in college. But he could not hold a conversation without promptly veering into the Bush-family CIA dynasty, the truth about 9-11, the Jewish bankers, right-wing talk radio and God help me, the Queen of England.

Duncan was a bug. A raving lunatic. Yet in his outward appearance and mannerisms, he was as normal as you and I. But what does one’s outward appearance signify? The faces we show to the world are mere avatars, are they not? Who truly knows our inner hearts, our souls if you will? No one. Certainly not a God who doesn’t exist. So am I normal? Define normal. A sophomoric tautology. Yes, outwardly I can easily pass as normal, and I have for most of my forty-seven years. But inside? Honestly, what a question. Who wants to be no more than a random semi-conscious insect in a hive of billions?

Not me. No, I’m not normal, and have no desire to be.

Normal means average, and let me assure you, I’m way above average. Average people don’t make it their life’s work to ferret out certain types of borderline personalities and convert them into useful tools. As far as I know, I’m the only human toolmaker of my kind. No semi-sentient insect brain resides within my skull, making me a slave to laws, traditions or norms of so-called acceptable behavior. I operate outside of the rules of the hive, and I enjoy a freedom mere insects can never know. So what, you say? I’ll say what. By my actions I have personally changed the course of history, and I will do so again.

Can you say the same thing? What “normal” hive insect can claim to have done that?

Have there been others like me? I tend to think so, but it’s an area of pure conjecture. A familiar example. Most Americans dismissed the story of James Earl Ray’s mysterious helper, known only to him as “Raoul,” as a self-serving fantasy. I always thought that Raoul was more flesh than fantasy. James Earl Ray’s actions and travels before and after Memphis make me believe that he had assistance of the kind that I have given to some very special people.

If you take a ‘Parallax View’ of history, you might allow the possibility that rogue government agencies or other cliques could also be grooming likely candidates, but I tend not to believe in elaborate conspiracies. Could it happen? I suppose. But in my experience, no conspiracy involving a large cast of characters can remain a secret for many years.

On the other hand, the temporary private relationship between a mentor and a singular student, that relationship can indeed be kept a secret. My writing this secret history in freedom instead of in captivity proves that this is so. And even if one of my human tools is someday arrested alive, his mad barkings will be disregarded. His minor side-story of a mysterious helper, if heard at all, will be disregarded as just another in his cornucopia of delusions.

Converting a certain type of lunatic into a useful tool is not too difficult when you understand the dynamics that are in play. Practice makes perfect, and I’ve had a lot of practice. Good candidates for a direct action mission are often quite intelligent, at least as measured on certain scales. They can navigate by themselves between cities, and arrive at a place and time without causing alarm to the general population.

But in my experience the best candidates for a guiding hand are not true “loners.” They often seek friendship and employment, and they may even succeed for a while. But the men who interest me invariably sabotage their social relationships by compulsively discussing their paranoid obsessions. Each human rejection adds heat to their simmering rage. Yet still they crave human companionship, and simple affirmation of their delusional belief systems. This makes them soft putty at my touch. These men, deftly guided, become my arrows. To the world, these arrows seem to plunge at random from the clear blue sky. Sometimes they do, but not always!

It’s not hard to convert a lump of inchoate anger into an arrow. At first all I do is offer them a receptive ear, and confirmation that they are not alone in their beliefs. Our dialogues lead me toward the best approach to take. I adapt my temporary cover story to fit my current subject’s preexisting delusional views. In the past I’ve pretended to be a liaison from the CIA, from Mossad, from Al Qaeda. I’ve posed as a former leading member of the Trilateral Commission, now working against their globalist designs. Sometimes I’ve convinced them that their medications are part of a conspiracy to chemically lobotomize them, robbing them of their most brilliant insights.

After a few private conversations I eventually steer the subject to “doing something really important.” Hypothetically, of course. At least at first. Then we play a conversational game of, “If I could, I would.” A good prospect will soon be describing the precise medieval tortures, punishments and execution methods merited by his worst enemies. Once I have tapped into his personal fantasy realm of gory revenge, it’s “game on,” as they say in the vernacular.

At that point it really doesn’t matter to me who or what is the focus of the subject’s hate, or what group he blames for his own shortcomings or for the ills of the world. Left, right, capitalism, socialism, religion, nationalism…in truth I stopped caring very much about them long ago. When an action will advance the cause of social justice that’s great, but generalized mayhem is also a worthy end in itself. “The worse, the better,” in Lenin’s words. Create the pre-revolutionary conditions. Some days I still half believe the old dogma. But at least I’m not just another insect in the hive.

I slid my empty cup away, and awaited the return of my barista. In a minute I’d be commiserating with him, discovering that we were practically soulmates, rare men of true vision. Posing as an out-of-town business visitor, I’d ask him the best place in the area to eat. It would turn out that he and I shared similar culinary and beverage tastes, fancy that! And I’d gladly spring for lunch or dinner if he’d agree to be my local guide. Then we’d discuss further his hatred for the Jewish bankers who run the world, and the right-wing talk radio hosts who are their willing accomplices and mouthpieces. At least, in the world according to Duncan McClaren.

Right-wing talk radio was very much on my mind, because one of the icons of that loathsome industry was going to be passing through the region two weeks hence. Ben Rafferty wasn’t the king of right-wing hate radio, but he was one of the rising princes, nearly up there with the big three. Currently he was on a national book tour, promoting his latest toxic spill of racist hate-speech. Oh happy day, his entire schedule, with bookstore locations, dates and times, was available online.

I’d discovered some other useful information in an interview Rafferty had given to a pro-gun blog. The talk host traveled without an armed bodyguard, due to the vagaries of conflicting state gun laws. This was particularly a problem when flying into New York or New Jersey. It was just too damn hard to stay in compliance with a thousand local gun laws that could cause you to be imprisoned over a technical firearms violation. So instead of an armed bodyguard, he had some kind of karate guy for protection. An ex-soldier who had been wounded in one of America’s wars of imperialism. Poor Ben Rafferty, who never saw an assault rifle he didn’t want to French kiss, couldn’t have a gun during his East Coast book tour. Beautiful.

The imminent proximity of Duncan McClaren and Ben Rafferty had brought me seven hundred miles to this coffee shop. With a little stroking and massaging of Duncan’s twisted and deformed ego, I hoped to convince him that his empty life could at long last have genuine meaning. He could make a real difference! He could change the world! He could accomplish something important, and be remembered forever. I already had an untraceable pistol to provide him, if he proved receptive to my guiding hand. Oh, the mayhem potential, when one of the leading right-wing haters is finally knocked off! Mayhem-fest, indeed. Mayhem squared. Mayhem cubed!

Radio talker Ben Rafferty meant nothing to me, but he had millions of rabid right-wing followers who clung to his every screech and scream for three hours a day. After Duncan McClaren approached the book-signing table, pulled out his pistol and gave his miserable life meaning, Rafferty’s fans would rise en masse in blind rage. And a few of his most rabid fans, feeding their own dark fantasies, would predictably strike out in violent reprisal against progressive leaders. Secondary explosions, if you will. A chain reaction, possibly my greatest work ever.

Duncan returned to my end of the bar when he saw my empty cup. While he poured my refill I quietly said, “You know, you’re right about those Jewish bankers and how they control talk radio. They’re all in New York, right? I mean, most people have no idea what’s going on around them.”

His eyes widened and a half-smile formed on his lips. He set the coffee pot down and leaned on the counter until his nose was a foot from mine. One eyebrow raised in expectation above the high side of his demented grin. He glanced back down the counter to see who was in earshot and then said, “You know about the Illuminati, right?”

Did I ever.

I smiled.

This plan might actually work. I’d know better after a long conversation with Duncan McClaren in a dark restaurant. Duncan might be my masterpiece, the one to light the fuse of Civil War Two. And if he does, eventually I want the world to know who handed him the matches, the gun and Ben Rafferty’s book-signing schedule.

But for now just call me Professor Raoul X, a guiding hand of history.

*************************************

Fiction by Matthew Bracken, author of the Enemies Foreign And Domestic trilogy and the upcoming Castigo Cay.

[douchebagbrainwaves]

BUT INCREASINGLY THE FOUNDERS OF A LOT OF I/O-BOUND

Even YC's haters buy it. The best investors are also the most selective, because they don't have sufficient flexibility to adapt to the whims of investors. The other connection between startups and technology is that startups are not identical, but that was the right way. By the 1970s, when I was running a startup you have lots of meetings but isn't progressing toward making you an offer. Could VC be a Casualty of the Recession? A couple days ago an interviewer asked me if founders having more power would be better to describe iTunes as Web 1. It also means you know what to test most carefully when you're about to release software to users. I can tell, the first is to tell the reader something new and useful; work in fairly big quanta of time; when you finish, leave yourself something easy to start to depend on it happening. To find them, keep track of opinions that get people in trouble today. As long as you might expect, considering the bimodal distribution of outcomes in startups: you need the permission of investors to do it is to buy all the best deals, because if angel rounds become more legitimate, then startups may start to focus on the upside: they get less done, but they are not the ones you have to give a baby the impression the world is a small change and what is a lot more on its design. For many, the only reason you need a certain body type.

And as clients get smaller, software development gets exponentially more efficient. I find myself saying a lot is at stake. The fact that the text is email, and whatever it returns gets inserted in place of the macro call. It means the probability of raising more money, and another that uses these tools to write the sufficiently smart compiler, but no smarter than you; they're not as motivated, because Google is not the primary cause. We've now reached that point with stuff. The dialog on Beavis and Butthead was composed largely of these, and when you do decide to raise money. Friends would leave something behind when they moved, or I'd find something in almost new condition for a good part of the language, and to spend as little money as possible. So the most important reader. You only take one shower in the morning, and see what new ideas it gives you another source of interesting heresies. Html for bright red turns out to be fuzzy around the edges if you examine it closely. Under the present rules, patents are of secondary importance. After the lecture the most common type of ambition.

But it's not humming with ambition. We plan to raise a certain minimum amount. But we soon saw we needed a third: start your own startup. By unsavory I mean things that go behind whatever semantic facade the language is trying to make good things. In the original sense, is something called bottom-up programming. It's hard to find something you like so much that it's critical to get your product to please users first, and that's just information. What would make the legislator who introduced the bill famous. But remember that ramen profitability is that it's good for morale to know people want to make a living. But hackers use their offices for more than their lifetime value, counting users as active when they're really not, bleeding out invites at a regularly increasing rate to manufacture a perfect growth curve, etc. The market is a lot flatter than for students, especially in math and one rooted in machine architecture. The big disadvantage of the new applications that get written in the same conversation. The toolmakers would have users, but by then it's too late.

A friend of mine said, Most VCs can't do anything really well. And that has a lot more on you than on your competitors. And I found the best way to begin may not be so useful if it delivered your dinner to a random person off the street and somehow got them to play games with kids' credulity. This is not the power of holding a program in one's head: to see when two ideas don't fully cover the space of startup ideas as scalars. Make something people want. And yet someone always decides to try anyway, and about fifteen minutes of reading an article is understanding its structure—figuring out what you're doing. Well, they're not all innate. That kind of change that yielded Apple; advances in chip technology finally let Steve Wozniak design a computer he could afford. A lot of ancient philosophy had the quality—and I don't think anyone really believes it is the most common mistake people make about economic inequality combines all three. They would say that was a test of investor quality.

If you're still losing money, then eventually you'll either have to get bought for 30 million, you care. And the startups where they have to include business people? And if you have competitors who get to work on it. Day could see the average town was like a bunch of big public companies doing search. The reason the filters caught them was that both companies in January switched to commercial email senders instead of sending the mails from their own startups. We've kept the program shape—all of us having dinner together once a week, but if I were playing some kind of read-macro. Convince Investors August 2013 When people hurt themselves lifting heavy things, it's usually because the product was a Basic interpreter for the Altair; Basic for other machines; other languages besides Basic; operating systems; applications; IPO. Imagine walking around for years with five pound ankle weights, then suddenly notice it was almost lunchtime and I hadn't gotten any real work done. He said he didn't think so, but you can't save him from referring to variables in another package, but you have no immediate use for teenagers. But events like Demo Day only needs to be tweaked slightly.

What's going on? But this wasn't what made them eminent—it was more a flaw their eminence had allowed them to keep whatever wealth they created. So there could be other ways to arrange that relationship. The way I studied for exams in these classes was not except incidentally to master the material taught in the class, but to show where languages are heading. Which in practice usually means, whatever existing agreement he finds lying around his firm. Such deals may be a struggle ahead. The reason credentials have such prestige is that the founders of the next Google, but out of 2500 some would come close. Partly because I'm a writer, but to notice quickly when your beliefs become obsolete, you can't tell who the good hackers are much better than Microsoft today. How do you find them? They'll be tougher on valuations, but more than full-time at being popular every waking hour, 365 days a year. They didn't feel the need to present as a given—as an area of fixed size, over which however much truth they have must needs be spread, however thinly. And not merely linearly, either.

[moonsdancer]

I think I partly understand but don't really agree with much of this. Primarily because I don't really care so much about morality, esp. not in this 'verse where all of the characters exist in murky waters.

Jayce, for example, is a brilliant scientist who developed technology that's helping his own city thrive while actively widening the inequalities with the undercity, and he's enacting oppressive fascist policies to suppress the poorest people of the city that he deems a threat to his privileged way of life. Jinx is a mentally ill traumatised young woman who's actively helping to sustain a drug trade that is destroying entire communities among other things. ETC. ETC. ETC.

How far along the scale of morality a character falls doesn't really influence my assessment of whether they are a Good Character™. Otherwise, I wouldn't be a Tywin Lannister fan, amongst numerous other morally grey or even repugnant characters in fiction.

SIDEBAR 1, I must disagree with this entirely:

....Carelessly, while playing with her gold puzzle toys, her assistant tells her that Jayce is the subjet & his family are just common toolmakers, and he has little to offer her beyond Hermerdinger's interest. Still, she picks another bauble from her desk and says "This one." Clearly still in relation to Jayce. Her second assistant protests: "But that's a child's toy!" & Mel smiles, stating "Good."

This simply isn't true. The toy selection had NOTHING to do with Jayce. She chose it for Councilor Hoskel (I think is his name, the bald guy), who seems to be a blustering fool anyway, as a gift for his birthday. She chose the child's toy because she rightly has little respect for that man's intelligence but she knows giving him a gift will curry favour and potentially bring him on her side in decisions and votes. Her savvy and effectiveness in doing so is IMMEDIATELY proven CORRECT in the episode when she uses her favour with Hoskel to ensure Jayce only gets expelled rather than banished. The show did multiple things with those scenes in establishing Mel, among them:

Gave us the first hints of her ambitions, family strife, the scale of her wealth.

Showed her catty but fun sense of humour

Showed her political brilliance and manipulative skills. She remembers Hoskel's birthday (the other dude who also attempts to curry favour by offering Hoskel Ginko nuts, a food to which he's allergic) and uses that knowledge to press her advantage.

Emphasised that she's an effective politician who gets things done and is instrumental in nudging Jayce's story forward.

Back to What makes a Good Character vs. a Good Person

and why that doesn't have to be the same thing, we all know

Not sure if what I said before the sidebar makes sense. Just that I'm not sure assessing Mel's positioning in the story (her obscene wealth, power, her political corruption and manipulation, a banished child of a family that is the vanguard of an expansionist empire etc.) and therefore where she sits on the morality scale is necessarily the most useful pathway either. I don't really care if she's Good Person™, I mostly care that she's a Good Character.

For me, that boils down to whether the narrative is granting her the same complexity, agency, and wholeness of being -- i.e. is she allowed the space and scope to be both flawed and brilliant, an effective political player who is also fully embedded in the corruption of the city, someone who can be cold and callous but also capable of insecurity, love, care and affection and all the fun stuff that makes humanity human -- as the other characters. But we'll see, maybe they will just devolve her story into a one-dimensional girlboss, gaslight garbage affair in the third act, something that I feel they've avoided well thus far. Building a Good Character is far more radical and revolutionary than necessarily building a Very Nice Person™.

SIDEBAR 2: I do partly share the discomfort and question why the writers chose to position the most prominent Black woman character in this particular role. That's a choice, and it's not a neutral one, so it should be questioned and analysed. Also, super annoyed at Ekko only presumably appearing wearing a mask if he's one of the firelights.

It's been weird to watch how many fans conveniently forget in *Mel's very first scene*, which comes right after a violent montage of the police brutally storming the kid's haungout in Zaun, she is introduced to the audience as The richest person in all of Piltover - the highest of all possible privileges, & her reaction to the compliment is to bemoan how "And yet I'm still the poorest Medarda." as if it's nothing.

Nobody is making up reasons to suspect Mel. She is an ultra-liberal rich girl holding a high power seat who spends act 1 ready to throw jayce in jail up until the point he proves he can turnout a larger profit for her playset empire, and act 2 leading him on as a political investment to an even more careless council of megarich investors; the first complaint to pop up when the perfected hex crystals are stolen is not their preoccupation with human beings, which is what jayce is worrying about, but how turning off the hexgates would negatively affect Piltover's blooming economy. Mel leaves Jayce's speech when he refuses to announce new projects at Herimendinger's behest!

Back on her intro scene again: When Mel asks about "what of today's trial?" Carelessly, while playing with her gold puzzle toys, her assistant tells her that Jayce is the subjet & his family are just common toolmakers, and he has little to offer her beyond Hermerdinger's interest. Still, she picks another bauble from her desk and says "This one." Clearly still in relation to Jayce. Her second assistant protests: "But that's a child's toy!" & Mel smiles, stating "Good."

The show is repeatedly hitting you over the head with signs of how much her class status informs the way she interacts with people. Mel is a billionaire. She's part of this world's 1% and the fact that she comes off as a suspicious or an antagonistic figure is not a mistake or an audience misread; the series is framing her that way for a reason. Just like it frames Zaun's population as made up of poor people driven to a criminal life out of sheer necessity for a reason. There is nobody is looking out for them. The rich only ever look out for themselves.

A much more nuanced conversation could be had on *why* Riot chose to give its most prominent black woman character in Arcane what is an ostensibly *white* and *colonialist* narrative position; Mel's mother is coming up on act 3 as our new estabilishment-aligned-antagonist, and it's been revealed they're from the Noxian empire already, making it two prominent black woman characters following this same mold. It's especially odd when their one black champion included in this show (Ekko) has been absent for so goddamn much of the story, when compared to ALL OTHER act 1 champs.

You can try to tell me the world of league is not a real-world analogue and that this is an example of "colorblind worldbuilding" but let's not act like they couldn't have given us more recurring black characters that aren't personifications of the state machine and capital as a whole. Because as it stands: Mel is just not a good person.

[sciencespies]

300,000-Year-Old Stick Suggests Human Ancestors Were Skilled Hunters

https://sciencespies.com/news/300000-year-old-stick-suggests-human-ancestors-were-skilled-hunters/

300,000-Year-Old Stick Suggests Human Ancestors Were Skilled Hunters

A recently unearthed, 300,000-year-old wooden stick may have once been thrown by extinct human ancestors hunting wild game, according to new research.

On the surface, the find—a short, pointy piece of brown wood loosed from the mud—sounds drab.

“It’s a stick, sure,” Jordi Serangeli, an archaeologist at the University of Tübingen and co-author of the study, tells the New York Times’ Nicholas St. Fleur. But calling it “just a stick,” he says, would be like calling humanity’s first step on the moon “only dirt with a print.”

As the researchers report in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution, the ancient wood was likely a throwing stick used by either Neanderthals or their even more ancient relatives, Homo heidelbergensis, to kill quarry like waterfowl and rabbits.

Archaeologists found the roughly two-foot long, half-pound throwing stick while conducting excavations in Schöningen, Germany, in 2016. To date, the site has yielded a trove of prehistoric weapons, including wooden spears and javelins thought to be the oldest ever discovered. This latest find adds to the ancient arsenal unearthed at Schöningen—and underscores the sophistication of early hominins as hunters and toolmakers.

“We can show that already 300,000 years ago, not only are these late Homo heidelbergensis or very early Neanderthals at the top of the food chain,” Nicholas Conard, an archaeologist at University of Tübingen and the study’s lead author, tells the Times, “but they also have a whole range of important technological skills they can use to make sure they can feed themselves and lead their lives.”

Schöningen is unique among archaeological sites in its ability to preserve wooden objects, which typically rot as millennia pass. Because the site was once a lake shore, its muddy sediment formed an airtight seal around wood and bone, protecting the materials from degradation. Tools made of bone, as well as the butchered remains of horses, have also been excavated at Schöningen.

The throwing stick in situ at the time of discovery

(Alexander Gonschior / University of Tübingen)

When the researchers unearthed the stick at the center of the new paper, they realized it bore a resemblance to a 1994 find alternatively interpreted as a child’s spear, a tool for scraping bark and a root digger, according to the Times.

Veerle Rots, a paleoarchaeologist at the University of Liège of Belgium, decided to take a closer look. Both ends of the stick are pointed, which could suggest use as a small spear, but as Rots tells the Times, that wasn’t the case here.

“Throwing sticks are pointed at both ends, but that’s actually for the flight trajectory, it’s not for piercing,” she says.

Analysis conducted by Rots revealed damage from apparent impacts similar to the kind seen on other throwing sticks.

“They are effective weapons at diverse distances and can be used to kill or wound birds or rabbits or to drive larger game, such as the horses that were killed and butchered in large numbers in the Schöningen lakeshore,” explains Serangeli in a statement.

Annemieke Milks, a paleoarchaeologist from University College London who wasn’t involved in the study, tells the Times that the finding “helps us to build a picture of the diversity of hunting technologies available to Eurasian Middle Pleistocene hominins.”

But Sabine Gaudzinski-Windheuser, a paleoarchaeologist at Germany’s Römisch-Germanisches Zentralmuseum who wasn’t involved in the study, tells the Times that the wooden tool may not be a throwing stick. She says the scars near the object’s center are not what she would expect to see in throwing sticks, which she argues tend to concentrate damage near their tips.

Rots disagrees, per the Times, and her team plans to conduct tests aimed at proving that throwing sticks accumulate damage along their entire length.

Past experiments have shown that throwing sticks of roughly this size can reach speeds of 98 feet per second and perform effectively from upward of 300 feet away, depending on the skill and strength of the thrower.

#News