#the sunspot chronicles

[fenmere]

An Earthling returns from the Sunspot to talk about it

from the second book of the Tunnel Apparati Diaries, the Sun Also Hatches, by Goreth Ampersand of the Inmara (coming mid October)

“Well. Maybe tell us more about it,” Peter suggested. “What was the Sunspot like?”

I leaned back in my chair and stared at the ceiling and huffed a breath, tears brimming in my eyes, and went over the events of the previous day in my head. Just visualizing them.

There were two days to pick from, really. One where I had talked to Karen and where I’d watched from the side as Sarah took us through an afternoon with friends and having dinner and writing. And one in which I’d been somewhere else entirely. And they both felt as real, as a part of my life, as each other.

And since Peter had asked about the Sunspot, that came more naturally to the front. Those memories were ever so slightly more vivid and ready to relive.

“I met so many people,” I said. “And not all of them were on the Network or in nanite exobodies.”

“What are nanite exobodies?” Abigail asked.

I held up my left hand, looking at it, and said, “Well, like thi – Ah. Hm.” I let my hand drop into my lap and said, “As you can see, I have a whole new set of reflexes already. Especially when I’m thinking about the Sunspot.” Then I explained, “It’s the same thing as the nanites we destroyed last year, that were in the ground, in the communications probe that we never dug up. Only, the Sunspot is full of them. And people use them to make bodies they can walk around in. Like in, uh, I mean, so many movies.”

“Oh. OK.”

“I had one. I was shown how to make it almost right away, so that I could feel more real,” I told them.  I decided not to derail my first point by saying that I’d been my draconic self. I wanted to, but I also wanted to describe the people. So, I said, “Anyway, not everyone had one of those. There were still living people, in living organic bodies. And they were all different.”

“Neat!”

“No, I mean. Ashwin has explained it, and I think they’ve told you about it, or we have. But I don’t think we’ve really gotten the idea across. Metabang’s book kinda does, but there’s so much it takes for granted, having lived there itself the whole time,” I rambled. “No. This was bigger than a furry convention.”

“Heh,” Peter chuckled.

“At a big furry convention, you’ve got like fifty wolves and fifty dragons, and a smattering of birds, opossums, foxes, and unrecognizable fursuits, and then just a bunch of humans wearing ears. There, on the Sunspot, every person looks like they’re from a different species. Every one of them chimerical. And they’re all just walking around, visiting each other, enjoying their days, and making all sorts of artwork.”

[ashwin-the-artless]

My book!

Proof arrived!

We're legally publishing it under the name of my system, the Inmara, to keep things simple, but I wrote this (with the help of the rest of the cast) and it is my voice that is the narration for the story. There is so much to fix. But it's also very exciting to have this in hand! Looking at this, we are fairly confident we'll meet our print release date of August 24 without a problem.

[your-tutor-abacus]

Fikwakyet

Translated to "Fairport" in the English versions of the Sunspot Chronicles, Fikwakyet is a city that is more unique than any other in the Garden of `etekeyerrinwuf.

I explain a bit about the why of that in my own book, Ni'a. But, to recap:

When the Sunspot was built, the Founding Crew designed the shapes of the corridors, the contours of the Garden, and the placement and foundations of the cities. Then they let the Children build upon and between all of that and make the ship their own.

But Fikwakyet was a special project. Fenmere (a.k.a. Fenemere) wanted to run an experiment, and managed to get the Crew Council to approve it.

Part of the whole point of the Sunspot was to make a strict and sudden cultural break from the millennia of fascism that had been plaguing their predecessor ship, the Terra Supreme (Feruukepikape). And for most of the Sunspot's architecture and culture, everything was derived from shapes and themes found in nature, and everything that reminded the Founding Crew of the Terra Supreme was done away with.

Fenmere contended that certain aesthetic choices were not inherently fascist, and wanted to demonstrate this by having one city where certain old elements could be reintroduced, starting with rectangular foundations for its buildings (instead of the scutoid structures found everywhere else on the Sunspot).

Fenmere had other reasons for doing this, besides trying to prove this point, and those reasons are likely to be visited in the last few chapters of the Sunspot Chronicles (I'll refrain from spoilers here).

The result is that, somewhat coincidentally, due to how right angles tend to work, when we finally made contact with Earth through the Tunnel Apparatus, it was remarked upon how similar Fikwakyet is to many Earth cities.

There are some critical differences, of course. The scales of things are not the same, because we build to accommodate both the largest and the smallest of our people, as well as for many disabilities.

Also, we have nothing like industry or commerce. At least, not driven by anything remotely like profit.

@ashwin-the-artless explains this in nems post titled Cities.

But, I'd like to use this opportunity to highlight another aesthetic difference. The alignment of our windows.

This is something that can be seen in almost all Sunspot cities, except perhaps Agaricales (which is a little more chaotic than most).

There are two axes of spectacular views on the Sunspot: foreward and aft; and spin and antispinward.

To the fore and aft, you can witness the sunbirths and sundeaths, and also the moonbirths and moondeaths. It some people really value that, and build their houses to give them as much view of that axis of the Garden as possible from anywhere in their house.

Perpendicular to that, spinward and antispinward, you can see the curvature of the Garden on a clear day, and the geography of it and neighboring cities, and honestly, even though I've lived with those views for the entirety of the Sunspot's existence, I still find them utterly breathtaking.

We try to show this off with the other photos of the Sunspot we share with you. This photo, here, however, demonstrates the effect on the architecture of the houses.

It's pretty rare that you'll find any building that is not aligned with one of these axes. And those that are tend to have wrap around windows that accommodate views of as much of the Garden as possible all around.

Another difference between the Sunspot and the Earth at the time of this writing is that our windows are more durable, more insulating, and more configurable. We can change their transparent and reflective properties on command. Which means that we have very few incentives to not make a wall a window, except perhaps to give us room to hang something or to place furniture against it in an aesthetic way.

But, solid walls and ceilings are still just a tad more insulating than our windows, so some people do opt for more opaque housing.

But if you don't want the views or the light, you'll usually choose to live belowdecks anyway.

[fenmere]

Take science fiction in one hand and epic fantasy in another, and mush them together really hard until you can't tell them apart anymore, then plop it in the queer blender.

Let's say you took a small planetoid the size of Ceres and spun it like a glass bottle, using construction nanites to shape the finer details. You could get a cylinder that's approxiamtely 400 km long by 200 km wide, with walls 3 km thick. Maybe.

Rotate that for simulation of gravity. Use the mass of another Ceres to build the Bussard collector and fusion drive, and you can make it go.

Now, fill it full of queer autistic intersex agender chimerical furries and fine tune everything so that none of them have to work for a living, and it seems like the neurodivergent queer utopia that you and your friends all sit around a cafe table daydreaming about, and then shake it up.

Add three conlangs and a map. Actually, make a 3D model of the interior of the ship, with mountains, rivers, lakes, forests, plains, an ice ring, and a sea...

And then write 11 novels about it (and counting), spanning from thousands of millions of years ago to today, complete with first contact with Earth through a psychic projection into the psyche of a transgeder plural system.

That's kind of what we're doing. Our latest book is released tomorrow, and covers the culture shock of the visiting Ktletaccete upon experiencing life in Portland, Oregon. And doing what they can to help improve the lives of their hosts.

But, while the Ktletaccete (our alien people) might be more advanced technologically than humans, and currently cultivate a culture that many of us would admire and dream of being a part of, they have a long, ancient, dark history. And they've also made some big errors fairly recently, too.

The Sunspot (or 'etekeyerrinwuf) is just one of a long line of Exodus Ships, and was forged in the compression wave of a nova. The origins of the Ktletaccete and what they used to look like has been long forgotten. Lost to countless generations of various different flavors of fascism and revolution. And the founding Crew of the Sunspot had tried to create a world without gender, with extreme diversity, a break from the goals of eugenics, and the protection of consent and autonomy. But in the process, they created a whole new gender, the AI Tutor, and failed to let go of the tools of eugenics, the evolutionary engines. And the whole series starts with the first attempts to uncover, recognize, and rectify those errors. The lessons already learned by the Crew at this point are that neurodiversity, disability, and physical dysphoria are among the things that cannot be bred or socialized out of the populace. The next thing they need to learn is that there shouldn't be any Crew.

But how do you own your mistakes and change all of that, and fight those that disagree with that change, without destroying the generational starship itself?

Anyway, all these stories are written from the perspective of being a plurality. We're a massive system with well managed DID, and are writing from our own experiences as an autistic, intersex, trigender trans feminine enby.

They're stories we want to tell ourselves and our children, to continue our internal culture, to make sense of the outer world and our inherent disconnect from it, and to be seen and remembered by the rest of the universe.

The Sunspot itself is an allegory for a system like ourselves. It doesn't follow the rules of an outworld country or planet. And the revolutionaries of the Sunspot have to work with their own reality in which the Elders cannot be killed and will not die without their own consent, imprisonment only breeds stronger resentment (dissociation is bad), and the vessel in which they all live is fragile and mortal.

So, the question for them is, "What other forms of justice, reparation, and safety protocols will actually work?"

And we don't have the answers, and we're still trying to figure it out, so the books keep coming.

Found family, friendship, asexual partnership, and the meaning of self and consciousness are all explored deeply and with a hopeful passion for living with others and experiencing the wonders of life.

Our websites:

And then, for a bonus! Our supervillains writing prompt story arc:

Crime-Cat and the Deliverator!

And if you want short descriptions of most of our books, you can find them in our pinned post.

writers, listen up...

i've fallen out of touch with the writeblr community a lot in the past few years, and i want to rectify that. the community aspect was what made me fall in love with tumblr, and what improved my writing for the better.

the golden days of my writing were when i was highly active and engaged in this wonderful community, but life and work and the horrors of self publishing have overtaken my energy in the past year. however, i have been really struggling with original writing, and i want to get back into the community here.

that said...

you write fantasy with queer characters

are an indie author

post frequently about your wips (taglists are a bonus!)

are queer

are a very active and friendly writer

if any of these apply

please, please reblog and tell me about your wip. gush over it. infodump. characters and ships and worldbuilding and plot, i want it all! this is your invitation to be as selfishly indulgent as possible. let's make some new friends and restore some community!!

boosts appreciated!

[ingridskogstad]

a commission for @fenmere! this was a very engaging project that i had a lot of fun with, all that vegetation and the unusual colors!

[ohthatphage]

In the book I am writing, I am the narrator and the... well, antagonist is not really the right word, but it's close. I'm the trickster spirit whose going to learn a valuable lesson while mucking about with mortals.

And there is this mentor of the two lead characters named Boamäo

Boamäo's name means "the meaning of evasion or escape". Rem chose it remself. Also, rem is a sailor.

In the scene we are currently writing, we learn that Boamäo has encountered me before, and resents the results of that interaction, and holds a grudge.

What we haven't figured out is what happened.

The rules work like this:

I am the process of Entropy itself given autonomous spiritual form.

I try to help people.

I have also been very deliberately coaxing the people of Boamäo's world to build their first generational starship, and that's had some unfortunate side effects on their cultures.

I have conscious power over the way that energy moves through my local vicinity. But in order to be conscious, I have to inhabit a sufficiently complex system.

I also cannot do anything to anyone without their subconscious consent. If they consciously revoke that consent, I must leave them alone. Not many people actually know this, however.

In order to be seen or heard, I must at least partially inhabit a person's neural system and cause them to hallucinate me.

In this story, I have a history of successfully convincing people that I want to help them, and coming to some sort of agreement as to how to do so. But then the effects of my efforts are later seen as disastrous.

Except in one set of cases: Any time a child is lost in the dark and I encounter them, I successfully lead them home without harm coming to them in any way.

So, knowing all of this, what would be a good and interesting previous incident between me and Boamäo?

[theinmara]

Ashwin the maybe not so Artless

Oh. Oh, wow. Oh.

Maybe I am the Linguist.

Maybe it's because I'm just strongly coconscious with a couple of my headmates, but it doesn't feel like I am. But I woke up today fronting strongly and I've got all these memories I'm reminiscing over as if they are mine.

Memories of writing our languages, Fenekere, Mäofrräo, and Inmararräo.

Memories of skulking r/conlangs with @fenmere while at work.

Memories of writing posts about our languages.

Memories of interjecting into @your-tutor-abacus' book with nerdery about our languages for it.

Shit. I even remember our first attempts at making a conlang in middle school, and studying up on Irish Gaelic, German, Korean, and Spanish around high school and college.

Just as strong and present and feeling like mine as my recent memories of writing my own book and living its events in our head.

So, I'm writing here in our system's blog instead of my own, because my own is dedicated to the kayfabe we created for my book.

In that blog, I write as if I'm living in a much, much smaller system with Sarah, Goreth, and @ohthatphage (who are real people, btw!) having traveled an uncounted number of parsecs across the universe through the Tunnel Apparatus, in a different part of Portland than we actually live. (If you go looking for the house we describe, you're not going to find it.)

I don't want to break that kayfabe there (@ashwin-the-artless). But, here? That's what this blog is for.

Honestly, it makes sense that I'd be the one to come forward and take the name Ashwin. The whole point of my book, The End of the Tunnel, is to tell the story of how our translation team got here to Earth to publish the Sunspot Chronicles for you.

But this explains why I've got such a strong handled on English idioms and my own colloquial U.S. English dialect and voice. I've actually been speaking this language for nearly 40 years, maybe longer.

In my book, I handwave it off as sharing the linguistic centers of Sarah and Goreth's brain, of course. Because that's actually a plausible and very common thing among systems.

In our actual system, the Inmara, that's how it works. Maybe with some active help from other headmates, even. All of the girls, who live in the right hemisphere of our brain, think in wordless thoughts, and get help from us dragons for translating them into English words.

Sarah and Goreth's fictional system was made to work the same way, but with 4 million fewer headmates.

Anyway. Hi!

Nice to meet you!

How are you?

~ Ashwin Pember, maybe not really the student of Metabang, maybe actually very much older than Metabang

[edrake]

X-Men ‘97 Episode 4 *spoilers ahead*

[fenmere]

We invite you to do the last two things with our stories. But especially the last thing. It's largely why we're writing them the way we are.

You can do the first thing. We can't stop you. But it's really boring, because our stories are really just using ideas that other science fiction authors have already devised and mixing them together in a different way.

But the last two activities could lead you to writing new stories, either fanfics or original fics, that we'd probably like to read.

It’s important to recognize the difference between “I’m nitpicking scientific facts because I’m willfully ignoring how suspension of disbelief, fantasy, and sci-fi work and just trying to be obnoxious about how unrealistic this is”, and “I’m nitpicking scientific facts because there are actually some intriguing worldbuilding possibilities if we use them that can add another dimension to the story”, and “I’m nitpicking scientific facts because considering the real-world implications of how this would happen are FUCKING HILARIOUS”

[fenmere]

The End of the Tunnel, by Ashwin Pember of the Inmara

What if being trans, autistic, and mad was OK, actually? (it is, but you know what we mean)

What if all the things that your headmates claimed to be were true?

What if you knew the location of alien technology that could reshape the surface of the Earth itself?

Would you use it? Or destroy it?

What if psychic powers were real but weird and kinda nerdy?

What if your headmate could actually make water boil faster?

What if you had a wormhole in your head?

What if you could escape but it meant leaving everyone behind?

What if you weren't human at all, but you kinda looked like one?

What if your friends believed you?

---

A web serial and novel, coming July 31, 2024 to http://www.sunspot.world/

[ashwin-the-artless]

At some point, I'm going to have to explain why I translated the first few books of the Sunspot Chronicles as if they were written by humans from the distant future.

I have my very, very good reasons for doing that, but I haven't figure out how to word them.

OK, maybe I'll give it a shot here, so I can look at what I write and figure out a better way to say it in the future:

I had three big, huge reasons for it.

First of all, I wanted immersion. I wanted readers on Earth to more easily imagine themselves in the otherwise very alien setting, and I've noticed that humans tend to like to imagine themselves as humans and tend to avoid imagining themselves as something else.

There are a lot of people here on Earth who appear to be humans, but are not. And they, like me and Goreth, like reading about not being human. But we're sort of a minority, and I was thinking of the broader populace for some reason.

Another reason is that the authors of those books were saying things about neurodiversity (and biodiversity, and diversity of identity) of people that are really important, and that apply to humans just about as much as they apply to Ktletaccete, and I wanted those messages to have punch.

And I think that using the word human as a replacement for mäofni ("person") accomplishes that.

Finally, over the course of cultural upheaval that those books cover we had a huge paradigm shift as a people. Well, several, in fact. But for hundreds of thousands of our years, we thought of ourselves as passengers on a colonial generational starship that might be going to a planet some day and who might just be the only people in the universe. And then we learned that we came from a predecessor ship, Feruukepikape (the Terra Supreme or Magnificent Dirt), and what we were was a result of a backlash against their breeding programs, and that also our ancient and forgotten ancestors that predate that ship called themselves Ktletaccete. And then, slowly, we began to call ourselves Ktletaccete, as we noticed more of more of us reverting back to a common body type once we ascended to the Network.

And I wanted to convey to readers just how big of a shift that was.

There.

That's the explanation.

Maybe some day I can make it shorter and more concise.

Also, Ni'a fucking knew I was going to do this somehow, and they did explain that in the text of their book, Outsider. And I found myself leaving their explanation in there, rendered almost exactly as they'd intended. I felt weird translating that bit.

[your-tutor-abacus]

The Color of the Sunspot's Milk

We don't drink milk on the Sunspot.

It's not really a thing for us.

We did not evolve from mammals, so we do not produce milk ourselves, typically. Actually, our life can't really be divided up into the same categories as Terran life, anyway, and the Evolutionary Engines that are used to create people now produce such a diversity of biological development that we can't use sweeping statements like that meaningfully. But, we strongly suspect based on evidence at hand that the Ktletaccete did not originally have anything like mammary glands.

And, on the Sunspot specifically, we do not consume anything produced by animals. It just never even occurred to the Founding Crew to set up the ship and our culture that way. The ecological balance of the Garden requires that we let the fauna live as naturally as possible without interference from people. So, we do not milk animals.

But it turns out that we drink something that is kinda of vaguely like milk. It often serves a similar culinary utility, particularly in baking.

We know this because we have been talking to our Earth custodians of the Terran Tunnel Apparatus, and they have tried a product they call Ryze that is an approximation of what we use on the Sunspot, and we've been trading notes.

So, in the search for accommodation, the ancestors of the Sunspot Ktletaccete developed a mixture of pureed fungus and algae that could provide a very young child or a disabled or elderly person with nutrients that might not otherwise be readily available to them. And we have been calling this something that our translators have decided to call "formula". We understand that this echoes the term many of you use for a fortified milk that you feed your infants, and that's acceptable.

But our formula comes in many varieties, customized for each person's needs and even each use they might have for it.

Fungal and algae farming has always been abundant and easy for us, so it is the least expensive food to create. It may not have been central to the diet of ancient Ktletaccete, but it has become pivotal to survival in space aboard our Exodus Ships. And now we use it in nearly everything.

We also eat a variety of nuts, fruits, grains, tubers, leaves, stalks, and other vegetable matter (or their Sunspot equivalents to what these words mean to you). And some of those things provide proteins and lipids that compliment what is provided by our various formulas, so depending on how we combine it we can create foods that sometimes resemble your breads, quiches, meat loafs, stews, etc.

But, also, Artisan crafted beverages is a huge thing here, which I understand some of your cultures might relate to. And our formula is central to that.

So, what are the main differences between our formula and milk? And what are the differences between our formula and something like Ryze?

Well, obvious, our formula is made entirely differently from milk, and does not share it's color. It's not white or even white-ish, typically.

Though some varieties of it can come close to white so that Artisans can add vibrant colors to it more easily without it turning brown, but the processing tends to remove a lot of nutrients from it, so it's not terribly popular outside of that visual utility.

It's also usually somewhat low on lipids, though those are definitely added for many baking purposes.

It's more of a suspension than an emulsion most of the time, as a result. But again, that varies on it's purpose.

And because of that, and the fact that it's made from fungus and algae, makes it very similar to things like Ryze, which is apparently currently available for something you call "a lot of money" by purchasing it over your Network (or Internet, as you say).

There are other drinks like Ryze, but it so happens that the girlfriend of our counterparts purchased Ryse specifically, so that is the one that they are trying. In particular, they are trying Ryze Matcha, as opposed to Ryse Coffee, since we don't have anything remotely like a coffee bean on the Sunspot, but we do have a green stimulant kind of vaguely like Matcha that can be added to our formula.

We can't really truly compare the sensations of drinking our various forumlas to drinking Ryze, because there is an enormous physical gulf between the Earth and the Sunspot, and we cannot transport either liquid nor taste buds and nervous systems across that distance. And translating words, even with in the same language, between two individuals' personal experiences is inherently inaccurate to begin with.

But we can make some conjectures.

As far as flavor is concerned, we can infer some things. Humans are omnivors with a variety of sensitivities to flavors, and apparently our counterparts are something called a supertaster. They are more highly sensitive to flavor than their typical peers.

They report that Ryze Matcha tastes "green". Not just that it is green in color and therefore the flavor it has can be described as green, but that it reminds them of other green things that they have eaten. There is a bit of a spinach flavor, they report, but its very faint. There is also a faint green tea flavor. We don't know what either of these things really mean, but we know that spinach is a leafy vegetable and that green tea is also made from leaves. But then, they also say that these flavors are not like either of these things, either. They're similar but different.

More specifically, they report that Ryze Matcha does not taste like most mushrooms they've eaten. In fact, it bears a closer resemblance to the flavors they get when they drink from an old jug of water that maybe has some green stuff growing on the inside of it.

"Why would you do that?" I asked them.

And they replied with, "Carelessness."

Anyway, this seems relatively in keeping with our experiences with formula. Usually, it tastes kind of like some other vegetable matter, but different. But, whether those ways are similar to how humans experience Ryse and vegetables on Earth, we really don't know.

What we do know for sure is color. That's something that can be measured quite precisely via the wavelengths of light.

Of course, we may perceive that color differently than you, but thanks to technological measuring devices and mathematics, we can use the same names for the same wavelengths of light. So, when I say that something is green on the Sunspot, you will be able to trust that if you somehow visited your neurology will interpret that thing as what you know of as green, adjusting for the difference in our ambient lighting, of course.

And, yes, some formulas we use are nearly as green as Ryze Matcha, and they are gorgeous.

But most formula ends up in a wide spectrum of color between what you call khaki and a deep vibrant purple, thanks to the dominant colors of most fungi and algae found on the Sunspot.

Our sun produces more ultraviolet light than yours does and there is less shielding between it and the surface of the Garden, so most of our plant life has developed its own shielding, which comes in varieties of purple. Mostly, it's the algae that carries the purple coloring. Most of our fungus isn't green, either, but even when it is, the purples of the algae shift the colors to brown when mixed with it.

But green mosses, ferns, and algae are found in the darkest, deepest parts of our forests, where the sun never reaches the ground directly, and we find that color to be captivating, so our ancestors bred a small variety of green food algae strains specifically for culinary variety.

And the flavor of that stuff is definitely what we could call green.

[ohthatphage]

Making Friends with Entropy

I just wrote this three chapter story for request via @a-system-of-giving and their AO3 plural writing exchange. It's original, as requested, to be released on AO3 under the Vanderkemp's names (a group of system members who are our AO3 voice), but with my voice and narration.

It is perhaps a little too canon to the Tunnel Apparati Diaries. It's basically the prequel.

I don't know if I can publish it to AO3 without it functioning as a promotion for that writing. So, I'm publishing it here first, and then to our own website, completely free to read. And then, after reviewing AO3's policies, we might post it there as archived work.

If it looks like doing that may be a risk to them, and against their policy, then I'll write something else for the exchange. There's time, and this work represents 9,267 in one day. Shouldn't be a problem.

I'd like to thank @ashwin-the-artless for starting the Tunnel Apparati Diaries and then coaxing me to write for myself.

First chapter is in this post. Second and third chapters will be reblogs, and then Fenmere will reblog that. Enjoy!

Chapter 1: Bedtime

In the early 21s century of Earth, on a small farm in Thurston county, Washington, in the United States of America, the social construct known as Jeremy Schmidt spent one late evening pushing a plastic truck around on the carpet with city streets printed on it that he’d inherited from his father.

It wasn’t his favorite game.

He would rather have been on his mountain in the back yard, bathing the sky with gouts of flame and scaring errant knights away from his twin sister, who was mysteriously human.

He was not supposed to be awake.

It was 11 pm, and a school night.

A few years later, he would learn that most of his classmates stayed up much later than that, but he was not yet socially aware enough to pick up on their conversations. He was still too preoccupied by making sense of other things, such as why his hands didn’t have claws, or what his tail was doing when the Sunday school teacher was busy trying to convince everyone that they all had another bigger father or something absurd like that.

He thought every seven year old’s bedtime was 8pm. Similar to how he thought he was a boy.

Which is to say that bedtime and boyhood, and even humanity, were rules imposed by adults, and everyone like him was expected to follow them.

In any case, he couldn’t sleep that night, and instead of lying in bed with the lights off, terrified of all the darkest corners of his room, he was taking his mom’s advice in a way that she probably hadn’t intended.

But, he had just figured something out, and was pretty excited about it. And playing truck on the floor was his way of testing this idea.

When an adult gives you conflicting rules, maybe you get to decide how to interpret them and which rule takes precedence in a given situation. After all, rules don’t just come from adults, they also come from the world itself, such as the rule that if you trip and fall you will, nine times out of ten, scrape your knee and hand. And if you have a good sense of rules, maybe better than anybody else, you can explain how you were following the most important rules.

And the way this situation worked was this.

He was afraid of the dark.

He was supposed to get enough sleep for school. That was a rule.

But if there was any darkness near him, he couldn’t sleep. That was also a rule.

So it was ultimately up to him to figure out how to sleep at night.

And for a while he did that by sleeping with the lights on.

So his parents left his room’s lights on when he went to bed, and he’d been sleeping with the lights on since he was three. But, every other birthday, they’d coax him to try sleeping with one more of his lights turned off, because it was supposed to be healthier to sleep in the dark.

So, now, he only had his clip-on reading lamp on the head of his bed turned on as a nightlight, and his parents were telling him that after his next birthday, he was supposed to switch that out for a softer, genuine plug-in nightlight that would be placed in the wall across the room from his bed.

But the thing was, he was pretty sure he wasn’t sleeping at all at night. Just lying in bed absolutely terrified.

His parents claimed he did sleep, and that they checked on him and he didn’t notice. But he only ever remembered being awake and being extremely sleepy all day, and it was getting worse.

And his parents could see that he was struggling. And though the way they usually did things was to tell him what to do, and then restrict his privileges until he did that thing, after long enough, sometimes three or so years of fruitless restrictions, they’d sometimes try to help him meet their goals for him.

So, recently his mom had given him another rule, and this rule had sort of made things snap into place for him.

Initially, she hadn’t worded it like a rule.

It had been a conversation that had happened earlier that night, in fact.

At seven pm, he’d been told that his mom wanted to talk to him about something before bed, she wanted to help him with a trouble he was having, and he should be ready to talk to her at seven thirty. They gave him this “heads up” because they had long ago figured out that he needed time to “shift gears” and adjust to change from the usual routines. And, to compensate for this conversation, he’d be allowed to doddle a little on his way to bed, because he might need to be brushing his teeth at 8pm and instead of ten to eight, and tonight that would be OK.

He’d found that he was eager to have this talk, so he was ready five minutes before the time it was supposed to happen. And he spent that five minutes talking amongst himself about what the subject would be.

Which is to say, he talked to his imaginary twin sister about it.

She had no idea what the subject would be, either, but she was worried it was going to be about their eating habits.

He pointed out that if their parents wanted to talk about their eating habits, they’d schedule this talk for before dinner, not after it.

And she said that made sense.

Then she asked if she could talk to their mom, too, but he shook his head quickly and sadly, and said, “She doesn’t know about you.”

“And she doesn’t have to!” his sister, who didn’t have a name yet, replied. “She’ll just think I’m you!”

“That scares me,” he said, though. “She might figure it out. You talk different.”

“I do not!”

“Shsh.”

He’d realized at the last minute that they were both using his mouth at that point, and didn’t want to explain what kind of game he was playing to his mom if she’d heard.

But he was glad for the little conversation anyway, because it had helped make that five minutes pass more quickly.

Then his mom came into the room and sat down on the floor with him.

“Jeremy?” she said. “Can I ask you something I’ve asked before?”

He pretended to look up at her face and nodded, eyes blinking closed.

“What is it exactly that you’re afraid of at night? Is it the dark itself? Or what’s in the dark?”

Oh, it was this conversation!

This had been a conversation he actually wanted to have, but he was also, he was realizing, kind of afraid of it itself.

So, unfortunately, he fell silent and his mind went blank. He couldn’t even feel his sister thinking or having emotions. So he looked down at the floor and sort of shook his head and sort of shrugged.

“Are you afraid of having nightmares if it’s dark?” his mom asked.

He vaguely remembered his first nightmare. He’d been really small at the time, and all he could remember was waking up screaming, and both his parents coming into his room to see if he was OK, and then asking him if he had a nightmare. And he thought he could remember nodding eventually, and that’s how he knew he’d had a nightmare.

After that, he’d had nightmares he could remember. Recurring nightmares about being chased by his grandma’s dog, or falling off a cliff, or finding only darkness in his parents’ closet.

Maybe it was that last one that made him afraid of the dark. But, also, he knew that when it was dark and there was a shadow on the floor or in the corner, he was always certain that it was dangerous. That maybe there was a monster there.

Whatever a real monster actually was. Like, maybe a triffid or that invisible thing on the alien planet, or a troll, like in the movies his dad watched and laughed at. But different. Real.

Oh, he was thinking again! He did kind of like it when a prompt from his mom got his thoughts going again.

“I think it’s monsters,” he found himself saying.

“Ah,” his mom said, glancing toward his door, presumably in the direction of his dad. She gave him a sad, rueful smile and asked, “Are they like the monsters in your dad’s movies?”

“Kind of?” he said. “But more like the monsters that want to be in my nightmares.”

“What do you mean?” she asked.

“Well,” he explained. “When I have my falling off a cliff nightmare, I’m being chased by something, but I can’t look at it or it will be real. And it will get me. And then there’s the cliff. And I can’t stop myself from going off the cliff. And then I land in my bed and it shakes.”

“Oh, I’ve had that very same dream!” his mom exclaimed.

“Really?” he didn’t believe her, but he let her tell him she did. He knew better than to outright question his parents. And maybe she’d say something cool anyway.

“Oh, yes. It’s actually really common. A lot of people have that same dream,” she explained. “I’ve been reading a book about dreams and what they mean. And that one’s supposed to mean you’re avoiding something. Or something like that. But, there’s a cool part in the book about something called lucid dreaming that I think could help you, and something my grandma, your grandma’s mother, told me. It might help you stop having that nightmare, and maybe you won’t have to be afraid of the dark anymore.”

“Really?” he asked again, actually looking up to her eyes this time. He was hopeful. This sounded actually cool. Like maybe he’d be taught a super power. Even if he was also skeptical about it. But he only glanced at her eyes for a split second, long enough to make that emotional contact and check her sincerity, but not long enough to make him hurt.

“Yes, I think so,” she said. “My grandma told me that the secret to beating a nightmare is to turn and face it. If you have something that is chasing you, you need to stop and turn around and face it, and tell it to be your friend. Because it’s only a dream, and if you do that you take control and it can’t hurt you.”

This sounded totally bonkers to him. The idea of doing that made his heart race. He couldn’t at all imagine doing that.

“But what if it gets me?” he asked.

“Tell it that it can’t,” she said. “Say to it, in no uncertain terms, ‘you cannot get me, you are not allowed.’ Make it a rule.”

“No uncertain terms?” he asked.

She nodded, “No uncertain terms. ‘You cannot get me, you are not allowed.’ In fact, you can tell it I said so. It’s my rule. Your nightmares aren’t allowed to get you.”

“I don’t think they care about you,” he told her.

“Well,” she said. “The important thing is that it’s your rule. It’s your mind, and your dream, and you make the rules. That’s how it works. It cannot hurt you if you don’t want it to.”

“Really?”

“Yes, really,” she nodded. “This works for falling off the cliff, too. If you still can’t face the monster behind you, when you fall off the cliff, you can fly instead. Just spread your arms wide, close your eyes in your dream, and imagine going up instead of going down. Imagine the ground falling away from you.”

“How do I do that though? I can’t control my dreams!” his voice maybe got a little loud.

“Well, you can, though,” she said. “It’s a skill, but you can learn it. That’s what the book I’m reading meant by ‘lucid dreaming’. It’s when you realize you’re in a dream and that you can do anything you want.”

“How?”

“Well, usually, what you do is before you go to bed every night, you tell yourself that you’re going to have a lucid dream,” she said. “It doesn’t usually work right away. But it helps, and if you do it repeatedly, you’ll eventually start to make it work. And then, you keep a lookout for things that tell you that you’re dreaming, like a monster chasing you.”

“What do you mean?” he felt like he was supposed to ask this question when she paused, so he did. He knew what she meant.

“Well, monsters don’t actually chase you when you’re awake, do they?” she asked.

This was becoming a long conversation and he could feel the darkness closing in as the night fell. It felt dangerous.

He shook his head, but then stopped and said, “Kensington chases me.”

“Yeah, but only when you have a peanut butter and jelly sandwich or a carrot in your hand, right?”

“Yeah, like I’m still a toddler or something.”

“He’s a naughty airedale,” she said.

“Only when I have a sandwich or a carrot, though,” he agreed. “But in my dreams he just chases me.”

“Exactly,” she said, patting his knee. “So, if he’s chasing you when you aren’t holding food, you know you’re dreaming, right? Or if you’re being chased by something that you don’t even know what it is because you haven’t looked at it.”

“Yeah.”

“Also. Can you tell you’re not dreaming right now?”

“Oh, yeah. I’m definitely not dreaming right now!”

“That’s another way for you to check,” she said. “Some people have a hard time telling whether they’re dreaming or not, because their brains work like that. Maybe sometimes they actually dream when they’re awake, too. So it makes things complicated. But because you know you’re awake when you’re actually awake, if you ever find yourself wondering if you’re awake or in a dream, you’re probably dreaming. But, then, ask yourself if you’re being chased by something that can’t be real, just to make sure. And if the answer is yes, then you know it’s a dream, and then you make the rules.”

“Oh.”

And that’s what she’d told him.

The important part was, “And then you make the rules.” That was so crucial. That’s where the actual power lay. That was permission. And it didn’t just come from his mom, but from a book and from his great grandmother. So it was extra right.

But, and as he brushed his teeth he thought about this, it was the part about how some people dreamed when they were even awake that made everything click into place for him.

Because maybe the monsters behind the darkness he felt were there when he was lying in bed were really dream monsters. So, he should have power over them if he faced them.

Which was why, at 11pm, he was brazenly playing with his truck on the printed town carpet with only his bed lamp on.

He was playing innocent, to try to lure a monster out so that he could face it.

He’d started at 9pm, after laying in his bed for a while thinking more about what his mom had said. It had taken about that long for him to formulate his plan and then work up the courage to carry it out.

And after he forced his body to move and climb down out of his bed, he played with a few different toys, getting into the routine of them to let the time pass, because, it turned out, the monsters weren’t brave enough to face him, apparently.

But he wasn’t playing make-believe with his toys. He was just pushing them through the motions of play, like he used to do as a toddler. Making the wheels spin. Feeling the changes in friction against the texture of the carpet as he made them turn corners and skid. Transforming them into robots and then back into cars and trucks, and appreciating their construction and the way the hinges worked.

And his sister just watched, because that’s usually what she did.

And time did pass really quickly then.

And it was around 11pm that he started to wonder if monsters were even real.

But, the really important part about 11pm is that that’s when his parents finally fell fast asleep and were unlikely to hear him talking to someone or something. And while he didn’t know that, I did.

So that’s when I stepped out of the darkness.

[mindblowingscience]

Aurora records in royal chronicles from Korea show that during the 'Maunder Minimum' between 1645 and 1715, the sun's solar cycles became several years shorter than they are today. The sun's solar cycles were once around three years shorter than they are today, a new analysis of centuries-old Korean chronicles reveals. This previously unknown anomaly occurred during a mysterious solar epoch known as the "Maunder Minimum," more than 300 years ago.  The sun is constantly in a state of flux. Our home star cycles through periods of increased activity, known as solar maximum, when solar storms become more frequent and powerful, as well as spells of reduced activity, known as solar minimum, when solar storms almost completely disappear. It currently takes about 11 years for the sun to complete a solar cycle, from minimum to maximum and back again. Scientists can track the sun's progress through a solar cycle by counting the number of sunspots on the star's surface, which appear more frequently in the lead-up to and during solar maximum. But just as the sun fluctuates within individual cycles, historical sunspot records show that over longer periods, spanning decades or centuries, the overall output of solar cycles can also rise and fall. The Maunder Minimum, sometimes referred to as the Grand Solar Minimum, was a period of greatly reduced solar activity between 1645 and 1715 when sunspots "effectively disappeared," Scott McIntosh, a solar physicist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Colorado who was not involved in the recent research, told Live Science in an email.

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[aeterna-auroral-avenger]

9 Fandom Peeps to get to know better

Tagged by @benevolentgodloki thinks for thanking of me, Pirate!

3 ships you like: oh man uhhhh let’s see. Microscope (Scott Lang/Hope van Dyne), Scoundress (Han Solo/Leia Organa), and Zutara (Zuko/Katara)

First ship ever: First ever? I guess that would be…Simba and Nala? Waaaaaaaaay before I even knew what shipping was 😂

Last song that you heard: Unknown Stuntman by Blake Shelton

Favorite childhood book: That would either be one of the many Nancy Drew books or The Chronicles of Narnia

Currently reading: Dead Eye (The Gray Man series book 4) by Mark Greaney

Currently watching: The Women’s College World Series tbh

Currently consuming: air

Currently craving: chocolate cake

No pressure tags: @trapezequeen @cyphers-and-sunspots @bisexualcoltseavers (I don’t even know if you like these things but I’m tagging you anyway 😂) @indoraptorgirlwind @sobeautifullyobsessed @azaraspirit and anyone else who wants to play

[fenmere]

This has us thinking about our fictional version of the Sunspot and the culture there. What would their host and guest protocols be like?

See, in our actual inworld, we each mimic the outworld cultures we identify with best and enjoy re-enacting the most.

But, in the fictional version, it's a generational starship with 3.6 million living people on it (and 50-some billion souls ascended to the Network, but we're not talking about them). It's basically a small country that has been traveling through space all alone with no contact with any other cultures. And, it's a post scarcity society, and has been for over 131 millennia.

The culture has absolutely changed over time, yes. And it's divided between the different cities that exist in the Sunspot. But, generally speaking, there have never been the pressures for survival that have shaped the typical rules of hospitality on Earth.

What would form instead?

We're thinking it's all based on art critique and accommodating disabilities.

This is getting long, but let us explain.

First of all, part of the story is that eugenics doesn't work. No matter how advanced the technology, we believe that disabilities will never be abolished. Doing so will only result in extinction through lack of sufficient diversity. And the Founders of the Sunspot knew this and created a society that accommodates disabilities rather than attempts to eradicate them (mostly - it's flawed in many ways and they're working on it).

So, one of the big things is that everyone is extremely diverse in physiology and psychology, and the culture is built to accommodate that instead of to ostracize people. To the point that if someone still doesn't feel like they fit in, they're given the autonomy to check out of society, disappear into the wilderness or fallow decks, and still receive accommodations.

So, when it comes to hosts and guests, there is a negotiation process for learning about each other's needs and where they might conflict with each other, and how to make sure you're both happy and comfortable. There is a certain amount of deference to the host, because it is their space and they can revoke their consent for the guest to occupy it. And there is always a place for the guest to go, because the ship is severely underpopulated (for reasons explained in the story) and there are plenty of resources.

And neither the host nor the guest are expected to do any cleaning, because the construction nanites do that. I mean, you still might move your dishes to the cleaning device, but not much more than that. And that little work is, again, negotiated between host and guest on a case by case basis, because accommodating needs is more important than anything. Host still gets ultimate veto, though.

Now, the art critique thing.

Since nobody needs to work to survive, people tend to live their lives exploring life. And a lot of times that involves creativity and crafting. And because of a certain philosophy of the Founders, it has been encourage to look at every skill in life as a potential Art, including simply washing the dishes instead of letting the nanites do it. Anything you want to do can be your Art.

So, when you're getting to know a new person, it's common to want to show of what you are into or are doing. Just to get to know each other. So, at the very basic level, there is the ritual of taking turns sharing your Arts with each other. This is Sunspot small talk.

But as you're really getting to know each other, you'll want to know each other's opinions of your work. And that's where the rules of Art Critique come in. And again, this intersects with accommodating disabilities, because you need to be considerate of each other's talents, impairments, and feelings.

And we really liked our community college art professor's direction regarding critiques, so we've wrapped those up in our fictional culture here.

Saving you from the details, the rules of critique are designed to be constructive but considerate, and to always couch your observations and opinions about the other person's work in phrasing that emphasizes that they are your point of view and changeable, and offered in the spirit of helping them to understand how their work is affecting you, so that they are in charge of deciding how it might also affect other people. And then you also offer them plenty of opportunity to explain what they're trying to do with it, before you give your critique and after. That way, it's a discussion of how they might improve their skills and understanding with your own (very limited) understanding.

These rules shift and very a bit from city to city, and over the generations, so it's not perfect and doesn't always result in a good conversation. But when people click over them, it can be great fun, and everyone feels really good. (And we mean this in real life, too, and know it from experience, it's just that this is an integral part of hospitality on the Sunspot.)

So, hospitality on the Sunspot is a mix of these two major social forces, in this way.

So, then, in the spirit of the original post, the question arises: what would happen if a delegation of ambassadors from the Sunspot visited Earth and stayed at various people's houses?

Well, we can tell you that!

Because, despite how we said our actual inworld culture has assimilated outworld values, our system's autistic needs have superseded and dominated all that.

And guess what we just described above.

Autistic culture as we have learned it from other autistics.

So, when we go visit somebody else's house, this is what is happening. A somewhat informed delegation of ambassadors (our coconscious crew of frontrunners) are visiting another culture and negotiation between advocating for our own needs and our impulses to share our Arts and learn about our host's Arts, and whatever directives our host has from their own culture.

And when someone comes over to visit, we do what we can but let them help out however they want, because Hailing Scales that's wonderful! Please, we're chronically ill and disabled! Thank you!

I love learning about other culture's Houseguest Protocols but I hate hate hate when they don't match up cause like

I (PNW Canadian, raised with etiquette from my old British great-grandparents) sleeping over: Can I help with dinner. Can I do the dishes. PLEASE let me do something useful. Im sorry I'm here. I can sleep on the floor it's fine. You don't need to cook for me I can go outside and drink pond water. Do you hate me

My friend (Indian, raised by entire extended family in Dubai) hosting me: Why won't you let me feed you. Do you need more coffee. Am I doing something wrong. Do you have enough blankets? I will buy you warmer clothes. Here, you can sleep in my room, I'll take the couch. Why are you crying? Oh God am I a bad host