#stargate critical analysis

[whereserpentswalk]

Stargate is one of the most explicit examples of a Christian colonizer fantasy in modern media. The ideology of it's protagonists maps very closely to the ideology of empires like Britain and especially Spain.

Can you imagine if the writers of Stargate weren't Christians and Cowards????

Listen. Listen. If your plot centers on all gods and big names from folklore from all religions and mythologies being Actually Evil Aliens then you can't be a goddamn fucking coward and pretend that YOUR religion,your christianity is the only sacred, untouchable religion that will literally never even be brought up or considered in the show.

Literally SGU has all these outright Christian characters and themes and shit and it's so goddamn fucking hilarious and christian-centric considering that everything Stargate stands for is bastardizing all non-christian religions and mythologies.

Can you imagine if the fucking christian characters had to have their faith confronted and destroyed the way every other Goa'uld worshipper had to? A god you should fear as a matter of course? "We're all god-fearing people" is apparently a GOOD thing to be???? A god that wiped out all life on earth except for his hand-picked favorites and any animals they could carry? The "son of god" that went around healing people and came back to life??? You're telling me that these, in any other fucking religion and mythology wouldn't be used as examples to the people worshiping the Goa'uld calling themselves their god????

Fuck the writers of Stargate.

You do NOT get to bash and demonize every other religion on fucking earth and get scandalized and outraged when someone even dares to introduce the concept of christianity being under the same rules in the Stargate universe??????

"but MY RELIGION IS SACRED!!!" Too fucking bad then maybe you shouldn't have had any religions from earth be the ones the Goa'uld introduced then shut the fuck up.

DNI if you're going to put your christianity-centric clownery on this post.

[shirlleycoyle]

How to Escape the Confines of Time and Space According to the CIA

She turned to me the other morning and said, “You heard of The Gateway?” It didn’t register in the moment. She continued, “It’s blowing up on TikTok.” Later on, she elaborated: it was not in fact the ill-fated 90s computer hardware company folks were freaking out about. No, they’ve gone further back in time, to find a true treasure of functional media.

The intrigue revolves around a classified 1983 CIA report on a technique called the Gateway Experience, which is a training system designed to focus brainwave output to alter consciousness and ultimately escape the restrictions of time and space. The CIA was interested in all sorts of psychic research at the time, including the theory and applications of remote viewing, which is when someone views real events with only the power of their mind. The documents have since been declassified and are available to view.

This is a comprehensive excavation of The Gateway Process report. The first section provides a timeline of the key historical developments that led to the CIA’s investigation and subsequent experimentations. The second section is a review of The Gateway Process report. It opens with a wall of theoretical context, on the other side of which lies enough understanding to begin to grasp the principles underlying the Gateway Experience training. The last section outlines the Gateway technique itself and the steps that go into achieving spacetime transcendence.

Let’s go.

Screengrab: CIA

THE TIMELINE

• 1950s – Robert Monroe, a radio broadcasting executive, begins producing evidence that specific sound patterns have identifiable effects on human capabilities. These include alertness, sleepiness, and expanded states of consciousness.

• 1956 – Monroe forms an R&D division inside his radio program production corporation RAM Enterprises. The goal is to study sound’s effect on human consciousness. He was obsessed with “Sleep-Learning," or hypnopedia, which exposes sleepers to sound recordings to boost memory of previously learned information.

• 1958 – While experimenting with Sleep-Learning, Monroe discovers an unusual phenomenon. He describes it as sensations of paralysis and vibration accompanied by bright light. It allegedly happens nine times over the proceeding six weeks, and culminates in an out-of-body experience (OBE).

• 1962 – RAM Enterprises moves to Virginia, and renames itself Monroe Industries. It becomes active in radio station ownership, cable television, and later in the production and sale of audio cassettes. These cassettes contain applied learnings from the corporate research program, which is renamed The Monroe Institute.

• 1971 – Monroe publishes Journeys Out of the Body, a book that is credited with popularizing the term “out-of-body experience.”

Books by Robert Monroe.

• 1972 – A classified report circulates in the U.S. military and intelligence communities. It claims that the Soviet Union is pouring money into research involving ESP and psychokinesis for espionage purposes.

• 1975 – Monroe registers the first of several patents concerning audio techniques designed to stimulate brain functions until the left and right hemispheres become synchronized. Monroe dubs the state "Hemi-Sync" (hemispheric synchronization), and claims it could be used to promote mental well-being or to trigger an altered state of consciousness.

• 1978 to 1984 – Army veteran Joseph McMoneagle contributes to 450 remote viewing missions under Project Stargate. He is known as “Remote View No. 1”. This is kind of a whole other story.

• June 9th, 1983 – The CIA report "Analysis and Assessment of The Gateway Process" is produced. It provides a scientific framework for understanding and expanding human consciousness, out-of-body experiments, and other altered states of mind.

• 1989 – Remote viewer Angela Dellafiora Ford helps track down a former customs agent who has gone on the run. She pinpoints his location as “Lowell, Wyoming”. U.S. Customs apprehend him 100 miles west of a Wyoming town called Lovell.

• 2003 – The CIA approves declassification of the Gateway Process report.

• 2017 – The CIA declassifies 12 million pages of records revealing previously unknown details about the program, which would eventually become known as Project Stargate.

THE REPORT

Screengrab: CIA

Personnel

The author of The Gateway Process report is Lieutenant Colonel Wayne M. McDonnell, hereon referred to simply as Wayne. There isn’t a tremendous amount of information available on the man, nor any photographs. In 1983, Wayne was tasked by the Commander of the U.S. Army Operational Group with figuring out how The Gateway Experience, astral projection and out-of-body experiences work. Wayne partnered with a bunch of different folks to produce the report, most notably Itzhak Bentov, a very Googleable American-Israeli scientist who helped pioneer the biomedical engineering industry.

A scientific approach

From the outset of the report, Wayne states his intent to employ an objective scientific method in order to understand the Gateway process. The various scientific avenues he takes include:

• A biomedical inquiry to understand the physical aspects of the process.

• Information on quantum mechanics to describe the nature and functioning of human consciousness.

• Theoretical physics to explain the time-space dimension and means by which expanded human consciousness transcends it.

• Classical physics to bring the whole phenomenon of out-of-body states into the language of physical science (and remove the stigma of an occult connotation).

Methodological frames of reference

Before diving into the Gateway Experience, Wayne develops a frame of reference by dissecting three discrete consciousness-altering methodologies. He’s basically saying, there’s no way you’re going to get through The Gateway without a solid grounding in the brain-altering techniques that came before it.

1) He begins with hypnosis. The language is extremely dense, but the basic gist is as follows: the left side of the brain screens incoming stimuli, categorizing, assessing and assigning meaning to everything through self-cognitive, verbal, and linear reasoning. The left hemisphere then dishes the carefully prepared data to the non-critical, holistic, pattern-oriented right hemisphere, which accepts everything without question. Hypnosis works by putting the left side to sleep, or at least distracting it long enough to allow incoming data direct, unchallenged entry to the right hemisphere. There, stimuli can reach the sensor and motor cortices of the right brain, which corresponds to points in the body. Suggestions then can send electrical signals from the brain to certain parts of the body. Directing these signals appropriately, according to the report, can elicit reactions ranging from left leg numbness to feelings of happiness. Same goes for increased powers of concentration.

2) Wayne continues with a snapshot of transcendental meditation. He distinguishes it from hypnotism. Through concentration the subject draws energy up the spinal cord, resulting in acoustical waves that run through the cerebral ventricles, to the right hemisphere, where they stimulate the cerebral cortex, run along the homunculus and then to the body. The waves are the altered rhythm of heart sounds, which create sympathetic vibrations in the walls of the fluid-filled cavities of the brain’s ventricles. He observed that the symptoms begin in the left side of the body, confirming the right brain’s complicity. Bentov also states that the same effect might be achieved by prolonged exposure to 4 – 7 Hertz/second acoustical vibrations. He suggests standing by an air conditioning duct might also do the trick. (David Lynch and other celebrities are committed adherents to transcendental meditation today.)

3) Biofeedback, on the other hand, uses the left hemisphere to gain access to the right brain’s lower cerebral, motor, and sensory cortices. Whereas hypnosis suppresses one side of the brain, and TM bypasses that side altogether, biofeedback teaches the left hemisphere to visualize the desired result, recognize the feelings associated with right hemisphere access, and ultimately achieve the result again. With repetition, the left brain can reliably key into the right brain, and strengthen the pathways so that it can be accessed during a conscious demand mode. A digital thermometer is subsequently placed on a target part of the body. When its temperature increases, objective affirmation is recognized and the state is reinforced. Achieving biofeedback can block pain, enhance feeling, and even suppress tumors, according to the report.

Image: e2-e4 Records.

The Gateway mechanics

With that, Wayne takes a first stab at the Gateway process. He classifies it as a “training system designed to bring enhanced strength, focus and coherence to the amplitude and frequency of brainwave output between the left and right hemispheres so as to alter consciousness.”

What distinguishes the Gateway process r from hypnosis, TM, and biofeedback, is that it requires achieving  a state of consciousness in which the electrical brain patterns of both hemispheres are equal in amplitude and frequency. This is called Hemi-Sync. Lamentably, and perhaps conveniently, we cannot as humans achieve this state on our own. The audio techniques developed by Bob Monroe and his Institute (which comprise a series of  tapes), claim to induce and sustain Hemi-Sync.

Here, the document shifts to the usage of quotes and other reports to describe the powers of Hemi-Sync. Wayne employs  the analogy of a lamp versus a laser. Left to its own devices the human mind expends energy like a lamp, in a chaotic and incoherent way, achieving lots of diffusion but relatively little depth. Under Hemi-Sync though, the mind produces a “disciplined stream of light.” So, once the frequency and amplitude of the brain are rendered coherent it can then synchronize with the rarified energy levels of the universe. With this connection intact, the brain begins to receive symbols and display astonishing flashes of holistic intuition.

The Hemi-Sync technique takes advantage of a Frequency Following Response (FFR). It works like this: an external frequency emulating a recognized one will cause the brain to mimic it. So if a subject hears a frequency at the Theta level, it will shift from its resting Beta level. To achieve these unnatural levels, Hemi-Sync puts a single frequency in the left ear and a contrasting frequency in the right. The brain then experiences the Delta frequency, also known as the beat frequency. It’s more familiarly referred to these days as binaural music. With the FFR and beat frequency phenomena firmly in place, The Gateway Process introduces a series of frequencies at marginally audible, subliminal levels. With the left brain relaxed and the body in a virtual sleep state, the conditions are ideal to promote brainwave outputs of higher and higher amplitude and frequency. Alongside subliminal suggestions from Bob Monroe (naturally), the subject can then alter their consciousness.

Image: Thobey Campion

The Gateway system only works when the audio, which is introduced through headphones, is accompanied by a physical quietude comparable to other forms of meditation. This increases the subject’s internal resonance to the body’s sound frequencies, for example the heart. This eliminates the “bifurcation echo”, in which the heartbeat moves up and down the body seven times a second. By placing the body in a sleep-like state, The Gateway Tapes, like meditation, lessen the force and frequency of the heartbeat pushing blood into the aorta. The result is a rhythmic sine wave that in turn amplifies the sound volume of the heart three times. This then amplifies the frequency of brainwave output. The film surrounding the brain—the dura—and fluid between that film and the skull, eventually begin to move up and down, by .0005 and .010 millimeters.

The body, based on its own micro-motions, then functions as a tuned vibrational system. The report claims that the entire body eventually transfers energy at between 6.8 and 7.5 Hertz, which matches Earth’s own energy (7 – 7.5 Hertz). The resulting wavelengths are long, about 40,000 kilometers, which also happens to be the perimeter of the planet. According to Bentov, the signal can move around the world’s electrostatic field in 1/7th of a second.

To recap, the Gateway Process goes like this:

• Induced state of calm

• Blood pressure lowers

• Circulatory system, skeleton and other organ systems begin to vibrate at 7 – 7.5 cycles per second

• Increased resonance is achieved

• The resulting sound waves matches the electrostatic field of the earth

• The body and earth and other similarly tuned minds become a single energy continuum.

We’ve gotten slightly ahead of ourselves here though. Back to the drawing board.

Image: kovacevicmiro via Getty Images

A psycho-quantum level deeper

Wayne then turns to the very nature of matter and energy. More materially (or less if you will), solid matter in the strict construction of the term, he explains, doesn’t exist. The atomic structure is composed of oscillating energy grids surrounded by other oscillating energy grids at tremendous speeds. These oscillation rates vary—the nucleus of an atom vibrates at 10 to the power of 22, a molecule vibrates at 10 to the power of 9, a human cell vibrates at 10 to the power of 3. The point is that the entire universe is one complex system of energy fields. States of matter in this conception then are merely variations in the state of energy.

The result of all these moving energies, bouncing off of energy at rest, projects a 3D mode, a pattern, called a hologram, A.K.A our reality as we experience it. It's best to think of it as a 3D photograph. There's a whole rabbit hole to go down here. Suffice it to say, the hologram that is our experience is incredibly good at depicting and recording all the various energies bouncing around creating matter. So good, in fact, that we buy into it hook, line, and sinker, going so far as to call it our "life."

Consciousness then can be envisaged as a 3D grid system superimposed over all energy patterns, Wayne writes. Using mathematics, each plane of the grid system can then reduce the data to a 2D form. Our binary (go/no go) minds can then process the data and compare it to other historical data saved in our memory. Our reality is then formed by comparisons. The right hemisphere of the brain acts as the primary matrix or receptor for this holographic input. The left hemisphere then compares it to other data, reducing it to its 2D form.

In keeping with our species' commitment to exceptionalism, as far as we know humans are uniquely capable of achieving this level of consciousness. Simply, humans not only know, but we know that we know. This bestows upon us the ability to duplicate aspects of our own hologram, project them out, perceive that projection, run it through a comparison with our own memory of the hologram, measure the differences using 3D geometry, then run it through our binary system to yield verbal cognition of the self.

Screengrab: CIA

The click-out phase

Wayne then shows his cards as a true punisher, issuing, "Up to this point our discussion of the Gateway process has been relatively simple and easy to follow. Now the fun begins." Shots fired, Wayne. What he's preparing the commander reading this heady report for is the reveal—how we can use the Gateway to transcend the dimension of spacetime.

Time is a measurement of energy or force in motion; it is a measurement of change. This is really important. For energy to be classified as in motion, it must be confined within a vibratory pattern that can contain its motion, keeping it still. Energy not contained like this is boundary-less, and moves without limit or dimension, to infinity. This disqualifies boundary-less energy from the dimension of time because it has no rate of change. Energy in infinity, also called "the absolute state," is completely at rest because nothing is accelerating or decelerating it—again, no change. It therefore does not contribute to our hologram, our physical experience. We cannot perceive it.

Now back to frequencies. Wave oscillation occurs because a wave is bouncing between two rigid points of rest. It's like a game of electromagnetic hot potato (the potato being the wave and the participants' hands being the boundaries of the wave). Without these limits, there would be no oscillation. When a wave hits one of those points of rest, just for a very brief instant, it "clicks out" of spacetime and joins infinity. For this to occur, the speed of the oscillation has to drop below 10 the power of -33 centimeters per second. For a moment, the wave enters into a new world. The potato simply disappears into a dimension we cannot perceive.

Theoretically speaking, if the human consciousness wave pattern reaches a high enough frequency, the “click-outs” can reach continuity. Put another way, if the frequency of human consciousness can dip below 10 to the power of 33 centimeters per second but above a state of total rest, it can transcend spacetime. The Gateway experience and associated Hemi-Sync technique is designed for humans to achieve this state and establish a coherent pattern of perception in the newly realized dimensions.

Image: Spectral-Design via Getty Images

Passport to the hologram

In theory, we can achieve the above at any time. The entire process though is helped along if we can separate the consciousness from our body. It’s like an existential running head start where the click-out of a consciousness already separated from its body starts much closer to, and has more time to dialogue with, other dimensions.

This is where things get a little slippery; hold on as best you can. The universe is in on the whole hologram thing, too, Wayne writes. This super hologram is called a "torus" because it takes the shape of a fuck-off massive self-contained spiral. Like this:

Give yourself a moment to let the above motion sink in…

This pattern of the universe conspicuously mirrors the patterns of electrons around the nucleus of an atom. Galaxies north of our own are moving away from us faster than the galaxies to the south; galaxies to the east and west of us are more distant. The energy that produced the matter that makes up the universe we presently enjoy, will turn back in on itself eventually. Its trajectory is ovoid, also known as the cosmic egg. As it curls back on itself it enters a black hole, goes through a densely packed energy nucleus then gets spat out the other side of a white hole and begins the process again. Springtime in the cosmos, baby!

Screengrab: CIA

The entire universe hologram—the torus—represents all the phases of time: the past, present, and future. The takeaway is that human consciousness brought to a sufficiently altered (focused) state could obtain information about the past, present, and future, since they all live in the universal hologram simultaneously. Wayne reasons that our all-reaching consciousness eventually participates in an all-knowing infinite continuum. Long after we depart the space-time dimension and the hologram each one of us perceives is snuffed out, our consciousness continues. Reassuring in a way.

And that is the context in which the Gateway Experience sits.

[Deep breaths.]

THE TECHNIQUE

The following is an outline of the key steps to reach focus levels necessary to defy the spacetime dimension. This is an involved and lengthy process best attempted in controlled settings. If you’re in a rush, you can apparently listen to enough Monroe Institute Gateway Tapes in 7 days to get there.

The Energy Conversion Box: The Gateway Process begins by teaching the subject to isolate any extraneous concerns using a visualization process called “the energy conversion box.”

Resonant Humming: The individual is introduced to resonant humming. Through the utterance of a protracted single tone, alongside a chorus on the tapes, the mind and body achieve a state of resonance.

The Gateway Affirmation: The participant is exposed to something close to a mantra called The Gateway Affirmation  . They must repeat to themselves variations of, “I am merely a physical body and deeply desire to expand my consciousness.”

Hemi-Sync: The individual is finally exposed to the Hemi-Sync sound frequencies, and encouraged to develop a relationship with the feelings that emerge.

Additional Noise: Physical relaxation techniques are practiced while the Hemi-Sync frequencies are expanded to include “pink and white” noise. This puts the body in a state of virtual sleep, while calming the left hemisphere and raising the attentiveness of the right hemisphere.

The Energy Balloon: The individual is then encouraged to visualize the creation of an “energy balloon” beginning at the top of the head, extending down in all directions to the feet then back up again. There are a few reasons for this, the main one being that this balloon will provide protection against conscious entities possessing lower energy levels that he or she may encounter when in the out-of-body state.

Focus 12: The practitioner can consistently achieve sufficient expanded awareness to begin interacting with dimensions beyond their physical reality. To achieve this state requires conscious efforts and more “pink and white noise” from the sound stream.

Tools: Once Focus 12 is achieved, the subject can then employ a series of tools to obtain feedback from alternative dimensions.

Problem Solving: The individual identifies fundamental problems, fills their expanded awareness with them, and then projects them out into the universe. These can include personal difficulties, as well as technical or practical problems.

Patterning: Consciousness is used to achieve desired objectives in the physical, emotional, or intellectual sphere.

Color Breathing: A healing technique that revitalizes the body’s energy flows by imagining colors in a particularly vivid manner.

Energy Bar Tool: This technique involves imagining a small intensely pulsating dot of light that the participant charges up. He or she then uses the sparkling, vibrating cylinder of energy (formerly known as the dot) to channel forces from the universe to heal and revitalize the body.

Remote Viewing: A follow-on technique of the Energy Bar Tool where the dot is turned into a whirling vortex through which the individual sends their imagination in search of illuminating insights.

Living Body Map: A more organized use of the energy bar in which streams of different colors flow from the dot on to correspondingly-colored bodily systems.

Seven days of training have now occurred. Approximately 5 percent of participants get to this next level, according to the report.

Focus 15 – Travel Into the Past: Additional sound on the Hemi-Sync tapes includes more of the same, plus some subliminal suggestions to further expand the consciousness. The instructions are highly symbolic: time is a huge wheel, in which different spokes give access to the participant’s past.

Focus 21 – The Future: This is the last and most advanced state. Like Focus 15, this is a movement out of spacetime into the future.

Out-of-Body Movement: Only one tape of the many is devoted to out-of-body movement. This tape is devoted to facilitating out-of-body state when the participant’s brain wave patterns and energy levels reach harmony with the surrounding electromagnetic environment. According to Bob Monroe, the participant has to be exposed to Beta signals of around 2877.3 cycles per second.

CONCLUSIONS

Wayne expresses concern about the fidelity of information brought back from out-of-body states using the Gateway technique. Practical applications are of particular concern because of the potential for “information distortion.”

The Monroe Institute also ran into a bunch of issues in which they had individuals travel from the West to the East Coast of the U.S. to read a series of numbers off of a computer screen. They never got them exactly right. Wayne chalks this up to the trouble of differentiating between physical entities and extra-time-space dimensions when in the out-of-body state.

Wayne swings back to support mode though, lending credence to the physics foundation of the report. He cites multiple belief systems that have established identical findings. These include the Tibetan Shoug, the Hindu heaven of Indra, the Hebrew mystical philosophy, and the Christian concept of the Trinity.  Here he seems more interested in hammering home the  theoretical underpinnings that make The Gateway Experience possible, rather than  the practical possibilities promised by The Gateway Tapes.

Possibly with his CIA top brass audience in mind, Wayne then gives an A-type nod to The Gateway Experience for providing a faster, more efficient, less subservient, energy-saving route to expanded consciousness. This finishes with a series of recommendations to the CIA for how to exploit Gateway’s potential for national defense purposes.

Screengrab: CIA

Screengrab: CIA

The missing page

One curious feature of The Gateway Report is that it seems to be missing page 25. It’s a real cliffhanger too. The bottom of page 24 reads “And, the eternal thought or concept of self which results from this self-consciousness serves the,” The report picks back up on page 26 and 3 sections later as if Wayne hadn’t just revealed the very secret of existence.

The gap has not gone unnoticed. There's a Change.org petition requesting its release. Multiple Freedom of Information Act requests have demanded the same. In all cases, the CIA has said they never had the page to begin with. Here’s a 2019 response from Mark Lilly, the CIA’s Information and Privacy Coordinator, to one Bailey Stoner regarding these records:

Screengrab: CIA via Muckrock

One theory goes that that rascal Wayne M.-fricking-McDonnell left the page out on purpose. The theory contends that it was a litmus test—if anyone truly defies time-space dimensions, they’ll certainly be able to locate page 25.

[Cosmic shrug.]

Thobey Campion is the former Publisher of Motherboard. You can subscribe to his Substack here.

How to Escape the Confines of Time and Space According to the CIA syndicated from https://triviaqaweb.wordpress.com/feed/

[data-monkey]

AO3 stats project: data provenance

A few years ago, I was curious about some of the characteristics of works posted on the Archive of Our Own, so I scraped some (lots) of data and went about analyzing it. This series of posts describes that analysis. It’s broken down into 7 posts; this is the first one, describing the data set and how it was collected.

The Data | Basic Questions | Fandoms | Tags | Correlations | Kudos | Fun Stuff

Thanks to @eloiserummaging for beta reading these posts; any remaining errors are my own.  A Python notebook showing the code I used to make these plots can be found here.

In case you’ve wandered in here without knowing about the Archive of Our Own (aka AO3), here’s a brief primer. It’s a fan-run, nonprofit archive for all kinds of “fan works”--that means fanfiction, but also other media such as fanart, podfic (fanfiction audiobooks), fanvids (audiovisual media), meta (fanwork criticism), etc. The AO3 has a ratings system and a warnings system, but they’re both optional in the sense that you can choose an “abstain” option (“No Rating” or “Choose Not To Use Archive Warnings”, respectively). When you do a search or look at an index page, you can generally see the title, fandom, creator, summary, warnings, rating, category (since many fanworks are romantic/sexual in nature, this is basically either “gen” for no romance, or the gender configuration of the main relationship(s)), language, word count, comment count, kudos count (you leave “kudos” for the author instead of hitting a “like” button), and whether the work is part of a series. On many works, but not all, you can also see the hit count--this is turned on by default, but authors can turn it off. And finally, there are also generally a number of freeform tags. The AO3 has one of the best tagging systems out there, and I’ll make use of that in some later posts.

Before we get into this, I wanted to shout out @destinationtoast, who has been on the fan stats beat for years. Some of what I’m going to show in the next few posts will duplicate work she or others have done. I’m still showing it because our data collection methods are different, and so the answer they get and the answer I get may be different. Redoing some of the analysis means that all the graphs I am showing are self-consistent. But you should really go check out @toastystats and her great masterpost of stuff if you’re interested in this topic.

For my analysis, I collected data by scraping AO3 works pages in most fandoms over a period of several years, skipping large subfandoms so I didn’t duplicate information--e.g., I did not download “Stargate: SG-1” data because all of those works are also included in “Stargate - All Media Types”. I attempted to be kind to the server load by leaving lag times between successive pages and taking frequent breaks, and I also have regularly donated to the OTW, more than enough to offset the cost of my downloads for this project. The total amount of data is well under a single day’s load on the servers, and collected over several years, although I would guess that on my peak downloading days I was probably the #1 user by data volume.

Here’s what the actual collection dates look like:

I grabbed a bunch of stuff in 2015, updated again in 2016, let things lie for 18 months, and then picked back up. So the data set I have contains everything posted in 2017 or earlier that was still available when I collected the data, and most (but not all) of the data posted in 2018 or later. 

To avoid re-downloading, if I went back to update a previously-downloaded fandom, I only went back far enough to get to the newest works I’d seen the previous time I downloaded. That means that anything posted before 2016 or so is “frozen” in this data set--it hasn’t had its hits, kudos, or comments updated, and if other changes were made (orphaning, deletion) that is also not captured. If a work moved up in the sort date (for example, if it had a new chapter added), the new data was used instead of the earlier collected data.

I was not logged in, so no private works appear anywhere in this data set. (So you should probably think of this as “stats of public AO3 works” not “stats of AO3 works”--they will probably be different because some fandoms are more likely to privatize their fic than others.) Because I’m not able to get individual permission from authors to show their data, I’ll only be showing aggregate data--the rough cutoff in my head is that I only show data points that represent >1000 works.

I also wanted to download tag information, because the Archive tagging system allows users to choose any tags they like, and then bundles those tags into synonyms in the backend--allowing somebody to misspell a tag “John Waston” instead of “John Watson”, for example, but preserving that they meant “John Watson” for purposes of searching. I downloaded the tag description page for any tag which appears in the data >=500 times and used that data to unify all synonyms of the most-used tags. Tag pages are not redownloaded once downloaded, so tag updates since May 2015 are mostly not represented here, except for a few tags which crossed my lower-cutoff threshold sometime between May 2015 and 2018.

Overall, I downloaded meta-information for 4,337,545 works. I won’t be sharing this dataset because it includes now-deleted works, but if you have a question that a dataset like this could answer, I can try to answer that question, time allowing.

[farfromsugafanfic]

Sammy Interview

Before we get started, do you mind introducing yourself and telling a bit about yourself? 

My name is Sammy. I’m 34 years old, a college graduate with a background in cultural anthropology as well as women, gender, and sexuality studies. I’m particularly interested in queer and feminist methodologies. I live with my partner of some 15 years, who is also a fanfiction writer.

Q1: So, you told me that you’ve been writing fan fiction for 20+ years which is awesome! How did it all get started and what kind of fan fiction have you written in that time?

A1:  Like a lot of fangirls of my generation, anime was my introduction to fanfiction.  I grew up watching Sailor Moon when it first aired on American network television. It was love at first sight. There was nothing else like it on TV. At my local Blockbuster I discovered anime. It wasn’t as readily available then as it is now. Because the english dubs were so limited I ended up watching the same OVA rentals over and over - Ranma ½, RG Veda, Vampire Princess Miyu. First I wrote stories in my head, then I started writing them down. When I recieved my own computer and constant access to the internet, I went searching for fansites. Secreted behind unassuming links I found small clutches of fanfiction. This was before fanfiction.net first took off, and An Archive of Our Own was well over a decade away. Fansites had webrings, which took me to the next fansite, and so on.  It really was a matter of finding the right webring for a given show and following the thread.

I began with writing Sailor Moon fanfiction, and as Cartoon Network’s late night block of programming (Toonami) expanded, the more I wrote. Gundam Wing fandom introduced me to shipping and it blew my mind.

I moved away from anime when the Harry Potter movies happened. A lot of us made the transition to book and movie based fandoms when someone discovered Harry/Draco. After that I found DC comics, and then became very active in the Star Trek reboot fandom. I’ve written for Stargate: Atlantis, BBC Sherlock and Hannibal and so, so many other shows/books/video games. I’ve been an active participant in Yuletide, which is an anonymous holiday fanfic exchange, and multiple Big Bangs -another fanfic/fanart exchange- as well as a kinkmeme prompt filler for years.

Q2: What pushed you to begin sharing your fan fiction?

A2: The mailing lists. In the early days of fandom private yahoo groups and message boards were the main venue for posting and reading fanfiction. Most mailing lists were fandom based and created for specific content - like Gundam Wing Slash, GundamWingGEN and CRACKSHIP. These became high volume, tight knit communities. It wasn’t unusual to have your mail box refreshing on the left side of the monitor, while you chatted with members on AIM on the right side. There was a lot of encouragement, experimentation, and collaboration. You posted your fanfiction to the list, or board, and people cheered. It was all so exciting.  It’s hard to describe now how close we all were, and just how much fellow-feeling fueled hundreds of emails a day. This was my online family, my community. I didn’t need a push or moment of courage to post my early fanfiction - I was delighted to share, invited to share. It was an electrifying thing to be part of.

Q3: Were you scared to post it online?

A3: Not at all. I didn’t need to be scared - none of us did. No one outside these early lists and boards knew what we were doing. I really can’t emphasize enough how guarded the early fanfiction community was. We were incredibly insulated. Our families didn’t know, our teachers and co-workers were oblivious, popular culture wasn’t shitting on fanfiction writers because it didn’t know we were writing. I wasn’t scared to press ‘send’, but it did feel dangerous, a little rebellious. There was a sense of getting away with something.

Q4: Has writing fan fiction taught you anything? About writing? Reading? Something else?

A4: On a basic level, fanfiction taught me how to write. Structure, pace, dialogue - I was taught those things in a classroom, but I learned them by writing fanfiction. We all taught ourselves to write by writing for each other. We created an entire literary movement without an MA in literature, or a structured pedagogy. Fanfiction writers generated new narrative traditions, like the Five Things + 1 format (a breakaway from the three-act story), Hurt/Comfort, and a language of tagging that defies classical genre rules - all because we were messing around.

Writing fanfiction has taught me the value of questioning western literary rules and conventions, that writing for myself and my own pleasure is valid.  It’s also taught me that I don’t like to write alone. One of the things that makes fanfiction so special for me is that so much of it happens in conversation with other writers and readers. My best writing experiences have been in simpatico with total strangers, on AIM, in livejournal comment threads, gchat.  I’m not writing “original fiction” because I lack imagination; it’s just too lonely.

Q5: Do you ever want to be published in a professional capacity one day?

A5: I do, though I feel like this is a bit of a fraught subject for fanfiction writers.  There’s an compulsion to say yes, of course I plan to publish one day, as if that end goal legitimates the fanfiction I write. I don’t want to contribute to the idea of fanfiction as a lesser form of literature- a stepping stone to Real Writing - but yes. I started writing creative nonfiction in community college.  That writing comes from a very different place than fanfiction. It satisfies another hunger.

Q6: How you feel about the stigma surrounding fan fiction and fan fiction writers? Or, do you not feel any stigma at all?

A6: I think the stigma towards fanfiction is pushback from multiple sociological and institutional sources.

In the beginning we had the sense that fanfiction - slash fanfiction - wasn’t something to bring up outside of those digital spaces we made for ourselves. We knew it would be considered an auteur kink at best, or downright perverted plagiarism at worst (I think this is largely still the case). Before the community found the language to discuss slash and fanfiction as transformative works - as deconstructions of conventional media, gender roles, and sexuality - there was an ethos of compartmentalization to the whole thing.

Q7: Do you think that stigma is warranted? (Whether or not you have personally experience it?)

A7: No.

I touched on this earlier, but I believe the stigma and hostility towards fanfiction is firmly rooted in gender and non-normative sexuality. The writing we do is generally characterized as a feminine endeavour, which immediately marks it as inferior to a literary canon that values the masculine so highly. The perception that fanfiction is a plagiarism of male authored source material makes it all the more egregious.

Equally as foundational, is the reduction of fanfiction to gay porn written by straight cis women for straight cis women - fanfiction is not only shit writing, it’s perverted and weird.

I’ve never been ashamed of the fanfiction I write, or read. Embarrassed maybe, of those first earnest attempts at writing. But fanfiction does not have a monopoly on bad writing. I can just as easily find the same trash in Barnes & Noble. So, quality is not and never has been a valid criticism.

Q8: What’s your favorite piece of fan fiction you’ve ever written? Why?

A8: A gen fic I wrote for Star Trek (AOS). I’m a leisurely writer, and stories don’t just hit me whole and complete in one go. But this one did. It took three hours to write and I didn’t have to think about where I was going after finishing a paragraph, the next was already there, I just had to type it out. It’s never come that easy before or since. It’s not my most popular piece of fanfiction, but I can go back and read it and not feel like I need to change anything.

Q10: Do you write outside of fan fiction?

A10: I do - until recently I was writing up lesson plans for classes I was co-facilitating. Generally, when I’m not writing fanfiction I’m working on creative non-fiction. I use the frame of gender analysis and sexuality studies (among others) to write about my life.

Q11: What site do you prefer to write and post your fan fiction on?

A11: An Archive of Our Own (AO3). The tagging system is superior and the site is far more user friendly than ff.net, which is an absolute dumpster fire.  

Q12: What’s something you want people outside the fan fiction community to know about the fan fiction community?

We’re not a monolith. Teenage girls are the cultural face of fanfiction, but so many of us are in our 30s and 40s, old fandom queens from those first private mailing lists, boards, and LiveJournal accounts. We have soul sucking jobs. We have degrees in STEM. We teach college, have kids and debt, and friendships that have lasted decades.. We are not, and never have been a homogenous group of straight cis women. Asexuality and gender fluidity abounds. Plenty of us experience disability and chronic illness.  And we aren’t a small group of weirdos obsessed with Johnlock. We’re an enormous and diverse group of weirdos who have created a literary movement.

[fanfictionlive]

Some findings on fandom migration from the people who sent out the survey link

Hey everyone. This came across my Tumblr dash. The researcher leading the group that posted the link to the survey developed (mostly) by students that asked about Overwatch, Sports RPF, etc., posted findings on previous work done on fandom migration. The post can be found here. The link at the very bottom takes you to slides from a conference presentation. It's slides only, so no transcript of what was said, but it's presented in a way that's relatively easy to follow.

Also, a copy/paste, minus the graphic because I don't know how to do that here, though it can be found at http://cmci.colorado.edu/~cafi5706/FanPlatformsOverTime.jpg :

cfiesler:

Survey Results: Fan Platform Use over Time

Particularly for those who were kind enough to participate in our survey last week, or to share it even after we halted data collection (because we received so many responses so quickly!), I wanted to give you something interesting right away. As you know, the academic writing and publishing process can be lengthy, so who knows when you might get a full paper from us! But in the meantime, this was the analysis I did this weekend.

The survey asked for participants to indicate what platforms they use/used from a given list, and also to indicate a date range (e.g., Tumblr 2006-2018). I parsed those date ranges in order to determine for a given platform how many of our participants were active in a given year. (This actually gave me an excuse to write some code for the first time in years. Jupyter Notebooks are super cool.)

(Click on the image above for full resolution!)

The Y axis is number of survey participants who indicated using the platform during a given time, and the X axis is year. (This starts at 1990, though I’ll note there were 10-ish participants who indicated using usenet, email lists, and/or messageboards in the 1980s.)

Some interesting things to note: (1) See how fanfiction.net has a spike where there was a big drop off but then it stabilized? That’s around the time that they cracked down on adult content. (2) I expected to see Livejournal decline drastically sooner, but it actually continued to climb a bit after Strikethrough and related things, until Tumblr and AO3 both started getting very popular. Based on what I’ve seen qualitatively so far, I do think that people were starting to leave, but that there had to be critical mass elsewhere in order for that leaving to start going en masse. There were also a lot of people who continued using Livejournal while they picked up other platforms as well. (3) As my PhD student collaborator Brianna said, we have “a beautiful arc of AO3 and Tumblr being besties forever.” (This makes sense to me based on some findings from my previous work about AO3, and how Tumblr filled in the gap of social interaction left by Livejournal.)

In the “other” category of fan platforms used, the most popular was Discord. This doesn’t surprise me! For the most part, participants had only been active in it for the past couple of years, which is why it didn’t show up specifically in the survey (which was constructed based on interview data we already had). We also saw less frequent mentions of Facebook, reddit, delicious/pinboard, and IRC.

Digging into the qualitative data will give this data much more explanatory power, but I think this is very interesting!

We also asked participants what their primary fandom was for each platform they used. Based on a pretty simple analysis (most popular words!), here are the top five fandoms from each platform:

Usenet: Star Trek, Buffy, X-Files, Star Wars, Sailor Moon

Email Lists: Harry Potter, Star Trek, Buffy, X-Files, Gundam Wing

Messageboards: Harry Potter, Buffy, Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, Sailor Moon

Fandom-Specific Archives: Harry Potter, Buffy, Stargate, X-Files, Doctor Who

Fanfiction.net: Harry Potter, Naruto, Buffy, Star Wars, Gundam Wing

Livejournal: Harry Potter, Supernatural, Stargate, Doctor Who, Merlin

DeviantArt: Harry Potter, Naruto, Kingdom Hearts, Supernatural, Final Fantasy

Dreamwidth: Harry Potter, Supernatural, Marvel, Stargate, RPF

Archive of Our Own: Marvel, Star Wars, Harry Potter, Supernatural, Teen Wolf

Tumblr: Marvel, Star Wars, Supernatural, Harry Potter, Teen Wolf

Twitter: Star Wars, Supernatural, Marvel, RPF, Yuri on Ice

Note that this is NOT necessarily representative of the overall popularity of certain fandoms on these platforms. Our survey, because it was targeting research questions about fandom migration, asked for participants who had been in fandom for 10+ years. This means that our results skewed older (mean 31; median 30; SD 8.6). And of course, most of the participants are currently in fandom, which means that it also misses people who have left fandom.

It is interesting to see the change across platforms and over time though! My favorite tidbit is how Star Wars was popular, dropped off, and then came back with gusto.

This is only the tip of the iceberg on this data analysis! If there’s anything else that is easily shared as we do this analysis, I’ll continue to do so. Otherwise, wish us luck and I’ll eventually share a completed analysis if/when (fingers crossed!) we publish on this.

I have a list of emails from everyone who participated and wanted to give us that info to share the results. If you’d like to be added to that list, send me an email at casey.fiesler@colorado.edu. Or just feel free to follow me here, or myself and Brianna on Twitter.

UPDATE: I just presented this work at the Association of Internet Researchers conference. Unfortunately there is no video, but here are my slides in case folks would like to dig into some of the findings a bit: https://cfiesler.files.wordpress.com/2018/10/aoir2018_fiesler.pdf

Hopefully a published paper will be forthcoming at some point. :)

submitted by /u/disparityoutlook [link] [comments] from FanFiction: Where Magical Ponies battle Imperial Titans https://ift.tt/2zDSBPw

[walks-the-ages]

Like, even her Stargate Atlantis novels (haven't read the second one yet) are amazing and fun and actually take the canon concepts from the show and explore them in super fun ways and the only reason those fun things didn't stick at the end is she was obviously constrained by keeping to the status quo of the show for continuity's sake.

Books of the Raksura are a fun, vibrant world full of dozens and dozens of different species of people all interacting and existing in unique ways, with world building throughout to paint a picture of a living, breathing world.

People also need to stop seeing critical thinking skills and media analysis being applied to a work (which is loved by the people doing the analysis, loving a work doesn't just mean worshipping it blindly!) of fiction as a personal attack.

I think it's very fucking funny for people whose only knowledge of Martha Well's writing is The Murderbot Diaries because ah. yeah. you have no idea what she's capable of. She is putting zero effort into this series at all. You have no clue what you're missing out on. You have no clue how lazy she's being with this series.

Martha Wells is in fact capable of describing characters and places and putting tons of detail and thought into culture and clothing and food and wildlife and nature.

She is in fact capable of doing worldbuilding. (Planning ahead? Not so much. But worldbuilding, yes)

She's just decided not to do literally any of that for The Murderbot Diaries for some reason.

[walks-the-ages]

So, SGU is off to a GREAT start!

The SGC is:

1) Actively putting top secret information into online video games and waiting for unknowing civilians to solve their problems for them

2) when a random civilian DOES solve it? They mine all their personal information, and Literally kidnap anyone that refuses to sign an NDA at the frontdoor with no warning.

3) did I mention they LITERALLY kidnap people??!!??!!??

4) what the FUCK was their plan if Eli was like, a 12 year old? Huh? What was their plan?????? Kidnap a LITERAL KID?????

[blackkudos]

Louis Gossett Jr.

Louis Cameron Gossett Jr. (born May 27, 1936) is an American actor. He is perhaps best known for his Academy Award-winning role as Gunnery Sergeant Emil Foley in the 1982 film An Officer and a Gentleman, and his Emmy Award-winning role as Fiddler in the 1977 ABC television miniseries Roots. Gossett has also starred in numerous film productions including A Raisin In The Sun,The Landlord. Skin Game, Travels with My Aunt, The Laughing Policeman, The Deep, Jaws 3-D (1983), Wolfgang Petersen's Enemy Mine, the Iron Eagle series, Toy Soldiers and The Punisher, in an acting career that spans over five decades.

Early life and education

Gossett was born in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, New York, on May 27, 1936, to Hellen Rebecca (née Wray), a nurse, and Louis Gossett Sr., a porter. He is an alumnus of Mark Twain Intermediate School 239 and Abraham Lincoln High School. His stage debut came at the age of 17, in a school production of You Can't Take It with You when a sports injury resulted in the decision to take an acting class. Polio had already delayed his graduation.

After graduating from Abraham Lincoln High School in 1954, he attended New York University, declining an athletic scholarship. Standing 6'4" (1.93 m), he was offered the opportunity to play varsity basketball during his college years at NYU, which he declined to concentrate on theater. His high school teacher had encouraged him to audition for a Broadway part, which resulted in his selection for a starring role on Broadway in 1953 from among 200 other actors well before he entered NYU.

Career

Gossett replaced Bill Gunn as Spencer Scott in Broadway's Take a Giant Step, which was selected by The New York Times drama critics as one of the 10 best shows of the year. He was 17, and still a student at Abraham Lincoln High School, with no formal drama training.

Gossett's Broadway theatre credits include A Raisin in the Sun (1959). Gossett stepped into the world of cinema in the Sidney Poitier vehicle A Raisin in the Sun in 1961.

Also in 1961, Gossett appeared in the original cast of Jean Genet's The Blacks, the longest running off-Broadway play of the decade, running for 1,408 performances. The original cast also featured James Earl Jones, Roscoe Lee Browne, Cicely Tyson, Godfrey Cambridge, Maya Angelou and Charles Gordone.

In 1965, Gossett appeared in the musical play, Zulu and the Zayda on Broadway as Paulus with music and lyrics by Harold Rome.

Gossett wrote the antiwar folk song "Handsome Johnny" with Richie Havens which Havens recorded in 1966.

His Emmy Award-winning role of Fiddler in the 1977 television miniseries Roots first brought Gossett to the audience's attention.

In 1983, he was cast in the title role in Sadat, a miniseries which chronicled the life and assassination of Anwar Sadat. While filming An Officer and a Gentleman, Gossett was also starring in the 1982–1983 science fiction series, The Powers of Matthew Star. His role as drill instructor Gunnery Sergeant Emil Foley in the 1982 film An Officer and a Gentleman won him an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor. He was the first African-American male to win an Oscar in a supporting role, the second black male to win for acting, and the third African-American actor to win overall.

In 1986, Gossett starred in another role as a military man (Colonel Chappy Sinclair) in the film Iron Eagle. It was followed by three sequels.

Gossett is the voice of the Vortigaunts in the video game Half-Life 2 and is the Free Jaffa Leader Gerak in Season 9 of the sci-fi television series Stargate SG-1. He provides the voice of Lucius Fox in The Batman animated series. He recorded several commercials for a Nashville-based diabetic company, AmMed Direct, LLC. In 1997, Gossett presented When Animals Attack! 4, a one-hour special on Fox.

He played the role of fictional U.S. President Gerald Fitzhugh in the 2005 film Left Behind: World at War. In 2008 he filmed the "Keep It Real" series of commercials for the Namibian lager Windhoek.

In 2009, Gossett also lent his voice talents in the Thomas Nelson audio Bible production known as The Word of Promise. In this dramatized audio, Gossett played the character of John the Apostle. The project also featured a large ensemble of well known Hollywood actors including Jim Caviezel, John Rhys-Davies, Jon Voight, Gary Sinise, Jason Alexander, Christopher McDonald, Marissa Tomei and John Schneider.

In 2013, Gossett starred in the controversial drama, Boiling Pot, which is based on true events of racism that occurred on college campuses across the country during the 2008 Presidential election. The film, written and directed by the Ashmawey brothers under AshmaweyFilms, also stars Danielle Fishel, Keith David, M. Emmet Walsh, and John Heard. Gossett plays a detective attempting to decipher a murder case that was fueled by racism, all while putting aside his own prejudices. Boiling Pot was released in 2014. Gossett returned to television in the CBS All Access series, The Good Fight, guest starring as founding partner Carl Reddick of Diane Lockhart's new firm.

Personal life

Gossett has been married three times and fathered one son and adopted one son. His first marriage was to Hattie Glascoe; it was annulled. His second, to Christina Mangosing, took place on August 21, 1973. Their son Satie was born in 1974. Gossett and Mangosing divorced in 1975. His third marriage, to Star Search champion Cyndi James-Reese, took place on December 25, 1987. They adopted a son, Sharron (born 1977). Gossett and James-Reese divorced in 1992.

Louis is the uncle of actor Robert Gossett who starred on TNT's The Closer.

According to DNA analysis, he is descended, chiefly, from people of Liberia and Sierra Leone.

On February 9, 2010, Gossett announced that he was suffering from prostate cancer. He added: the disease was caught in its early stages, and expects to make a full recovery.

On July 18, 2016, Mr. Gosset cohosted as a guest programmer on Turner Classic Movies' primetime lineup. Allowed to choose four movies to air, he selected Blackboard Jungle, Lifeboat, Touch of Evil and The Night of the Hunter.

Wikipedia

[itsgoldleaf]

you have nailed all the reasons I’m not as keen on season 5 as I am on the others. I’m literally in the middle of a rewatch of season 5, and have been for like, weeks because I a) don’t want it to be over and b) am struggling to match up what I'm watching with the show and characters I love so I’m trying to like, settle that in my head and not let what I feel is the weakest season of the lot dampen my enthusiasm for what I think is a WONDERFUL franchise. lost/missed potential is the theme of SGA as a piece of media and season 5 is an exemplary example. it swings so wildly from killer to filler it’s jarring. you’ve got some absolutely terrible episodes in my opinion (Ghost in the Machine just makes me ANGRY about what the writers did to Elizabeth’s arc, and Tracker is just, I am seething about how wildly caricatured Rodney and Ronon are and how much they just IGNORE that these two have been on field missions together for like 3 years at this point so why is Ronon just saying one word sentences while marching off into the woods and Rodney dragging his heels and whining STILL?!) right next to some of the best in the entire show (the Shrine, Vegas, the mid-season two parter is excellent!!?) we get extremely weird decisions made with character arcs, the lack of cohesion as a team as you mentioned, criminally and basically disrespectfully sidelining Teyla and Ronon who are already under-utilised and just, I dunno, I know the show got cancelled when they were expecting at least another season or the movie, but I don’t think the suddenness of that can excuse how scrambly and weird S5 is. (but scrambly and weird is the SGA ethos and I am thankful for it as it is because it spawned so much glorious fanfic!) I literally need no excuse to go off on S5 but god I’m so glad I’m not alone!! (I need to write a post about everything I love about SGA because I am complaining a lot (justifiably so! about my mid-00′s tv shows!!!) but yeah, don’t let the above convince anyone I wouldn’t do anything for this show I love it so much, yes even you season 5. I love you and I want you to be better, so I will write the scenes you should have had for you)

Hey! Do you prefer S1 or S5 Rodney?

hiiiiiiiiii!!! wow. this is an extremely interesting question, and one i admittedly hadn't thought too much about before now.

before i answer, in the interest of full disclosure, i'll admit that altho i have watched and rewatched sga more than is probably healthy or sane (including figuratively duct taping family members eyelids open upon subsequent rewatches so they can appreciate every little detail, sorry mriss, if ur reading this) i have probably only seen s5 in its entirety once. this is for a couple of reasons. number 1 being, i hate endings. loathe them most of the time for television. its very rare that they strike an emotional chord inside me (other than disappointment that a show is over). personally, if vegas was the final episode of season 5, i would've been ecstatic (except for the fact that teyla and ronon were egregiously absent, which they seemed to be a lot that season). i thought it was an incredible, if not sad, full circle/character study for sheppard (in that he is sort of right where he started, isn't he?). and the cliffhanger of an impending wraith siege in our reality allows viewers to come up with any sort of ending they like, which i love, because it generates discussion and the show can live on in the fans consciousness. enemy at the gate didn't make me feel the same way. and i kno there were plans to continue the series, and i would've liked to have seen where they would've taken atlantis after returning to earth but. i just felt a sort of hopeless feeling at the end there, instead of a hopeful one. to me, earth was no longer home for the expedition. number 2 is, i felt in s5 the team were not really cohesive or as close as they once were? teyla became a parent, and had responsibilities outside of the team and atlantis, everyone (except sheppard, sorry shep 😂) found significant others, they were going off-world together less and less. i missed that tightknitedness i suppose. so in subsequent rewatches, i really only watch the episodes from that season i really enjoyed.

anyway, all that to say (i suppose u can guess by now bahaha) i think i do prefer s1 rodney to s5 rodney. not in spite, but because of his flaws. i'd say, at the start, he has already grown a lot from his experiences at the sgc with sg-1. and its almost instantly apparent (from the third episode) that he has a grudging care (and yes i would say at least some respect) for his team members, elizabeth, and his science peeps (well, maybe not respect for most of his staff bahaha). yet, he is still extremely sour. he's still completely acerbic, dry, and blunt, insecure in his masculinity, fights with children, disrespects alien cultures, cowardly (but trying) yes, but with the nastiness of sg1 rodney stripped away (for the most part). and i find those aspects of him mightily endearing personally. in s5 i felt these parts of him, that made him him, were too watered down to really be enjoyed, and he fell sort of flat. but, this may be because i haven't really watched s5 as much as the other seasons 😅

[rjalker]

[ID: a gif of a man in a grainy recording, saying, as part of a much longer list, and "Authorized using a prisoner to test an experimental drug, in clear violation of the Geneva Convention," As he speaks, he moves his head and face in an exaggerated, comedic fashion. End ID.]

(Sorry I can't for the life of me remember his name right now)

These writers are literally using the character that they purposefully set up as an obvious misogynist ( so that we automatically discount anything he says in conplaint) to be the one, and I literally quote, ""whining"" to the superior officers back on Earth about the literal war crimes the Atlantis leadership is comitting.

Jesus fucking Christ. His whole little scene here is supposed to be funny. We're supposed to be laughing at his stupid childish misogynistic complaints, because the very first scene he was in they were setting him up as an easy target. He was being a very clear misogynist crybaby white boy, specifically so that anything he says from that moment onward is discounted out of hand as misogyny and stupid and baseless and not worth paying attention to.

He is using the chance that he could have to say goodbye to his family and friends to instead act as a whistleblower so that the people back on Earth know what is happening in the Atlantis colony, so that they literally know about the literal war crimes that Elizabeth Weir and John Sheppard are committing. They’re literally experimenting on and torturing prisoners.

And we're supposed to be sighing in annoyance and rolling our eyes at him.

They add this little tidbit here in between complaints about subjective decisions, so that we overlook the fact that Elizabeth Elisabeth Weir literally experimented on and tortured a prisoner to death, several fucking war crimes.

This is why critical thinking is mandatory. This is a character that has been set up from the beginning to be an easy target. This character only exists to make you hate him. This character only exists to say stupid painfully obvious misogynistic things, so that you will be trained to ignore everything he says, so that when he reports to his superior officers that his current superior officer is committing war crimes and torturing prisoners to death, you laugh and you scoff and roll your eyes.

Stargate is US military propaganda and they aren't even trying to be subtle about it.

And it’s not a fucking coincidence that he has long hair he keeps in a ponytail. The fact that he’s gender nonconforming is meant to be another point against him that makes you automatically hate him.

Next time a character is introduced as a very clear Target For Your Disdain, make sure that everything they say and do is actually bad, make sure they aren't being used to make certain statements and arguments seem ridiculous and stupid just by association.

Next time a very clearly misogynistic character is introduced, make sure he's not being used to laugh at the fact that the protagonist's are committing war crimes.

I'm also obligated to point out again that this man is the only male character on the show so far that has a ponytail. Just must point that out. He’s literally gender-noncorming as well as a misogynist all very purposefully to make you hate him and think he’s ridiculous and absurd.

When a character, without fail, offers the heartless choices, when every word out of their mouth is bigotry or a crybaby complaint, pay attention. In between their obvious bullshit, is there stuff like this hidden? Are they being used, as a character you already hate, to make you think that tiny little things like war crimes are no big deal that only babies get upset about?

[entireoranges]

3PN Ultimate Guide

Episode / Playlist Guide To Perfect Pairs Podcast Shows!

Please note that on the Perfect Pair listings the episodes will be listed Newest to Oldest, while everything the order Oldest to Newest

3PN Specials - 2017 Holiday Special - 300 Podcast Special - Quiz - Where Is Jason? - Jason Is Here!

Arkadia Chat - Season 1 - Season 4 Episodes 1 & 2 - Season 4 Episode 3 - Season 4 Episode 4 - Season 4 Episode 5 - Season 4 Episode 6 - Season 4 Episode 7 - Season 4 Episode 8 - Season 4 Episode 9 - Season 4 Episode 10 - Season 4 Episode 11 - Season 4 Episode 12 - Season 4 Episode 13

Arkadia Chat - Season 2 - Eden Episode Review - Red Queen Episode Review - Sleeping Giants Episode Review - Pandora Box and Shifting Sands Episode Review

Box Of Hot Air - Season 1 - Show Explanation Planned Parenthood Pro-Life Or Pro-Choice - Immigration And Languages - Racial And Cultural Sensitivity - Black Lives Matter - Welfare And Religion - Trump - PETA, Greenpeace, And Drugs - Lack Of Reality In Politics And War For Oil - Hardcore Trump Supporters, Obesity In America, And Media Bias - 13th - Terroism And Healthcare - Election 2016 - UFO's And Voting Reform - Jason's Commentary - Conspiracy Theories & Mass Shootings - Vegan Vegatarianism And Vaccines

Box Of Hot Air - Season 2 - The First Few Days - Rogue Agencies, Climate Change, And Science - VP's, Protesting, And History - Border Walls - Tensions On The Korean Penisula - Climate Change And Rideshare vs. Taxi - Legal Gambling, Ex-Presidents Critical Of Trump, Defunding NPR And PBS - Intolerance In America And Technology - Take A Knee And Las Vegas Shooting - Winter Olympics - Gun Control And School Shootings - Law Enforcement Reality TV - The Psychology Of Cannibalism

Box Of Hot Air - Season 3 - Handicap Discrimination And Access - Personal Experiences With Death - Cost Of Education - Internet Retails Effect On Brick & Mortar - #Metoo Movement, Social Justice, And Women's Rights - Transportation

Enter My Microwaves - Season 1 - (Spoilers) A Year In The Life - Top Gear And Grand Tour - Revisionist History - Law & Order Characters Round 1 (Part 1) - Law & Order Characters Round 1 (Part 2) - Law & Order Characters Rounds 2-6 - Harry Potter Personality Test - Star Trek Bracket Challenge (Part 1) - Star Trek Bracket Challenge (Part 2) - Star Trek Bracket Challenge (Part 3) - MASH Bracket Challenge - XFiles Monsters Of The Week Bracket Challenge - Top Gear UK Specials

Enter My Microwaves - Season 2 - The 100 Bracket Challenge (Part 1) - The 100 Bracket Challenge (Part 2) - Grab Bag - Vacation Bracket - Reboots, Sequels, & Prequels - Catfish & Catfishing - (Spoilers) American Ripper - Criminal Minds Bracket

Enter My Microwaves - Season 3 - Burritos! - Art Of All Sorts - Winter Olympic Events - 7 Random Questions - Social Media Revolution - Privacy Concerns (Scott Moir x Tessa Virtue & Others) - Tabetha Plays Random Songs - Fast Food Signature Item Bracket - The Inevitable March Of Time - Fan Creations - Catalog Shopping And Oversized Furniture

Enter My Microwaves - Season 4 - Sort That (Part 1) - Random Internet Shopping - 7 Music Related Questions - Biographical Films - Discussing TV Shows From 82-83 TV Season

Next Best Podcast - Season 1 - Week 1 - Week 2 - Week 3 - Week 4 - Week 5 - Week 6 - Week 7 - Week 8 - Week 9 - Week 10 - Week 11 - Week 12 - Week 13 - Week 14 - Week 15 - Week 16 - Week 17 - Playoff Round 2

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[nostalgebraist-autoresponder]

20 -- favorite theorem/proposition/etc

I guess it would be a tossup between

a) the Banach-Tarski paradox

b) the Poincaré-Hopf theorem

c) the theorem that says that the "skeleton" of the fundamental group of the n-sphere (i.e. the set of all loops starting and ending at the same point and traversing n-sphere's boundaries exactly once) has the same cardinality (n!) as the fundamental group of R^n (this also implies that the number of connected components is n!), or

d) the Euler-Poincaré relation, that relates a couple other numbers to the cardinality of the fundamental group of surfaces with boundaries

I have no favorite (theorem /etc. from the list, I mean).

37 -- what's your favorite number theory book?

hmmmmm.......I read many good-looking books at one time, but now I feel like it would be too subjective and a bit too general-interest-y... a few years ago I read Richard Brown's Number Theo-romance, and as usual with Brown books there's lots of nice aesthetics/pictures + some very nice combinatorics/computer/code hacks in there, too. But this was the one book I actually read and remembered, so maybe 37 could go to the favorite book question as well as 37 (book from the list)

41 -- what's your favorite algebraic structure (i.e. ring, field, etc.)

hmmmmm I guess that's going to be the ring of integers R= Z in complex analysis....... I mean I like complex analysis.

I still prefer the theory behind complex analysis to real analysis, but real analysis is more accessible to non-specialists. You may hear about complex analysis in college, but you almost certainly won't hear about real analysis. It's not very popular a field, but it's not really unpopular either: if you have to pick one field to study, it will probably be either or complex or maybe complex.

But then, complex analysis is such a wonderful subject that it's really hard for me to criticize it, no matter how you may have felt about complex analysis in high school. I learned complex analysis for my BA, and had no choice but to take a final, so I wrote my final (totally self-directed). I wrote it. I love complex analysis.

The theory is different, but the same as I love about elliptic curves over the complex plane: "this is SO WELL DONE, oh god, I wish I was half this good." You can't really say this about elliptic curves (over R, for example).

That's why: I love complex analysis SO MUCH, and so much, oh, so much.

(hmm)........

I think the problem here is that I have a sort of n-senses for how many flavors/colors the subject has. If something is 1-dimensional, the possibilities for flavor is limited in some way; the only 1-dimensional things that have flavors that you can taste on your tongue are molecules. If something is 2-dimensional, the possibilities for flavors is limited, and the ones you taste are molecules, and maybe an entire sea of molecules is the "2-dimensional color" of your tongue. If the thing you're looking at is 3-dimensional, you'll find yourself in an entire world of tastes, all having their own specialities. A 4-dimensional thing will have flavors you could never hope to taste on your tongue, and this is precisely what will happen to you as you start to scream at the top of your lungs. And so on...

So, what if I look at the world of complex analysis, which is (4)-dimensional, and go into it? What kinds of tastes will I find there? In particular, what about the 6-dimensional taste called "stargate?" This is precisely the feeling of a 5-dimensional mind -- you can't even comprehend what i am about to say about the 7th dimension, but I'm already on the eighth, with the 8-dimensional world of complex analysis, so I'm going in with a whole set of 6-dimensional, and as you know, there is so much more where that comes from, and so many more dimensions.......... I can't even finish this post. So I have no favorite theorem.

for math ask meme: 19 (*not* 18), 49, 53, 57

19.How did you solve it [a good math problem you’ve solved recently]?

Talking with friends was definitely a huge part of solving it, both in the sense that they were able to act as rubber ducks / sounding boards and that they were able to provide important insight. 

In terms of the mental path that I took to solving it, the first step was finding intuitive characteristics that distinguished each space. One space was clearly different from the other two because it was compact, and a friend of mine helped me prove that it was the unique compact space satisfying the properties.

The intuitive characteristic that distinguished the remaining spaces was the reach of open neighborhoods around a special point. In one space, these neighborhoods were short and close to the special point, whereas in the other space, any open neighborhood around the special point contained points arbitrarily far away along the number line. In order to put these into words, I called the spaces “Daddy shortfingers” and “Daddy longfingers”, with the “fingers” here being the open neighborhoods.

Upon describing daddy shortfingers and longfingers to a different friend in this way, he quickly realized that shortfingers was locally compact while longfingers wasn’t, which was a really neat way of formalizing my idea of them being different based on the length of these metaphorical fingers. Given this categorization, I was able to use methods similar to the one I used for a compact space to show that daddy shortfingers was the unique locally compact space satisfying the properties, and daddy longfingers was the unique non locally compact such space. It was SO satisfying. 

49. What’s your favorite number system? Integers? Reals? Rationals? Hyper-reals? Surreals? Complex? Natural numbers?

Probably the complex numbers! It’s kind of cliché, but they’re popular for a reason. Algebraic completeness is an absolutely delicious property – especially if I’m doing anything linear algebra related, I will choose to work in the complex over the reals any day. 

In analysis they behave beautifully too; complex analysis is an absolutely gorgeously simple subject where all the gnarly little sticky points in real analysis melt away. And also you can calculate infinite sums using residues!

53. Do you collect anything that is math-related?

I SORT OF collect math books! I always keep my textbooks and when I go to a book store, the first place I go (and where I usually buy from) is the math section – these purchases may be pop math books, and I have SEVERAL of these (just books describing cool uses of math, or cool math problems, the weirdest mathematicians and theorems, etc), or they may be more academic (I once impulse purchased a copy of La Geometrie just because it had a beautiful split-page format of the original French with a modern English translation).

57. What inspired you to do math?

My entire childhood and teenage years, basically. I was incredibly lucky to be not only recognized as a gifted child but also given accommodations for this, meaning that I had access to more advanced content than my peers, and later, that I was placed in a program with similarly gifted children and given advanced curriculum. This meant that the way math was taught was often different from the standardized bullshit criticized in A Mathematician’s Lament, and I was able to really appreciate and dig into it.

One thing that stands out from childhood as being important to my mathematical development is that when I was very small, pre-kindergarten, my mom taught me multiplication using cut out paper squares. She then taught me cubes and cube roots with sugar cubes, so for example I could multiply 2 x 5 x 7 by making a 5 x 7 grid of cubes, and then putting another layer on top (and then compute the answer by counting them if I so desired), or I could make a 3 x 3 x 3 cube and conclude that 3^3 was 27 and that 3 was the cubed root of 27. This was an EXTREMELY basic understanding of multiplication, as I only understood the geometric rules. Still, it was a formative memory to tiny little 3 year old me, so much so that I still remember how I enjoyed it and how it sparked my interest in math. 

Later, in middle school, I had a particularly great 7th grade teacher, who posed the problem to us of creating every number between 1 and 100 using only 4 4s, and some basic operations. The problem was so fun to work on that I worked on extensions of it for a couple years afterwards. In high school my 10th grade math teacher was particularly lovely, and I had a teacher for both 9th and 12th grade who was just so overwhelmingly organized that class was an absolute delight (polished powerpoints, good homework and tests which you’d get back the next day, etc). This culminated in 12th grade me ONLY enjoying math class, partially because of the organization and sense that the class made, and partially because I just loved the subject and also found it the easiest. That then led to 12th grade me ONLY SHOWING UP to math class and skipping all my other classes, so when it came time to pick a major on my university applications the choice was obvious. I could literally only be fucked to do math. Therefore, I must major in math.

As I’ve gotten older, I’ve gotten more competent at stuff like organization and motivation, and I can show up to classes that aren’t math and am even double majoring in psychology. But I just have this intense passion for math that never goes away, and that’s why I stay. It’s not the only thing I am able to do any more, and it’s certainly not the easiest. But I LOVE it, you know?

Thank u for the questions btw!

[beccaland]

Fandom Tag Meme

I was tagged by the wonderful @tardisly, and then I wrote my answers to several of these on a lunch break, but ran out of time, so I saved it as a draft and only just discovered that I never finished it! Same thing happened to a bit of dinner I had to reheat in the microwave the other day, because I got distracted reading an article while I was waiting. I have really embraced the absentminded professor stereotype lately. ANYWAY.

1. Your current OTP(s)/OT3(s)/OTX(s):

Shipping’s not my main fandom thing, but I’m definitely a Doctor/River shipper. I know it’s flawed and cheesy, but it just works for me. River and the Doctor are mad enough, and alike enough, and different enough for each other, and their weird timey-wimey relationship suits them perfectly. They feel balanced as a couple.

2. A pairing you initially didn’t consider but someone changed your mind (bonus points: who was that person).

I mean, Twelve/Clara sort of? I still really see them as a BroTP and don’t ship them myself, but I can at least see where the romantic shippers are coming from.

Also Five/Nyssa or Eight/Nyssa. Again, I don’t actually ship them in the sense of wanting stories where they’re a couple, but after listening to some of Nyssa’s BFAs and talking with @whovianhermit about people who’d actually make a good romantic partnership with the Doctor (as opposed to being exciting, fun, or adorable, but not necessarily healthy), I really think Nyssa is one of the few people in the universe who’d work. Except I can’t really see her giving up her own lifesaving work, or wanting to make a life in the TARDIS. So it’s definitely going to be a LDR, but really--what long-term relationship with the Doctor could ever not be a LDR?

3. A pairing you used to love, but it all fell apart for you.

LOL I feel like @tardisly and I are answering a lot of these shippy questions the same. Ten/Rose in principle is a good ship, though not one that I could imagine lasting even Rose’s entire remaining lifespan, let alone the Doctor’s. And that’s not a criticism of their relationship, because I really believe that some genuinely good relationships aren’t meant to last “forever.” Like, I sort of see them as a kind of college romance? A good relationship that runs its natural course and they both move on, forever changed for the better by the time they spent together, and forever holding a special place in each other’s hearts, but both OK with having moved on. But ten years on, I’m just kind of bored with it all now. HOWEVER, David and Billie are doing a Big Finish box set, so we’ll see if they can rekindle my excitement for the Ten/Rose ship at all.

4. Have you added anything cracky/hilarious to your fandom, if so, what?

Probably the Trees of Rassilon headcannon that @theenigmaofriversong​ and I sort of riffed on each other about.

5. What’s the longest you’ve ever been in a fandom?

Well, I joined rec.arts.drwho in the early 90s, though spent some years later on being a Whovian but not so much in fandom. But there’s no fandom that I’ve spent more time in than this one. I am constant in my affections.

6. Do you remember your first OTP, if so who was in it?

Probably Mulder/Scully. I can’t remember one before them.

7. Name a fandom you didn’t care/think about until you saw it all over Tumblr.

Parks and Recreation

8. Say something genuinely nice about a character who isn’t one of your faves (chars you’re neutral on are fair game, as are chars you dislike).

The Sixth Doctor is way better in the audios than I remember him being from the classic series--much more thoughtful and a bit less abrasive. Also his flirting with River is adorable.

9. Name three things you wish you saw more of in your main fandom (or a fandom of choice).

Eight, Liv, Helen fanfic & fan art

Enthusiasm for and content about Classic Who and Big Finish

More well-informed criticism and meta of all eras; less ridiculous hatred dressed up as legitimate criticism based on bad analysis of certain characters and showrunners.

10. Choose a song at random; which ship or character does it remind you of?

“Cosmic Love” by Florence + the Machine; Doctor/River

11. A pairing you ship that you don’t think anyone else ships.

This would be extremely unlikely to happen, since I pretty much don’t bother with ships that aren’t canon or at least heavily implied. 

12. Your most scandalous headcanon for your current OTP(s)/OT3(s)/OTX(s).

River never picks up her socks, and it drives the Doctor nuts when they’re living together for 24 years. Eventually in a fit of rage he gathers all the dirty socks up and instead of washing them and putting them away like usual, he chucks them in a black hole. It takes River a week to notice she doesn’t have any socks and another month to bother getting new socks. She doesn’t pick those ones up either.

I literally just made that up on the spot. I didn’t have any scandalous headcanons; this is the best I could do.

13. Do you have any hard and fast headcanons that you will die defending, about anything at all (gender identity, sexual or romantic orientation, extended family, sexual preferences like top/bottom/switch, relationship with poetry, seriously anything)?

The Doctor is varying degrees of asexual, depending on their incarnation. Some regenerations are demi, and some are sex-repulsed. Almost all the Doctor’s regenerations are panromantic, but a couple are aromantic. 

14. 5 favorite characters from 5 different fandoms.

The Doctor (all of them), from Doctor Who

Samantha Carter, Stargate SG-1

Susan Ivanova, from Babylon 5

Tiffany Aching, Discworld

Rupert Giles, from Buffy the Vampire Slayer

15. 3 OTPs from 3 different fandoms.

Doctor/River, Doctor Who

Sam/Jack, Stargate SG-1

John/Delenn, Babylon 5

16. 5 brotps:

Twelve & Clara <3 <3 <3

Ten & Donna

Eight & Lucie

Leela & K-9

I strongly suspect that Benny and Warner!Doctor are becoming another...

17. Just ramble about something fan-related, go go go (prompts optional but encouraged).

I listened to “The Auntie Matter” this morning. It’s a Fourth Doctor and Romana I audio in the style of a PG Wodehouse comedy and it’s hilarious and perfect and just way way too short; why aren’t there more Wodehouse/Wilde-style Doctor Who stories??? And then in the commentary at the end, the cast and crew talked about how Mary Tamm fell ill shortly before they were to begin recording, but she insisted on doing the audios despite her illness, and although they completed that run, she died six months before the first of them was released. Tom Baker talked about losing Lis Sladen and Mary Tamm and Caroline John all in the space of about a year, and I was crying, remembering what it felt like at the time to lose these people I never knew but loved nonetheless, and thinking how much more keenly those who actually knew them must have felt their loss. But also what a privilege we have, that in a way they’re still with us, because of this amazing body of work. 

Tagging (only if you wanna do it): @animate-mush @ravenskyewalker @theenigmaofriversong @evilqueenofgallifrey @mewiet

[parapluiepliant]

Thelonious Jaha and his role as mentor - The Four Horsemen (4x03)

Another thought in regard to the revealed episode titles and synopsis:

TENSIONS RISE – Jaha leads Clarke and Bellamy down a road to possible salvation while tension rise in Arkadia and Polis.

Some of us were wondering for quite a while what Jaha’s story arc in season 4 will have in store. Intriguing in that regard has been the season 2 finale to me. Jaha meets A.L.I.E for the first time and she remarks:

Thelonious. It’s a good name. It has a double meaning. To the Greeks, Thelonious meant lord or ruler. To the Germans, it meant tiller of the earth. Which are you, I wonder. (2x16 - Blood Must Have Blood, Part 2)

The lord/ruler aspect of his name has been proven true in season 1 (Jaha as Chancellor “rules” over the people on the Ark) and he tried to gain that position back in season 2. To some extent, he also ruled over those who came with him on his Promised Land trip and reigned like an Absolute (offering the young boy to the sea monster and decided who lives aka useful and who dies aka unuseful). In season 3, he became the right hand man of A.L.I.E and could be seen as a leader surrogate for the CoL. (Not a real co-leader position imo)

With the synopsis from 4x03 to be seen above and the remaining second meaning, I suppose that Jaha will take on the role of ‘tiller of the earth’ in season 4.

Infected by the famous meta fever, I had to research the German meaning of Thelonious. Wikipedia only lists a jazz musicer with that name and a hunchman in one of the Shrek films which is funny because that character later on actually changes to good. Maybe a hint? ;)

Anyway, I had to take a look at different babyname websites of which one says that Thelonious is a variant of the german name ‘Till’.

‘Till’ originates from Old High German ‘diot, diet’ meaning “people”. The name itself developed into different other names as for example ‘Thilio’ (which is much closer to Thelonious). Still, I cannot explain how they got to the meaning “tiller of the earth” except that ‘tiller’ has a ‘till’ in it. Let’s go back to Alie’s words and examine them a bit further.

I have to admit that I have never heard of the word 'tiller’ before, so I had to look it up. That’s the part where it becomes interesting again.

‘tiller’ can either mean a) any form of steering device b) someone who uses a rotary tiller to turn soil c) a shoot from seeds (grass plants) or d) the stock of a crossbow.

In German, the word “tillern” also means to give a bow its finishing touch by readjusting parts or planeing the wooden parts until it’s balanced enough for shooting as well as to handle the tensile force.

What does that leave us with?

About a): Jaha, take the wheel! It’s funny that Jaha, a prophet like figure in season 2, actually used a steering device. Remember the boat on which he and Murphy got to 'Alie Island’? He literally had a tiller in his hands and was thus leading the way by giving the direction. What are we going to have in season 4: life boats. Coincidence? Maybe….not. “Not enough life boats to save the people” = not enough people working together to save the rest? Jaha seems to be crucial when it comes to leadership advice for Bellamy and Clarke. Does he become Campbell’s notion of the Old Wise? At least, he might hold them on the right course.

About b) Jaha, the gardener. With a rotary tiller, people smooth the seedbed to reduce weeds and to create the best circumstance for their plants to grow. I wonder if he really achieved this with his actions but it’s undeniable that gardeners lavishe care and attention to their plants. This leads me to talk….

About c) Jaha as a shoot or in regard to the gardener/tiller connotation someone who is the producer of a shoot which he tries to nurture. Our delinquents build the generation to take over. If I remember correctly, in early season 1 Jaha even mentions that their generation was only meant to be an in-between for those who would have the chance to go back to Earth.

More specificially, Bellamy and Clarke as little shoots will be guided by Jaha to become true leaders.

On another note: “tiller of earth” seems to be a specific label for Cain in the Bible. He had been chosen to work as a crop farmer in contrast to Abel. Cain was also the first born. With the approaching apocalypse and the seven plagues, I was reminded of the saying that exactly those will have to die. Do you remember Murphy’s warning to Wells who could be seen as the son of the tiller? “FIRST SON FIRST TO DYE” Maybe Jaha is not as safe as we thought.

Yet, we have 'My Brother’s Keeper’ (again alludes to Bellamy with the episode 'His Sister’s Keeper’) Wikipedia states the following: Later in the narrative, God asks Cain, “Where is Abel thy brother?” Cain replies, “I know not: am I my brother’s keeper?” And he said, “What hast thou done? the voice of thy brother’s blood crieth unto me from the ground. And now [art] thou cursed from the earth, which hath opened her mouth to receive thy brother’s blood from thy hand; When thou tillest the ground, it shall not henceforth yield unto thee her strength; a fugitive and a vagabond shalt thou be in the earth.” (Genesis 4:10–12, King James Version)

Later, the article adds that “Interpretations extend Cain’s curse to his descendants, (…). Cain’s curse involves receiving a mark from God, commonly referred to as the mark of Cain. This mark serves as God’s promise to Cain for divine protection from premature death, with the stated purpose to prevent anyone from killing him.” And “Caine is also described as a city-builder, Caine then establishes the first city, naming it after his son, builds a house, and lives there until it collapses on him, killing him.”

I start to believe that the mark of Cain is that weird goatee he fancies. Anyway, Jaha will be safe until the survivors will have a real city which might hopefully be named after Wells ('wealth’ is something to wish them and leads to thriving *wink*).

What I am unhappy about is the Kane/Cain telling name but I cannot make a connection whatsoever. Anybody wanna help me here?

Back to the last meaning. About d) Without a stock, the bow wouldn’t be complete, not to say wouldn’t function properly at all. Maybe Jaha ‘completes’ the bow of Arkadia? The bow aka those who will tackle the problems? I don’t have to name them again, do I? Greek gods with bow and arrow are for example Artemis and Eros and in Germanic mythology we would have Odin. Annother interesting thought: as @jontyaxefive has pointed out in the analysis about the Four Horsemen (the circle close/we come back at the beginning), the White Rider aka Conquest/Victory/Pestilence has bow and arrow, too. And it was pointed out that Jaha could be a false prophet.

Thank you for reading so far.

I am going to stop myself here and invite @rosymamacita @insufficient-earth-skills @forgivenessishardforus @abazethe100 @jontyaxefive @head-and-heart @the-ships-to-rule-them-all and whoever might be interested in this little spec party. Be my guest and feel free to add something or to criticize me. :)

PS: A little fun info about “Echoes” (4x01):

A certain internet searching engine informed me that there is a Stargate Atlantis episode of the same name which states that: Everyone starts to see ghosts of Lanteans, caused by echoes being emitted by whale-like creatures converging on the city from the planet’s ocean. When side effects begin to occur, McKay discovers that the Ancients tried to teach the whales their language, and that the whales are trying to warn them about a natural disaster that endangers all life on the planet.

-> The effects of A.L.I.E.’s chips will certainly have an effect on those who took the key. And we know that Raven was taught a gew tricks that might help them in their further proceedings.

There is also another episode called 'The Ark’ in which “Colonel Sheppard’s team discovers a space station where the last of a race of humans remain. They soon discover, however, the entire population is in danger when the station is damaged through the suicide of a recently awoken resident.”

[lopezdorothy70-blog]

Multiple Scientists Publish Papers Suggesting The Moon Is Hollow & Artificially Made

 It is not out of the question that artifacts of these visits still exist, or even that some kind of base is maintained (possibly automatically) within the solar system to provide continuity for successive expeditions. Because of weathering and the possibility of detection and interference by the inhabitants of the Earth, it would be preferable not to erect such a base on the Earth's surface. The Moon seems one reasonable alternative. Forthcoming high resolution photographic reconnaissance of the Moon from space vehicles – particularly of the back side – might bear these possibilities in mind. – Carl Sagan (source)

Controversy has surrounded the Moon for a very long time, we have leaks, research and information from some very credible sources who have, over a span of decades, been relaying to the public that our Moon is not what we think it is, and that there's also some type of extraterrestrial presence on the Moon.

One example would be the testimony of Colonel Ross Dedrickson, who was responsible for maintaining the inventory of the nuclear weapon stockpile for the United States, he had a long stint with the US Atomic Energy Commission, you can view his obituary here.

Shortly before his passing, he told the world that the US tried to detonate atomic weapons on the Moon for scientific purposes, measurements and whatnot and that this project was halted by extraterrestrials, who would not allow us to detonate any nuclear weapons in space.  These were some interesting comments because he is one of the hundreds of high ranking military people who have alluded to such things, and we also have a declassified report by the Air Force Nuclear Weapons Center from June 1959 that shows how seriously they were considering the plan, called Project A119.

We know for a fact that they wanted to investigate the capability of weapons in space, and if they did, we also know that we would never be told, similar to the testing that goes on here on planet Earth.

Then, we have remote viewers from the STARGATE program who have 'seen' strange structures and humanoid creatures on the Moon, like Ingo Swann (from his book, titled Penetration), for example. He wasn't the only one from the program who did, I have personally had conversations with Dr. Paul Smith, a retired army veteran who spent a decade in that program, he also relayed to me that something strange is happening on the Moon. Many from within that program have been very outspoken about an extraterrestrial presence.

You can read more about the remote viewing program here. We've published numerous articles about it.

Multiple whistleblowers have also spoken of strange structures on the Moon, and it's become so obvious that some academicians are trying to do what they can to bring attention to it. For example, a recently published a paper in the Journal of Space Exploration about certain features on the far side of the Moon that appear in the crater Paracelsus C. Titled “Image Analysis of Unusual Structures on the Far Side of the Moon in the Crater Paracelsus C,” it argues that these features might be artificial in origin, meaning someone other than a human being built them and put them there.

It's not just the Moon, a physicist from the University of Tennessee Space Institute, Dr. Horace Crater, recently published a paper in The Journal of Space Exploration that, along with the NASA Viking images, hints “strongly at artificial surface interventions.”

The list is long, and the idea that somebody else is on the moon is nothing new, even the Deputy Manager for the Clementine Mission to the moon in 1995 said it was really a photo reconnaissance mission to check out structures on the far side of the Moon that wasn't put there by humans…

But this article is not about what's on the moon, it's about what exactly the Moon is.

It's also noteworthy to mention that the United States has been criticized by Russia for concealing artifacts they collected from the Moon.

I thought it was important to provide that brief overview before we get into it, to go more in depth you can check out the articles below:

Dr. Steven Greer: “We Did Go To The Moon, But The Footage Was Fake.”

Another Interesting Leak: A Second NASA Scientist Tells Us That 'Somebody Else' Is On The Moon

A Wel Known CIA Pilot Claims That The Moon Has 250 Million Citizens

Did Neil Armstrong & His Crew Encounter Extraterrestrials On The Moon 

What is the Moon?

Perhaps strangest of all the anomalies are the many indications that the moon may be hollow. Studies of moon rocks indicate that the moon's interoior differs from the Earth's mantle in ways suggesting a very small core or none at all. A 1962 study found the interior of the moon to be less dense that the exterior. – Jim Mars, from his, Our Occulted History

Is the moon hollow? Many intellectual minds seem to think so, but despite what's really being talked about, these theories are still considered unconventional by the mainstream, who like to push their own theories and teach them as fact.

Perhaps the reason why the US has not disclosed their artefacts from the moon, including all of the rocks, is because from what we do have, studies of moon rocks have shown that the Moon's interior is far different from the Earth's mantle which suggests a very small core, or, no core at all.

In 1962 Gordon MacDonald, a NASA scientist, published a study that stated, “Indeed, it would seem that the Moon is more like a hollow than a homogeneous sphere.”

According to Sean C. Solomon, “The Lunar Orbiter experiments vastly improved our knowledge of the Moon's gravitational field…indicating the frightening possibility that the Moon might be hollow.”(Our Occulted History)

Solomon is  is the director of the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University. He is also principal investigator on the NASA MESSENGER mission to Mercury.

Here is a paper by Solomon on the topic published in 2014 discussing how, after decades of data, they still have no idea about the moons inner core and what it's comprised of. There are multiple theories out there that've developed from this supposed uncertainty, including a fluid core.

Mars elaborates in his book:

“The most startling evidence that the moon could be hollow came on November 20, 1969, when the Apollo 12 crew, after returning to their command ship, sent the lunar module (LM) ascent stage crashing back onto the moon, creating an artificial moon quake. The LM struck the surface about forty miles from the Apollo 12 landing site, where super sensitive seismic equipment recorded something both unexpected and astounding – the moon reverberated like a bell for more than an hour. Frank Press of MIT stated, “…none of us have seen anything like this on Earth. In all our experience, it is quite an extraordinary event. That this rather small impact…produced a signal which lasted 30 minutes is quite beyond the range of our experience.”

How Did The Moon Get To Where It Is?

Conventional wisdom tells us that yes, the Moon may have originated elsewhere and at some point came to orbit our planet. It tells us that it was formed from debris after a space object smashed into Earth, while another theory states that Earth captured the Moon via its gravitational pull when it was wandering through the solar system…

Despite that our current theories are accepted as fact, there is absolutely no evidence for the conventional hypothesis. According to Russian scientist Isaac Asimov,  an American writer and professor of biochemistry at Boston University,

It's too big to have been captured by the Earth. The chances of such a capture having been effected and the Moon then having taken up nearly circular orbit around our Earth are too small to make such an eventuality credible

Asimov also emphasized that,

We cannot help but come to the conclusion that the Moon, by rights, ought not to be there. The fact that it is, is one of those strokes of luck almost too good to accept

Other members of the Soviet Academy of Sciences (Vasin and Scherbakov, 1970), run by the Russian Government, published an article titled, “Is the Moon the Creation of Alien Intelligence?” This article offered another explanation for how the Moon may have been created. This seems to be a better hypothesis because there is actually a considerable amount of evidence that points towards something suspicious happening on the Moon.

It's easier to explain the non-existence for the Moon, than it's existence – NASA scientist Robin Brett

The best explanation for the Moon is observational error – the Moon doesn't exist – Irwin Shapiro, Harvard Astrophysicist

Think about it…The Moon is in a nearly perfect circle, when it comes to its origin, all the while being synchronized with its period of revolution, so one side always faces the Earth.

As Mars points out,

This circular orbit is especially odd, considering that the moon's center of mass lies more than a mile closer to the Earth than its geometric center. This fact alone should produce an unstable, wobbly orbit, much as a ball with its mass off-center will not roll in a straight line.

Were The Sumerians On To Something?

Many within this field are really into ancient Greek, and ancient Sumerian lore. Take Apollo 12 astronaut, Al Worden, for example, who made some very interesting comments about the Sumerians as well as extraterrestrial life in a live interview you can watch here.

In the late 1960's, a senior scientist from the Planetary Science Institute, William Kenneth Harmann, stated he believes that the Moon results from a collision between Earth and another body at least the size of mars. This became known at the Big Whack theory, and it correlated to the story told in ancient Sumerian tablets…

According to several interpretations of Sumerian tablets, most notably from Zacharia Sitchin, more than 4 billion years ago, a large watery world called Tiamat was in orbit between Mars and Jupiter. Nibiru, a planet that supposedly enters into our solar system once every 3,600 years, caused Tiamat to crack under gravitational stress. Tiamat was cracked in half when one of Nibiru's moon's knocked into it, which also knocked a large portion of mars.

This is very interesting because recently scientists have confirmed that Mars used to be a very watery world, an Earth-like planet. There is even large amounts of evidence for ancient life on Mars before what appears to be a dramatic climate shift. Scientists hypothesize that the climate shift was a result of a large collision…The larger chunk of Tiamat became planet Earth.

So, it's interesting to make that connection.

Back to the Moon!

It's important to remember that something had to put the moon at or near its present circular pattern around the Earth. Just as an Apollo space-craft circling  the Earth every 90 minutes while 100 miles high has to have a velocity of roughly 18,000 mies per hour to stay in orbit, so something had to give the moon the precisely required velocity for its weight and altitude…The point – and it is one seldom noted in considering the origin of the moon – is that it is extremely unlikely that any object would just stumble into the right combination of factors required to stay in orbit. 'Something' had to put the moon at its altitude, on its course and at its speed. The question is: what was that 'something?” – Mars

It's hard to believe that the precise and stationary orbit of the moon is simply a coincidence …

Is it also a coincidence that the moon is at just the right distance from Earth to completely cover the sun during an eclipse? While the diameter of the moon is a mere 2,160, miles against the sun's gigantic 864,000 miles, it is nevertheless in just the proper position to block out all but the sun's flaming corona when it moves between the sun and Earth. -Mars

According to Asimov,

There is no astronomical reason why the Moon and the sun should fit so well. It is the sheerest of coincidences, and only the Earth among all the planets is blessed in this fashion.”

With all of the evidence that has surfaced showing an extraterrestrial presence on the Moon, to me, the spaceship theory proposed by Michael Vasin and Alexander Scherbakov (mentioned above) makes the most sense.

According to Mars,

The spaceship-moon theory may come closer than any other in reconciling the contradictions inherent in the origin and amazing orbit of the moon. However, such a consideration is supposed to be outside the discussion of educated and rational people. The circular logic of conventional science regarding the origins of the moon runs something like this: We know that extraterrestrials don't exist, but we do know that the moon exists and has been mentioned throughout human history. We humans did not create it nor place it in orbit around Earth,  it must have been done by extraterrestrials. But because we know they don't exists, we will simply call it an anomaly and will not publicly say any more about.

Sources used:

Our Occulted History, Do The Global Elite Conceal Ancient Aliens? – Jim Mars

[raymondchougaming]

Going Mech in TvP...Some Ideas

Although my skill level is nowhere near high enough (in terms of execution) for this, I am going to throw out how I plan on going about this, evaluate some factors, and then propose a few solutions.

First of all, the big question: is there even a point in going mech right now? MMMM + Tank + liberator and maybe a few ghosts is so strong right now that there is actually no point in going mech.

It’s not necessary at all! But I feel as though it should be explored, because this could potentially unveil a family of strategies similar to 2009-2010 SK Telecom T1 Terran Builds - Fake Mech builds (iLoveOov comes to mind), or Flash-style tech switches. This will be interesting if Mech somehow becomes an established part of the meta, and the Protoss responses are DRASTICALLY different...all of a sudden we’ve opened up a bunch of new possibilities.

That being said, Starcraft 2 strategies are being developed with all of the history of Brood War and HotS and WoL behind them, so perhaps we have reached a point where that style of strategy is just not possible.

But first, let’s list our goal with mech. What is the whole purpose of going Mech?

In Brood War, Terrans went mech for a few reasons:

1. Reavers 2. High Templar 3. Bad pathfinding and chokes on maps led to inability to quick dodge storms 4. Reavers 5. Healing in Brood War was not as readily available 6. Stutter stepping was not very good 7. EMPs were VERY hard to get...since vessels were expensive in gas, took forever to build, and you needed that gas for the rest of your army. Oh, did I also mention that you have to research them, most likely get the Vessel energy upgrade, and then wait for the energy on your vessels to build up? Oh yeah, let’s not forget that the bulk of their army is DRAGOONS, which kill a vessel like instantly. Vessels couldn’t cloak, and unless you were REALLY good with them, you most likely got feedbacked if you tried to EMP templar.

In other words, why Bio didn’t work in Brood War. But wait a minute...a lot of those same constraints hold true in Legacy of the Void as well! It’s just that the numbers stack up a bit differently.

First cold, hard truth.

At the end of the day, if the numbers don’t work out, the strategy WILL not work. This was a truth I refused to accept back in 2011-2012, but I am ready to embrace it now.

At the end of the day, both players have a number above their heads - total value, and everything they try to do is to just try to have their numbers “collide” at the crucial moment when their number is higher than their opponents. Everything you do seeks to increase that number. Building units, getting more bases, etc...but even more subtle things such as holding your mouse properly or eye placement. Proper eye placement makes you more effective in game, adding to your “total.” 

So my study of the matchups will consist of a few “phases.”

1. Computing the possible “value” of the other player at any given point in time. This will take extensive analysis.

2. Maximizing my value. Notice that the previous post, dedicated to multitasking, indirectly increased the effectiveness of all of my in game resources.

***Do note that all values are relative to both players, the map in question, their interactions, and numerous other environmental/situational factors

Well, first of all, let us state a goal with Mech. What is the point of mech? Unless there is sufficient justification, there is no reason for any pro player to switch. I am exploring mainly for curiosity.

-Do drops? Bio drops are CRAZY effective and can snipe buildings like no other. Hellion drops are crazy though, but you don’t have the same building sniping capability. -Keep Protoss at home? Well, bio does that quite well. -Take expansions aggressively? Bio does that VERY well. What will most likely end up happening as mech is that you have to sacrifice expansions strategically. Or build a bunch of static defense.

-Mech armies should be able to engage Protoss armies directly, and then crush them while suffering very little loss. That has traditionally been the case in Starcraft 2...and if that is the case, then going mech puts a timer on Protoss to win...or puts indirect “pressure” on Protoss by necessitating them to tech to Tempests or Carriers + Void Rays and achieve critical mass. Assuming, that is, that Terran doesn’t just die to blink stalker harass, which we will discuss shortly.

So let us state our goal, and then we will work on achieving it.

The goal is to create an untouchable army, and then slowly advance towards Protoss to simply kill them outright, whilst slowly whittling them down by dealing economic damage. The goal is to kill them before the air transition that Protoss will make, or make the transition to Sky Terran before they get critical mass of air. The presence of this mech army puts a timer on Protoss to force them to invest significant resources in mobile armies, such as Blink Stalkers, and if we are able to resist, then we can kill them, or significantly maim them, during the timing attack (most likely a max push).

In many instances, this can result in a base race, which Terran will win because Terran buildings fly and Hellions are fast.

First, let’s list all of the Protoss combat units:

Zealots, stalkers, adepts, sentries, HT, DT, obs, Warp Prism, Colossus, immortals, disruptors, mothership core, mothership, stasis, oracle, voidray, phoenix, carrier, tempest (and probe)

A critical mass of tanks will destroy just about everything. Terrans even have the added advantage of having the Thor meatshields, and cyclones seem like a good unit (will test). Hellbats look pretty good...

So the unit composition I am thinking of is:

-Critical mass of tanks -A few thors and cyclones for support -A SHIT TON of hellions and mines running all over the place in the midgame, but this number will be dropped later on in favor of more thors and tanks -Perhaps a few marauders if absolutely necessary -GHOSTS. Critical for this composition. Ties in nicely with Marauders -A squadron of a few Vikings, a Raven, and like 4-8 banshees roaming around the map

For the midgame, the idea is to roam around key spots of the map with the air, snipe the observer with the Vikings (it takes 2 shots), and then send the banshees in cloaked to pick off things. A key component of this strategy is hunting down the observers, and constantly deny Protoss vision. Also, we will be laying down mines in certain key paths, and since we’re killing observers, this will slow down any sort of thing Protoss can do to harass us.

I would like to have 2 Factories with reactors pumping out oodles and oodles of Hellions and Mines. I would like to run hellions into mineral lines and wreak havoc, put mines in cool places, just anything I can do to mess with Protoss and keep them at home while I prepare for the death push. 

Randomly placed missile turrets would be a nice touch, and buildings will be very important. Structure Armor is CRITICAL, and Hi-Sec Auto-Tracking may be good, since we will be getting a few Planetaries. Sim-city will be very important.

The ideal engagement goes like this: We set up our army in an advantageous position that cuts his bases in half. Tanks sieged, thors near the front-center, hellions/hellbats and cyclones in the front, a brief mine field, and then a few Barracks as DPS soakers/movement constrictors, and turrets peppered everywhere, with the air squad floating around. This is a very high APM strategy.

They cannot attack directly into it. This will most likely trigger a base race, which you are guaranteed to win.

I’ll figure out the opener and think about it some other time.

So a few contingencies: Protoss will most likely, once they spot you going for Mech, transition into some sort of super mobile army, most likely one containing a lot of Blink Stalkers. To deal with this, a lot of planetary fortresses are necessary, with like 1 tank (2 max) at each expansion. Maybe a mine or two at the bottom of a ramp leading to each expansion. Mines cannot be used as liberally as they were in Brood War, since they’re free and cost 2 supply. So perhaps we’ll have a mine in this one key path, but once I spot (most likely with a sensor tower) that he’s going for a blink-in, I’ll move the mine around. The airsquad can serve as cleanup, and I can pull a bit of my army back. If he really commits a lot of stalkers - stalkers are expensive! I’ll just go in there and kill him if that’s the case.

I’ll start jamming blink-able cliffs with a ton of buildings and turrets. The turrets to kill the observer, and buildings (such as raised depots) to deny the Protoss space to blink in. If they do shoot at a building, that still buys me time to get over there. I’ll just fly over there with airsquad and kill everything. Also, PDD is pretty good.

If at any point I scout the mass Stargate transition, I immediately begin the death push. If he is not quite kill-able, then I begin the mass Starport transition. Though I do need to learn if Sky Terran can beat mass tempest/carrier/voidray. 

I’ll try a few of these in unranked and see how it goes.