#societal advancements

[dontmean2bepoliticalbut]

[serpentface]

i really like how this setting has a very well defined history to it, the past, the way it has been described so far, genuinely feels like another place and still one that would logically lead to the present, so i wanted to ask, have you thought at all about this in the other direction? what will the setting look like in 10, 50, a 100 years? just where is this world going exactly?

10 years absolutely. 50 years not so much. 100 years barely. Far future not at all. Here's a summary of the localized 10-15 year outcome (posting the (incomplete, already outdated) map again because it is extremely necessary for the paragraphs to come)

(Titenegal is the star just to the west of Godsmouth, the Mouth is the stretch of sea between Bur and the Wardi empire, the Viper trails off a little off-map to the east, the seas west of the Viper form the Inner Seaway)

I have a pretty solid idea of the next 10-15 years for Imperial Wardin. The former king (technically emperor but the word for 'king' is used for this title) Stavis Amanti honorably and nobly and TOTALLY willingly replaces the destined white calf in sacrifice, and the Odomache takes his dynasty's place as the emperor. As God Itself incarnated, the state is now functionally a theocracy with a god-emperor. The Imperial Wardi faith has always been the greatest unifying factor in an otherwise fragmented imperial entity, and this change results in a greater centralization of power than what's seen in Whitecalf (in which it is essentially composed of allied city-states conditionally loyal to a king, it's integrity is very tenuous in general and actively falling apart in the famine). The city-state of Lobera and Godsmouth both disavow the Amanti dynasty during the famine and the former wholly secedes and declares itself an independent state near the end of the story (the latter re-avows its loyalty to the new god-emperor). Lobera pulls some nearby imperial tributary territories under its protection and and the territorial size of Imperial Wardin is diminished (basically the entire northeast is lost).

The drought DOES end in the same year as the pilgrimage (yayyyy it worked) but actual recovery from a 6.75 year drought and famine, especially in the context of a shift in political power, takes time. The famine cannot be considered to have fully ended for another 4-5 years (conditions just gradually improve until normalization) and this time is spent in with focus being inward and on recovery and reunification. The city-state of Erub in particular fully collapsed by the end of the famine (the Yellowtail river ran Completely dry and tens of thousands of people in that region alone died from starvation and disease) and is never reformed in this 15 year period, though some refugees (and opportunists grabbing lands from dead or fled farmers) start to trickle back in as the land recovers.

The shift in power from a dynastic imperial monarchy to an imperial oligarchy is actually wildly popular among much of the public (the notion existed long before it actually happened, the public opinion on the imperial family is EXTREMELY low during the famine and the pilgrimage is largely a desperate attempt to save face). The social perception that God Itself incarnated and made head of state is what ended the drought and famine is massively beneficial to the new power structure. Imperial Wardin emerges from famine recovery at the most united and centralized in power it's ever been.

A full scale war between Imperial Wardin and Lobera+Allies finally occurs about 6 years out, and lasts a little over a year before Lobera is utterly crushed and re-absorbed. Control over tributary states is reaffirmed, and efforts start to be made to make Imperial Wardi territory fully contiguous (in the map, only the red sections are Fully controlled territories)

Meanwhile Titenegal is more aggressively courted into full alliance with Godsmouth, and the majority of elected officials vote for a merger, which in practice absorbs it into the Wardi empire (while retaining elected officials for local affairs, though these must defer to the emperor). This basically splits the united Burri nations in half (both in public opinion and in a literal territorial capacity) and is extremely contentious. Imperial Wardin is clearly in the process of pulling the old switcheroo and conquering Bur, through diplomacy for the time being.

And with the full cross-Mouth unification having occurred, attention is turned back north to Finnerich (which has been fully independent of its tributary status for over a decade now, and has been a major pain in the ass for both Wardi and Burri interests). A much stronger, much more unified, and much more militarized Imperial Wardin starts preparing for another round of invasions, while the self-declared king of Finnerich has been courting historical enemies into allegiance against it. At this point the Wardi Empire is entering a strong expansionist era and trying to conquer the entire Viper Seaway and Mouth, with hopes of finally digging that canal at the end of the Viper (a seaway that peters out about 40 miles from the ocean, many have tried to dig a canal and all have failed) to completely monopolize the eastern tradeways. It has a long way to go to actually get there though.

All this stuff is the political backdrop for Blightseed (the story).

In the LONG and broader term, the only really imminent world-altering scenario would be the greater spread of firearms. At the moment the most complex and powerful firearm being produced is types of flintlocks/matchlocks most comparable to the arquebus (also there's some smaller pistols with similar mechanisms) (I'm also going back and forth on whether I should downgrade the gun tech), but the majority of firearms that exist are more basal fire lances and handcannons (and the VAST majority of peoples have no firearms at all). In the 'contemporary' these matchlocks are only just starting to spread through very powerful states in the Inner Seas tradeway and are generally rare and elite weapons, which are slowly being disseminated through capture and illegal trade and reverse engineered by other people. The spread of relatively efficient and powerful handguns would have profound implications for warfare and the power structures involved in trade networks and will probably be a major contributing force to mass societal changes in the next 100-300 years.

I also haven't provided a good sense of scale via not posting world maps but most of the imperial entities described are relatively tiny on a global scale. There has never been anything in the setting on the scale of the Roman empire or the Mongolian empire at their peaks. Imperial Wardin's total mass of occupied territories (not including claimed but unoccupied land, blue on the map) is a little under the size of the full extent of the Aztec empire (and they have some similarities in being largely composed of a tributary states). It's a world that has heavy interconnection via trade along coasts and seaways, but its societies are mostly (relatively) small in scale. This is a long way of saying I think the mass spread of firearms could result in something closer to that scale of territorial landgrabbing forming.

[hunxi-after-hours]

this performance haunts me

translation notes:

'louba' and 'louliga' refer to the sun and the moon, respectively. I cannot for the life of me find a solid source on this. most commentators seem to agree that here, 'louba' and 'louliga' are being used to refer to someone's father and mother.

after the first chorus, the lines "I'm sorry / I cannot change" are incredibly ambiguous, particularly as to whether the line should be interpreted as "I cannot change" or "I cannot change it"

[peachphernalia]

click for higher quality

do you ever see yourself ?

[alt ver. with different colors under the cut and ramble in tags]

[dream by joku]

[fandomsandfeminism]

Joshua remembers her saying that many women miscarry in the first 12 weeks of pregnancy, and they didn't want to be liable for an investigation.

Louisiana's near-total abortion ban, which took effect on Aug. 1, has raised fears among physicians that they could potentially be investigated for treating a miscarriage, since the same treatments are also used for abortion.

God. The fucking cruelty. The inhumane cruelty of it.

[lokilysolbitch]

god bless Jessica kellgren-fozard and any other disabled creator responsible for rewiring my brain at the age of like 15 so that learning im disabled and need mobility aids did not ever feel like a death sentence

[frank-olivier]

Navigating the Nexus of Transformation: Humanity's Quest for Agency in a Global, Technological, and Cosmic Landscape

As we venture into the uncharted expanse of the 21st century, humanity is at the confluence of three transformative forces: a global revolution synchronizing nearly 190 nations, the dawn of the "Transhumanist Stage" with its revolutionary technologies, and the profound implications of potential extraterrestrial life. This nexus challenges the very essence of our existence, posing fundamental questions about unity, autonomy, and what it means to be human.

The global push for unity, while promising cooperation and peace, veils risks of societal homogenization and totalitarian inclinations. The tension between global synchronization and individual autonomy has reached a critical juncture, necessitating vigilant oversight to ensure that unity enhances, rather than erodes, personal freedoms.

Simultaneously, the Transhumanist Stage, marked by brain-computer interfaces, cognitive enhancements, and immersive metaverse experiences, redefines human boundaries. While promising unprecedented innovation and efficiency, these technologies threaten to dilute individuality and emotional depth. Urgent ethical deliberations are required to safeguard humanity's essence amidst this rapid advancement.

The possibility of extraterrestrial life introduces a cosmic dimension to our transformation, prompting existential inquiries into mutual awareness, influence, and humanity's universal purpose. This line of questioning underscores the enduring philosophical conundrums of our species: the pursuit of meaning and our place within the cosmos.

A common imperative emerges from this complex landscape: the preservation and empowerment of human agency. To navigate the transformative forces shaping our world effectively, a multifaceted approach is crucial. This entails four key strategies: firstly, ensuring global unity while preserving autonomy by vigilant participation in global policy-making to safeguard individual freedoms. Secondly, adopting ethical tech governance through inclusive, forward-thinking discussions that prioritize enhancing human agency, emotional depth, and collective well-being. Thirdly, cultivating critical and communal intelligence by fostering a global culture that values critical thinking, empathetic engagement, and the sharing of diverse perspectives. Lastly, embracing existential inquiry to reflect on humanity’s identity, leveraging profound existential questions as a catalyst for resilience and adaptability in the face of uncertainty.

By embracing these strategic imperatives, humanity can harmonize the transformative potential of global unity, technological advancement, and cosmic awareness with the indelible essence of our humanity, forging a future that is at once progressive, resilient, and profoundly human.

Richard Dolan: Globalist Revolution, UFOs, and Transhumanism (The Richard Dolan Show, January 2022)

Sunday, November 10, 2024

[string-cheese-cake]

It's funny that reactionary conservatives are sooooo distressed about how drastically things have changed when very little has changed institutionally. Systems of power got a new liberal coat of paint and they really bought that it was a whole new country. Do they think that a new sun rises every day too

[iturbide]

boy this post got a lot of good discussion going

@lamphoera replied:

for this kind of thing i put "for the sake of the story" first but also worth noting that the period of time between the end of the medieval period and and the industrial revolution is really short compared to the length of the medieval period itself. it depends on how you define it but you could easily make an estimate of about a thousand years, and then adding on like the classical period, it's a pretty substantial amount of time another thing worth noting is that on the scale of like european history (or at least how it's framed) 2000 years seemingly unbroken is a massively long time but it for example egypt and china have very long histories GOING ON A TANGENT ABOUT THIS but i think saying very little changed and marth would manage just fine is maybe an understatement, because the tech ostensibly is not very different but the culture and geopolitics? undeniably is. actually i'd be really interested in exploring marth and the awakening characters discussing that!

please go on the tangents I love it

I absolutely agree that, technology aside, Marth probably would be suffering from massive culture shock if they dropped him into Ylisse. Ylisse is nothing like Altea, and considering how humble the man seems, knowing that he's enshrined as the Hero-King in Ylissean lore would probably throw him for a loop. That honestly would be fascinating to see.

Also: you're exactly right about Euro-centric history having a very particular framing, a constant push toward industrialization that muddies a lot of discussion -- because there are other cultures with incredible histories that stretch back thousands of years. In the case of Egypt, they were building pyramids like the Giza complex 2,500+ years before Cleopatra. Their histories are incredibly rich and complex, and they're technically pre-Medieval. Even if it does borrow trappings of Medieval Europe, I think it's entirely reasonable to say that their cultural history has been continuing and progressing along the course of other ancient cultures.

(To be fair, though: "for the sake of the story" is a totally legitimate and valid answer, and one that I embrace wholeheartedly. Again, I don't want to play Fire Emblem: Industrial Revolution. That sounds like a shit time.)

@thewizardmus replied:

Hang on but there IS a substantial difference between Altea and Ylisse's development Magic! In the older games Magic was very simple. There wasn't that many tome types and none of them had meaningful secondary effects(because of hardware limits but shush) meanwhile in Awakening magic has progressed well enough that Wind Fire and Thunder magic all have their own branches instead of "Merrics tome" and "the others" and powerful spells that were at one point legendary aAre reproduced and can be purchased at your local Anna, Merric's boyfriend's whole deal in 12 is he took over Khadain because he was mad that Merric was chosen for Excalibur and he got the number 2 tome Thoron. Come Awakening and Thoron isn't just Robin's signature spell for Chrom killing but also something any mage with the gall to study a bit can pick up and use freely That's not even mentioning the weird crap that Plegia has been making the entire time In conclusion while you could totally drop Marth in Ylisse and he'd be fine, if you gingerly placed Merric in Ylisse or Plegia he'd have his mind blown

Okay so let me start by saying that I do take issue with calling magic in Plegia "weird crap." I think it's reasonable to say that Plegia has come farther with magic than Ylisse has, given that they have three separate canonical branches of magic: staves, tomes -- split between anima and dark, the latter of which Ylisse doesn't deal in -- and hexcraft. If we posit that magic is a better signifier of advancement than industrial-level technology, that would place Plegia head and shoulders above Ylisse as the most developed nation on the Archanean continent.

In fact, I've talked about this before, along with the general concept that there was a magic revolution rather than an industrial one.

[exhausted-capybara]

So, I keep seeing a lot of posts about AI and how capitalism and a bunch of tech companies are doing massive ethics violations, and I do agree that we should be talking about these things!

But I've also seen people go a bit too far and just kinda not get why those things are bad. The problem isn't AI as a concept, it's how they were implemented and how they're being used.

For example, did you know that phone calls are AI powered? Yes, really. It's not even a new development, they've been using AI / ML models since at least the '70s. VoIP calls like Discord, Google Meet and Zoom use more or less the same technology, so this applies to them as well.

Realistically the only reason they've never been marketed as AI powered is because they come from a time where AI wasn't a giant household buzzword (and in some cases, it was after the first major AI crash, so AI was actively a dirty no-no word if you wanted to get funds). AI really just means "inputs a big ball of data, outputs a crude, but smaller, approximation" - it just so happens that for a bunch of problems, we've found very good small approximations. Which means that please, for the love of all that's unholy, DO NOT harass someone using something that has AI or Machine Learning or terms like that attached, without considering whether that technology in question is actually harmful.

Linear interpolations (any interpolations really, linears are just the most common and banal of them) are technically AI, and yet they're a staple of pretty much every 3D rendering engine. Sometimes they're a cheap hack that makes whatever extremely easier and cheaper to make without compromising on visual accuracy, sometimes they're just *The Right Thing To Do*, and sometimes they're just saving an animator / modeler / etc. that's probably already overworked anyways from doing extra busy work. And yet there have been sightings of people harassing animators because they mentioned using some kind of interpolation during the animating / rigging / modeling process, someone mentioned (correctly in a pedantic sort of way) that it was AI to them before, and they just saw "thing that is AI" and "art" in the same general space and went full "fuck AI mode" on the overworked artist.

The problems with AI we're seeing right now are ethical, but there is ethical usage of AIs (and in fact there is a non negligible amount of accessibility devices that are AI powered), and sometimes that includes industries where there have been the biggest violations so far (generative images, generative sound and generative text). If you don't know enough about the kind of AI / ML model that was used, how it was used in the workflow, how it was trained, etc. Please look into that before going around throwing accusations and making call out posts, because there's a fuckton of things that are technically AI in stuff you use everyday and there are people in the Internet ready to start drama just because it's Tuesday or because the partner of a cousin of a friend of a classmate of their roommate's gym buddy said so.

[idiosyncraticrednebula]

I feel like whenever people discuss "gender roles" on social media and just in society at large, they simplify it way too damn much.

[lesbiankoby]

i have a very half serious unbaked au where danzou planted one of his agents in fugaku uchiha’s genin team and she eventually defects via fugaku setting her up with one of his cousins and then getting hurriedly teen married before danzou can say anything about it so she falls under uchiha authority. lol.

[dapperrokyuu]

The whole crux of WHA is basically about healing magic and I still fail to understand why healing magic is banned, ngl, dalnbdalkfjn-

Like, I recall they say the whole experimental thing, but thats less about the magic and more about the lack of consent and suffering regarding those experiments-

[samanthamarymargaretalice]

[humanadvancementproject]

Reminder.

It is against Project policy to give humans access to or special knowledge of technologies beyond the current scope of advancement already achieved by humans, or what they may accomplish in the near future via their own efforts.

In spite of human advancements in social consciousness and structure made in the past few hundred years and notwithstanding many individual humans' accomplishments in mature and responsible behavior, human society as a whole is not yet socially mature enough to be expected to responsibly use and manage far-advanced technologies such as those that allow for timespace manipulation, matter/energy conversion, worldshaping, extra-dimensional transference, relocation of cosmic-scale objects, and sub-atomic manipulations of similar scientific sophistication.

Far too many humans and groups of humans still view every advancement through the lens of how it can be used to gain power, money, or social status. Many who seek scientific advancement for its own sake and are not interested in exploiting it for personal gain, in order to push the limits of what they could achieve on their own, still require funding from those who would seek to exploit it for the gain of specific individuals or groups while contributing to the detriment of others. Human society as a global entity is not even mature enough to responsibly manage the technological advancements of which they are already in possession. Priority must be given to helping humans learn to do so.

It is hoped that human society may endeavor to achieve sufficient social/societal maturity to be able to deal with far-advanced technologies in responsible, non-destructive ways, before such time as Humankind may manage to develop such technologies independently. In the meantime, no authorization has been given to 'help' humans towards these or any similarly far-advanced sciences.

In short, all Project Members are directed to maintain the already-established non-interference policy as regarding scientific advancement. This is merely a reminder of a cardinal reason for scientific non-interference, and a significant purpose behind efforts to help humans develop greater social maturity and responsibility as a global society.

[captaingimpy]

Exploring the Themes of Atlas and the Role of Technology in Society

The Netflix film Atlas, starring Jennifer Lopez as the titular character, centers around her lifelong vendetta to decommission Harlan, an artificial intelligence created by her mother, portrayed by Simu Liu. Despite what critics tend to think of this movie, there are several things I appreciate that it made me think about. One thing I appreciate about the nakedness of new Hollywood is that, for…