#what if you were an interviewing reporter or researcher of some sort

[hellalugosi]

Interview with the Vampire - Season 2, Episode 5

Candyman (1992)

[twopoppies]

To piggyback off your journalist anon…as a current journalist of more than 10 years, I have to call BS. Maybe that’s how things are in the entertainment journalism space, but it’s patently false elsewhere. To write without a basis in truth would be a violation of ethics. In fact, it’s on us to prove that we have enough backing to say what we say. That’s the point of attributions. And when you don’t have attributions, you better be confident that what you’re putting down isn’t going to get you sued and that you have some kind of proof, whether that’s notes, pictures, data, etc. It’s encouraged of journalists to save their interview tapes in the face of any potential accusation that what was written was not said. It’s dangerous to suggest a true journalist would make things up just for the hell of it, especially in the current climate.

Now you will see outlets aggregate quotes from different sources and paste them together indiscriminately. But most of the time the outlets doing that are not the ones tasked with actually reporting the truth and keeping the citizenry informed of what’s going on in the world. As always, check your sources!

That said, as a journalist, you have to be wary of your subjects and their motives. They don’t always have the best intentions, or they may not always be able to share whole truths. That’s the distinction we need to be clear about. As a journalist, it’s important to note that a subject actually said something, because that’s our way of putting the onus on the subject to represent themselves accurately. We report on what’s been said to us. We do all the research we can to ensure we’re not hoodwinking our audience. And then we publish.

And yes it’s true we don’t give any PR machines prior approval of articles. That would be a breach of our journalistic integrity. Our job is to report, not be hand-fed information from someone whose job it is to put a positive spin on things.

Hi, darling. Thank you so much for this. My impression from the previous anon was that they were talking about gossip and entertainment media (like People magazine or the Sun. Maybe even an outlet like Rolling Stone). But I would hope a journalist reporting on more important topics is doing the sort of things you say.

What I’ve heard from others is that there’s a fine line in celebrity reporting where a journalist wants to tell the truth as they see it, but (as you said) the subject may not be telling the whole truth, or they are concerned about no longer having access to the artist or others under the same label if they don’t follow the “suggested narrative.”

I suppose there’s a little give and take either way.

But I really appreciate your perspective! And thank you for the lovely compliment. I’m touched you check in here to catch up. 🩷

In reference to this

[aparrotandaqrow]

A lot of folks, especially in the Jewish community, have mixed feelings about Harris picking Walz as her VP over Shapiro. Some wanted Shapiro for the Jewish representation, especially a Jew who is Zionist and yet decries Netanyahu and expresses the desire for peace that so many of us have. Some worried that having two Jews in the White House would provoke yet more antisemitism and possibly even sink the ticket, given the massive surge in leftist antisemitism recently.

Many of us were frustrated and angered by seeing leftists campaign for Walz being the pick over Shapiro more or less entirely because Shapiro is Jewish—and felt a sense of dismay that perhaps Harris had caved to the antisemites.

I'm a Jew but I'm also a Minnesotan. I was glad to see the Walz pick for many reasons unrelated to my Jewish identity or Israel. But I want to also submit that Walz, uniquely among the politicians Harris could have picked, brings something to the table that is desperately important both to the nation more broadly and our community more specifically.

I present as Exhibit A, this archived NYT profile of Walz from back in 2008:

The teacher, Tim Walz, was determined that even in this isolated place, perhaps especially in this isolated place, this county seat of 9,000 that was hours away from any city in any direction, the students should learn how and why a society can descend into mass murder.

...

“The Holocaust is taught too often purely as a historical event, an anomaly, a moment in time,” Mr. Walz said in a recent interview, recalling his approach. “Students understood what had happened and that it was terrible and that the people who did this were monsters. “The problem is,” he continued, “that relieves us of responsibility. Obviously, the mastermind was sociopathic, but on the scale for it to happen, there had to be a lot of people in the country who chose to go down that path. You have to make the intellectual leap to figure out the reasons why.”

My ancestors immigrated to the US around the turn of the century from Mariampol, Lithuania and Luboml, Ukraine. When the Nazis arrived in those towns some 40 years later, the Jews there (many of whom would have been my ancestors' relatives) were massacred not by Nazi soldiers, but by their neighbors, who welcomed the Nazis with open arms. You cannot truly help protect the Jewish community from antisemitism if you don't understand this crucial detail about how the Holocaust happened.

So Mr. Walz took his students [...] and assigned them to study the conditions associated with mass murder. What factors, he asked them to determine, had been present when Germans slaughtered Jews, Turks murdered Armenians, the Khmer Rouge ravaged their Cambodian countrymen?

...

They read about civil war, colonialism and totalitarian ideology. They worked with reference books and scholarly reports, long before conducting research took place instantly online.

...

When the students finished with the past, Mr. Walz gave a final exam of sorts. He listed about a dozen current nations — Yugoslavia, Congo, some former Soviet republics among them — and asked the class as a whole to decide which was at the greatest risk of sliding into genocide. Their answer was: Rwanda. The evidence was the ethnic divide between Hutus and Tutsis, the favoritism toward Tutsis shown by the Belgian colonial regime, and the previous outbreaks of tribal violence. Mr. Walz awarded high marks. The next April, in 1994, Mr. Walz heard news reports of a plane carrying the Rwandan president, Juvenal Habyarimana, being shot down. [...] Mr. Walz’s students, now juniors, saw their prophecy made into flesh and blood.

...

“You have to understand what caused genocide to happen,” Mr. Walz said, with those grim anniversaries in mind. “Or it will happen again.”

Y'all, Tim Walz is not Jewish. He's a white guy who grew up in Nebraska and then lived in one of Minnesota's smaller cities, up until going to Congress and then the Governor's mansion. No, he does not provide us with representation, nor will he ever truly understand what it feels like to be Jewish in America in 2024.

But he gets it. He understands not just academic history but people, and understands that "Never Again" is only feasible if we look at root causes, and strive to nip the factors that lead to genocide in the bud. We have all understood that allyship for Jews is only meaningful if you're here defending us before it gets violent.

Governor Walz represents an opportunity to have someone in the White House, on the national stage, who understands the big picture and the history well enough to actually be able to navigate incredibly complex and painful issues like the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, like the regional conflicts within the Arab world, like the experience of progressive Jews in the US who would have found ourselves ostracized and alienated from increasingly hostile leftist movements. I cannot begin to explain how rare it is to have a politician at this level who also carries an experienced teacher's grasp of both history and empathy.

Maybe Josh Shapiro would have also brought that. But honestly, I'm not so sure. Walz may not be Jewish. But I think we're going to find that he'll be an ally, and a deeply learned and wise one at that. And I think we really need that right now.

[82mitsu]

{18Trip} The 18 Questions Corner - Lu Liguang

This is a translation for the 18 questions interview uploaded on the official Youtube channel. I suggest to read this translation alongside it!

Note: P stands for "Player", this series has a voiced male & female character for the player. The interviews are conducted by the male player in this case.

P: 18 questions for the Tourism Ward Mayors! We look forward to your cooperation!

Liguang: Let’s settle this already.

What’s your name?

I’m Lu Liguang.

How old are you?

23 years old.

Tell us about your occupation!

Company manager and all sorts of things on the side.

What’s the first thing you do when waking up in the morning?

Feeding my bunny. 

Anything you’re particular about with lunch?

Need to eat with chopsticks.

What pops up in your mind when it comes to “evening”?

…Evening showers.

What’s your routine before bed?

Listening to reports from my subordinates. 

Where do you start with washing your body?

My head- why though?

What’s essential when leaving for a trip?

Having some cash on hand. 

What do you check before traveling somewhere?

I’m interested in what kind of festivals each place has. 

What’s your favorite method of transportation for traveling? 

I don’t have a preference, but I often go by car. 

What’s one item you’d bring to a deserted island?

…A hair tie. 

Please give us some fanservice! 

✧・ﾟ: *You want me to spoil you even more? ...Then, get closer to me.*:・ﾟ✧ …Oi, what the hell’s up with this script? 

Who’s someone you’d lean on for support? 

Oguro. 

Who would you swap bodies with for a day?

If it’s by force, I guess Night Squad’s Natsume. 

What would you want to do as them?

Gaining experience on how to manage a bar seems like a good time. Not to mention all the rumors in town I can get my hands on.

Pass on a message to your roommates!

Kamina, appreciate you being a proxy for looking after my bunny.

Tell us from the heart, what’s a “journey” to you? 

Something like market research with relaxation peppered in, I suppose.

P: Thank you, those were all 18 questions!

Liguang: Sigh… was this enough to satisfy you?

Liguang: HAMA’s 4th Ward Mayor, Lu Liguang. My base of operations is in Chinatown and the neighborhood surrounding it. In the case that there’s anything you can’t settle on the surface, come to me for a consultation. I’ll deal with it behind the scenes, one way or another.

[sakurachan7734]

November 20th Anomaly behavior difference report

Subject SCP 1096-1

(researcher Felix is Jackson’s abuser)

Foundation staff have noticed that subject 1096-1 has been acting rather strangely with such behaviors as

Trying to hide whenever researcher Felix entered the room and screaming at the top of its lungs whenever he gets close to it 

Not letting anyone touch it

Trying to run away whenever a adult but will follow the research Felix to a secluded room with no cameras no questions asked 

Has been crying and in a more docile state more often

Dr [DATEA REMOVED] and Dr [REDACTED] tried interviewing SCP 1096-1 but it refused to answer any questions here is the audio log of what happened

Dr [DATE REMOVED]: so 1096-1 we have noticed that your behavior has changed exactly a month after you got here which was in August right? 

Jackson can be heard running into the corner

Jackson: yes 

Dr [REDACTED]: so we have noticed that you act very aggressive towards your researcher, Felix can you explain why this sudden behavior change? Plus you were screaming at him to get away from you on several occasions

Jackson:…..I……I can’t talk about that…

Dr [DATE REMOVED]: why?

Jackson: I just can’t 

Dr [DATA REMOVED]: listen we don’t wanna hurt you. We just wanna get some answers to why you’re acting so strange.

Jackson:* mocking* don’t want to hurt me….yea right i’m not believing your Bullshit continuously, putting me through tests and putting an electric fence around me like I’m some sort of dog why don’t you just force me into gross actions?! Like he is doing!!

Dr [REDACTED]: what are you talking about?

Jackson: you just want to take advantage of me like he is and then bribe me with more time with my parents to get me to shut up 

The recording ends with SCP 1096-1 shrieking and attacking the doctors then curled up in the corner and sobbed and refused to answer any more questions the staff have been suspecting that research. Felix has been abusing his power with SCP 1096-1 but they can’t prove it because it is refusing to answer any questions 



[cloverdisclosed]

[cis fem, she/her] Welcome to Aurora Bay, CLOVER NATELA. I couldn’t help but notice you look an awful lot like LUPITA NYONG’O. You must be the THIRTY SIX year old EDITOR AT UFOLOGY DISCLOSED MAGAZINE. Word is you’re HARD WORKING but can also be a bit OVER-OBSESSED and your favorite song is VOYAGER’S GOLDEN RECORD. I also heard you’ll be staying in OCEAN CREST. I’m sure you’ll love it!

Liene, 25, GMT+1, any pronouns

As a child, Clover often tagged along to her mothers work at the local public library where she exclusively was drawn to books about space. She could spend hours in the comfy chair reading about all of the planets and stars and learning about the workings of our galaxies and all they contain.

At the age of fourteen, the girlfriend of Clover's mom gifted her a flimsy telescope, picked out lovingly at the local mall. It became Clover's most priced possession, and from then on she'd gaze at the stars every night after school, as soon as it got dark enough in their backyard. She'd keep notebooks to write down what she observed, often including drawings of sky-maps and constellations.

One night, right after her fifteenth birthday, Clover looked up into the sky and three big lights hovered over her in a triangle position. It flew just a few meters over her house, slowly and soundless. The lights were there for almost fifteen minutes, before heading south and disappearing over the tall buildings on the edge of the city. Clover was left breathless and completely entranced by this phenomenon.

This was a prompt for Clover to read up about UFO-sightings. She would read anything she could get her hands on, set up regular observatory meetings with friends hoping to witness anything that would explain what she saw that one winter night. Eventually most friends would stop coming, but Clover remained, dutifully keeping up her notebooks and expanding on her research.

Clover would never lose her interest in sightings and in her mid-twenties would start a magazine by the name of UFO's Disclosed, in which she reports on any sightings or other UFO-related news. The magazine started out small, but quickly became an essential space to everyone who concerned themselves with any of the discussed topics. From the subscription fees alone Clover is able to sustain herself, travel around and do local research at hotspots. Through the years she's accidentally profiled herself as a sighting-hotline, and she's learned to pick out the interesting stories to be published in the magazine.

An other topic Clover starts covering more and more over the years, are interviews with and stories by alien abductees. She feels as though it is important stories concerning UFO's and alien experiences are factually recorded and made accessible for research.

The last couple of years, Clover has had her base in Aurora Bay after receiving multiple notifications of sightings around the place. She can often be found on the beach with her observation gear, where she has a clear view of the sky. She has rented a small office space too, where she can receive guests if she needs to, and where she has a small printing station to press the magazine. It gives her some peace of mind to be settled a bit more and not have to rely on local print shops and dodgy motels. She does rent a small apartment too, but she's hardly ever around there since most nights she is out to observe, and most days she ends up napping on her office couch.

Clover finds it very important to keep some sort of objectiveness concerning her reports. She tries to keep everything close to the facts, and close to peoples experiences. However, she'd never deny that she will always be biased because of her own sighting. She comes across phlegmatic, although most people would find her line of work to contradict this. Clover will always ask any question crossing her mind. She is confident, but can be too stubborn at times. Currently, Clover is working on a book about the particular type of sightings in the Aurora Bay area.

@aurorabayaesthetic

[dnickels]

The Agency assured the Warren Commission that, prior to the assassination, it had had no particular interest in Oswald and almost no information on him whatsoever. This had always seemed implausible. Oswald was only 24 when he died, but his life had been eventful. He had served as a radar operator in the Marine Corps, stationed at an air base in Japan from which the CIA flew U-2 spy missions over Russia; had then defected to Moscow, where he told American diplomats that he planned to tell the Soviets everything he knew; had been closely watched, if not recruited, by Soviet intelligence services; and had then, in 1962, after more than two and a half years in the USSR, returned, Russian wife in tow, to the United States. One would think the CIA might have taken somewhat more than a passing interest. Early on, Newman had photocopied the entirety of Oswald’s pre-assassination CIA file at the archive and brought it home. Morley came often to study it. “I had read something that said, you know, they only had five documents on him,” Morley said. “And it was like, ‘No, there were 42.’” [...]

Newman asked most of the questions. (Newman and Morley are still friendly, but each has a tendency to present himself as the central protagonist in the story of Jane Roman. Roman died in 2007.) He spread documents on the table and walked Roman through them, beginning with a routing slip from shortly after Oswald’s return from the USSR. It had been signed by officials of the Soviet Realities branch, of counterintelligence, of covert operations, and elsewhere. Newman asked, “Is this the mark of a person’s file who’s dull and uninteresting?” “No, we’re really trying to zero in on somebody here,” Roman said. Newman showed her the FBI report on Oswald’s arrest in New Orleans, for which Roman had signed on October 4, 1963. Newman then produced the October 10 cable, according to which the Agency had received no information on Oswald in over a year. “Jane,” Newman said, “you read this file just a couple of days before you released this message. So you knew that’s not true.” Roman protested that she had “a thousand of these things” to handle. But she soon conceded, “Yeah, I mean, I’m signing off on something that I know isn’t true.” Newman asked if this suggested “some sort of operational interest in Oswald’s file.” “Well, to me, it’s indicative of a keen interest in Oswald, held very closely on the need-to-know basis,” Roman said. She speculated that there had been an “operational reason” to withhold information about him from Mexico City, though she herself had not been read into whatever “hanky-panky” may have been taking place. After the interview, Morley and Newman stopped their recorders, thanked Roman, and stepped outside. “John and I looked at each other and said, ‘Oh my fucking God,’” Morley told me. They had coaxed from a highly placed former CIA official, on tape and on the record, an acknowledgment that top CIA officers in Washington had been keenly interested in Oswald before the assassination, so much so that they had intentionally misled their colleagues in Mexico about him for reasons apparently related to an operation of some kind. Later, Morley spoke with Edward Lopez, a former researcher for the HSCA, where he had been tasked with investigating the CIA. Lopez said, “What this tells people is that somehow the Agency had a relationship with Lee Harvey Oswald prior to the assassination and that they are covering it up.”

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Alastair Mordey

Published: Jun 4, 2023

You may have noticed over the last decade a steady increase in the promiscuous use of the word ‘trauma’. A word that once referred exclusively to grievous injuries of body and mind (gun-shot wounds, PTSD, that sort of thing) can now describe virtually anything. Psychotherapists and clinical psychologists are the main super-spreaders of this hyperbolic virus, though educators, politicians and of course celebrities are now getting in on the act.  

But trauma is more than just an annoying buzz word. Its inexorable creep into common parlance is the culmination of aa sustained campaign to politicise healthcare that has been going on for 30 years. Along the way it has resurrected some of Sigmund Freud’s more bizarre theories about childhood development, and married them with social justice concerns to become what is effectively a secular religion. 

Anyone who is familiar with the work of Sigmund Freud knows that his psycho-sexual theories developed in two distinct stages. The first posited that people who were mentally or emotionally unwell had repressed traumatic memories (almost always of sexual abuse in their childhood). He eventually gave up on this theory. In its stead he developed his equally infamous theory of infantile sexuality, in which children experienced sexual feelings through different erogenous zones during distinct stages of their development. It may surprise and horrify you to learn that both theories are alive and well in the current mental healthcare establishment, where they have been rebranded into a pseudoscientific theory about childhood trauma that leads to brain damage, addiction, and disease. 

This Freudian reformation began in the 1990s with the Adverse Childhood Experiences Study. The ACE study as it became known, was conducted between 1995 and 1997. The lead researcher was a physician called Vincent Felitti, who worked at Kaiser Permanente’s Department for Preventative Medicine in San Diego. Dr Felitti ran a weight loss programme at Kaiser, and he had a problem. His obese patients kept dropping out. Not only that, it was the ones who were doing well who were dropping off the most. Confused by this, Felitti conducted follow up interviews with as many of those patients as he could, and what he found was shocking. Out of the 286 interviews, a significant amount reported that they had been sexually abused as children. These revelations caused Felitti to reflect on Freud’s psycho-sexual theories. What if his patients had grown up using their obesity as a protective mechanism to deter sexual predation? Maybe that was why they were unwilling to lose too much weight. Or what if comfort eating was some kind of self-medication? An ‘oral fixation’ which compensated for the nurturing they should have received as children? 

Inspired by these hypotheses, Felitti approached colleagues at the Center for Disease Control and set about designing the ACE study. The study asked some 17,000 patients in California’s healthcare system ten questions about adverse experiences in their childhood (which they dubbed ACEs). Specifically they asked them questions about three types of abuse (physical, sexual, and psychological); two types of neglect (physical and emotional); and five different types of household dysfunction (exposure to mental illness, substance abuse, domestic violence, criminal behaviour, and divorce or separation of parents). Those ‘ACE scores’ were then mapped onto the respondents’ current health status as adults. 

The results were stark. Children who experienced four or more of these ACEs were deemed two to four times more likely to smoke, and four to 12 times more likely to become alcoholic or drug addicted as adults, compared to people with an ACE score of zero. Further, the study found that high ACE scores were strongly correlated with ischemic heart disease, cancer, chronic lung disease, and even skeletal fractures later in life. It seemed that childhood trauma wasn’t just causing obesity. It was causing all manner of addictions and health problems in later life. 

Over the following decade Dr Felitti became something of a hero to mental health professionals. Helping professionals like counsellors and psychologists are almost overwhelmingly left-leaning, so Felitti’s work was well received in such circles. It seemed to vindicate their convictions that social ills like health inequality and addiction had purely sociological causes, and could therefore be solved only by direct government action. 

By the end of the decade the ACE study was so lauded that organisations like the World Health Organisation were adopting the concept. In 2012, they issued their own questionnaire (the ACE-IQ) which sought to measure ACEs across the globe. The WHO noted that ACEs can ‘disrupt early brain development and compromise functioning of the nervous and immune systems.’ So not only were ACEs causing actual organic disease, they were permanently rewiring the brain. As a result, large sums of money began pouring into research which sought to isolate the specific bio-markers of adverse childhood experiences, and the idea that early life adversity might be ‘biologically embedded’ took hold. 

By the 2010s the idea that childhood trauma causes physical illness began to seep its way into popular culture. Magazine and newspaper articles ran headlines linking childhood trauma to migraines, cancer, and autoimmune disease. Numerous cities across America (such as New Orleans and Baltimore) started initiatives to protect children from trauma induced brain damage. Universities and schools ran training seminars to create ‘ACE-awareness’ in their staff. In 2018, first minister Nicola Sturgeon gave an introductory speech to welcome some 2,000 delegates to the first ACE-Aware Nation conference in Scotland. She noted that ACEs can ‘affect children’s physical and mental health’ and vowed to make sure that ‘an understanding of ACEs is embedded right across our services.’ All of these initiatives cited the ACE study as their ‘proof’ that childhood trauma causes addiction, disease and mental illness. 

As of 2023, the original ACE study has been cited more than 15,000 times and ‘replicated’ in hundreds, if not thousands of other studies. But few have seriously questioned its findings, or indeed the veracity of the idea that trauma permanently damages the brain. To my mind the ACE study was misleading, both in the way it presented its findings and the types of questions it asked. The results have proved to be disastrous for the mental health of our increasingly fragile younger generations. 

For example, one of the ACE study’s initial findings was that a child who experienced four or more ACE’s was twice as likely to become a smoker than a child with an ACE score of zero, and that those risks climbed with additional ACE’s. What the blurb emanating from the study didn’t emphasise however, was that only a minority of people with four or more ACEs go on to smoke (13.5 per cent). Even lower rates of prevalence were observed with injection drug use and alcoholism (3.4 and 16.1 per cent respectively). Surely, if childhood trauma is the main cause of addiction, and especially injection drug use (as has been portrayed endlessly by trauma advocates such as Dr Gabor Maté, who recently gained notoriety for his televised ‘trauma-focused’ therapy session with Prince Harry) then we should be seeing more than a 3.4 per cent prevalence rate in those most effected. What this tells us as much as anything else, is that 85 to 95 per cent of traumatised children do not go on to become addicts, alcoholics, or even smokers. 

The way the ACE study presented its findings wasn’t the only problem. There were multiple problems with the questionnaire itself. When we look at the wording of the questionnaire, what we find is that many of these so-called ‘adversities’ weren’t actually that traumatic at all. They were subjective, vague, and a virtual open invitation to self-indulgence and grievance. Take question one for example: 

‘Did a parent or other adult in the household often, or very often, swear at you, insult you, put you down, or humiliate you, or act in a way that made you afraid that you might be physically hurt?’ 

This is a hopelessly wide-ranging question. Given that the ACE questionnaire was quantitative, not qualitative, respondents could only answer yes or no. So if a respondent ‘felt like’ they had been frequently ‘put down’ by their parents during childhood, they could answer yes and would then be categorised as having suffered ‘psychological abuse’. 

Question two asked: ‘Did a parent or other adult in the household, often, or very often, push, grab, slap, or throw something at you, or ever hit you so hard that you had marks or were injured?’ 

Obviously a simple ‘yes’ leaves us completely in the dark as to whether the respondent was beaten up repeatedly by a brutal step father, or simply ‘grabbed’ on occasion by his long-suffering single mother who was fed up with him smoking dope in his room. Nevertheless, any affirmative answer scored a point for ‘physical abuse’. 

Question four was particularly weak: ‘Did you often, or very often, feel that no one in your family loved you or thought you were important or special – or [that] your family didn’t look out for each other, feel close to each other, or support each other?’ Surely this is describing the majority of the planet?  

As for the idea that childhood adversity is toxic to the brain, this is actually a radical claim with little in the way of real evidence. In his brilliant book The Trouble with Trauma, child psychiatrist Michael Scheeringa explains why evidence for the stress-damages-the-brain-theory is so thin on the ground. The only reliable evidence that would clearly demonstrate a link between trauma and subsequent changes in the brain, he says, would be a study that captures brain images before and after the trauma (a pre-trauma prospective study followed by another one after the event). Currently, there are very few of these studies due to the obvious fact that it is not ethical to induce trauma.  

Instead there are lots of cross sectional studies. These studies look at brains after the trauma has occurred, but have no way of knowing what the brain looked like before the trauma (e.g. whether the person had an undersized amygdala, over-active pre-frontal cortex, or other neurological disability which might predispose them to a heightened traumatic response). The few before and after studies that do exist seem to point towards pre-dispositional vulnerabilities. Predisposition has also, so far at least, been the most successful theory explaining other psychiatric conditions like depression, schizophrenia, anxiety and bipolar disorder. 

So the trauma damages the brain theory is the outlier here, and it is frankly incredible that governments, top tier universities, and entire professions have placed all their eggs into this big Freudian-hypothesis basket.  

The reasons for this bias are fairly obvious however. Pre-disposition points to genes, a less headline-grabbing area of study, and therefore not as useful for raising funds for trendy political healthcare projects.  

In the DSM-5 (The American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, Fifth Edition) trauma is defined as a psychiatric disorder (Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder) which has horrendous and unmistakable symptoms. These symptoms occur (in some individuals) after being exposed to ‘actual or threatened death, serious injury or sexual violence.’ Things that are certainly outside the realm of ‘normal human experience’. Psychiatrists have known this since the Vietnam war. 

Nevertheless, since the 1990s psychiatrists under the sway of social justice politics (and bolstered by the findings of the ACE study) have been attempting to nudge a more watered-down version of trauma into the DSM. This includes ‘complex-trauma’, ‘developmental-trauma’, ‘relational- trauma’, and other snappy, made-up disorders. These ‘knock-off’ versions of PTSD have proven to be scientifically unverifiable, and have been rejected for inclusion in the DSM on multiple occasions, but nevertheless, they remain incredibly popular with clinicians and the public because they like them, and because they fit with what they believe. This concept creep around trauma is a perfect example of how bad, unscientific ideas can completely capture the zeitgeist when they peddle the right narrative. 

If this politicisation of psychology is not successfully challenged, I have grave fears for what the consequences will be. If we don’t stop using the word trauma, then those who suffer from real trauma (women who’ve been raped, children who’ve been burned, soldiers who’ve been blown up by mines) will have to share their services with those who, frankly speaking, don’t deserve them. And, people with addictions and other conditions that could be turned around with the right treatment will fail, because they are being protected and wrapped up in cotton wool by health professionals who are using them to fulfil their own professional and ideological goals. This cult of trauma must be stopped.  

[iviarellereads]

Fugitive Telemetry, Chapter 3

(Curious what I'm doing here? Read this post! For the link index and a primer on The Murderbot Diaries, read this one! Like what you see? Send me a Ko-Fi.)

In which someone wants to display their cake and eat it too, sort of.

Murderbot isn't surprised to have been more or less kicked out of the investigation. StatSec still don't want it there, and they're not going to change their minds so easily, no matter what Mensah says.

As a demonstration of this, MB goes into the other restriction imposed on it by the negotiations with Indah: it must broadcast a feed ID, and stop concealing its presence. MB really, really didn't want to have a feed ID, because either it lists all the human markers, like a name other people can use and a gender, or it lists a local feed address,(1) indicating that it's just a bot.

Neither of these is MB's ideal(2) but it understands why Indah thinks it's not that big of a deal. And, maybe choosing something basic to broadcast would have been worth it to get out of that meeting. It chose to broadcast a name of "SecUnit" and a gender of "not applicable". It's not sure what Indah did afterward, but Mensah and Pin-Lee sought comfort in their own ways.

Two days later, someone sent a photo of MB to a news stream on the station, identifying it as the rogue SecUnit from the corporate rumours. The photo was not taken from security footage, more likely from a capture camera in an augmented human given the angle. And, it was taken after its memory repair incident, given the location and the company it was in. Supposedly, nobody in StatSec sent it to the news feed, but MB isn't buying it.

After that, Mensah gave it the two boxes of intel drones. Indah objected, but Mensah said it was necessary for MB's mental health.(3) MB is pretty sure she'd already ordered the drones as the bribe from the end of the Home short story, though it wouldn't put it past her to use the drones for both that and telling Indah to fuck off.

In the present, such as it is, MB does have things to do other than the investigation. Like visit Bharadwaj again, as they've started research for her documentary, and she wants to see MB regularly for more meetings and interviews. It finds talking to her comforting. It's also bene helping Ratthi with data analysis for his reports, and he's been suggesting MB could do that as a job for other researchers. MB thinks that would be boring, though, at least with anyone except Ratthi, who is excited about MB's reports and invites it to go watch live performances at the theater on the station.(4)

Still, it can't help but want the intel for the investigation, so that it can figure out if it needs to worry about GrayCris on this or not. It could've done quite a lot before StatSec even got Medical down there to scan the body, if it still had systems access. It's not likely to be a GrayCris incident, but there's so much MB doesn't know about what happened, and it hates acknowledging that.(5)

MB's train of thought finally comes to a slow point thinking about how the dead human would need housing of some sort. It doesn't have systems access to find what it needs, but it might have another way. It goes to the transient block, as the most likely place they were staying. It sends a ping, and receives an answer 1.2 seconds later, probably taking so long because of startlement. MB enters the hostel, and finds a restocking bot. The bot follows MB as it walks in, a behaviour programmed for human comfort rather than practicality since it has visual sensors all over.

(I don’t know why bot behaviors that are useless except to comfort humans annoy me so much.) (Okay, maybe I do. They built us, right? So didn’t they know how this type of bot took in visual data? It’s not like sensors and scanners just popped up randomly on its body without humans putting them there.)

The bot first greets MB as a human, but MB says it doesn't have to pretend it's human, and they have a more programmatical exchange where MB asks the bot to identify the victim. The human supervisor asks if everything's alright, but both the bot (who the human calls "Tellus") and MB confirm they're just talking. The supervisor is clearly uncomfortable, but returns to their business.

MB knows it makes humans particularly uncomfortable, because humans like neat categories like "human" and "bot", and MB is both and neither. And, the "free" bot guardian system is like a magnet for humans who like to be patronizing(6) which compounds both their reactions to MB and its annoyance with them.

At any rate, Tellus helps MB identify the victim, and to narrow down the number of potential rooms they might have been staying in by sharing only rooms where the occupant left before the time of death and hasn't returned. Tellus is concerned about occupant privacy, but invites MB to come on an unscheduled maintenance inspection of unoccupied rooms as long as it deems MB's item search not in violation of it. MB offers that it only needs to look at clothing, on a hunch, seeking to match what the victim was found wearing.

Together, they do find a scarf that MB determines matches the clothes in material and pattern, and it assembles a report for StatSec with images of the scarf as well as the location of the room and the feed ID associated with it. It sends the report to StatSec tagged for attention by Indah and Tural, so it's not ignored, as well as to Tellus so it knows what's up when StatSec come to ask questions.

MB signals that it's ready to leave, and Tellus accompanies it back to the lobby, but as it goes to help clients, it asks MB about its next action. MB still doesn't have enough information, so signals "task complete", but Tellus suggests querying the arrival data before the victim, if he is Lutran, arrived at the hostel two days ago.

I didn’t respond because I don’t need a critique from a “free” bot(7) and I couldn’t access the arrivals data without Station Security’s permission anyway, and fuck that. Huh, I just thought of another way to do it. It was annoying that the “free” bot was right, but I needed to go to the transit ring.

MB finds a chair near another plant biome and sits. It wants to identify the ship Lutran came in on, but doesn't want to hack the system. It promised it wouldn't, and StatSec will do just that with permission as soon as they read its report. But, asking for information worked once, why not twice?

So, MB slips into the feed, and queries the available transports. It's tedious, and it can't be backburnered to watch media. But, after 57% of the transports in dock, it finds an anomaly: a cargo-and-human transport that responds, not with a protocol, but a salutation. When MB queries it further, it starts spewing error codes.

MB assembles its drones and makes its way toward the malfunctioning transport. The weapons scanners detect it but stand down, and MB knows the system will probably alert StatSec of its whereabouts. At least one human recognizes what MB is, a SecUnit, and watches it closely. It hates being ID'd so quickly after all the work it did to blend in, even growing out its hair.

Still, nine minutes later it's at the transport in question, and there's an urgency to its transmissions. It needs to get onboard, but it can't give StatSec any room to fuck it over. Mensah and Pin-Lee, its first choices, are in separate meetings, and several of the other team members are on-planet, Bharadwaj visiting family, Arada and Overse preparing for the survey they've got planned next,(8) and Volescu having retired.

That left me with the human most likely to want to drop everything and come watch me break into a damaged transport and the human also most likely to come watch me break into a damaged transport but only so he could argue with me about it. So I called both of them.(9)

=====

(1) See, I feel like this kinda backs me up that the local feed address isn't what Art used as MB's passcode, because it's not something unknowable to humans. Yes, it implies that it's not actively broadcasting that address, but (2) The mortifying ordeal of being perceived is Murderbot's worst fear. Its "Murderbot" name is private, even though its friends know it, they know not to use it. It's not quite a dead name, it still thinks of itself as that name, but at the risk of projecting a little of my bias and interpretation onto it, I think it (fairly) fears what people will think of it if it admits that it still sees itself as a killing machine, when it's not even really ready to think about what that means for itself. I have a feeling if the series ever ends, it will end with MB setting aside that name and choosing a new one. But, for now, this is where I think MB wants to do the thing in my chapter tagline. It wants to be a person, but it doesn't want to do person things or be perceived as a person. We're six books in and we've only just begun to scratch the surface of its issues. I'm just as grateful it fell in with Preservation, a whole society that, once they understand its intentions, is absolutely primed to help and support it in whatever it needs. (3) It's not even a lie, it's much more comfortable looking through drones than with its own eyes. Being cut off to just itself is limiting in a way it's not accustomed to. Totally justified. (4) For all that he was a little overbearing in his attempts to be helpful in the first book, Ratthi and MB have become real buds. I love it. (5) One of the most relatable things it's ever thought. (6) At least on Preservation it's just people who have a patronizing streak, and not… well, guardianship over adult humans has been in the news a lot lately and I have my own set of emotions about it and the sort of people it attracts. (7) As much as it complains about human biases toward it, MB has its own biases toward both humans-in-general and bots. (8) Hey look, Network Effect setup. (9) Who does that leave? Who's coming to "help"? From those not named, I'm guessing Ratthi and Gurathin respectively. MB has so little faith in the latter.

[xcruelladcvil]

─◇ what does the world know about cruella de vil ? 

(ie. the wikipedia page)

ooc note: this is in-character public knowledge that other citizens of elias could research/already know about cruella's past.

> the early years.

the daughter of famous fashion designer and former model, malevola de vil, cruella rose to the top of fashion’s heights as a teenager. at eighteen years old, she released her first fashion line, with the help of her mother’s connections and her father’s financial backing ( her father, known mining tycoon, ernest de vil ). and in a matter of months she gained fame for her fresh designs and innovative ideas. 

between the ages of 18-23, it seemed like she did nothing but work and party. 

one of the things she’s most known for is being one designer who still relishes using real fur and real leather. her house had to go undergo a lot of investigations with ethical sourcing, but they all passed with flying colours.

“i live for fur, i worship fur. after all, is there a woman in all this wretched world who doesn't?” ( cruella de vil, quoted outside the house of de vil, london, 2009 )

she had a famous photoshoot with annie leobovitz where cruella posed with various animals, and she donated money to various animal welfare organisations to show her support.

> a falling career.

however, in the same amount of time, there were other designers rising as well. most of cruella’s 20s were spent fighting to stay on top. 

“the main problem she’s encountering here is … well, it’s not that her designs aren’t good, it’s just that everyone else’s is just as good or even better. it’s an especially difficult time to be a rising star in fashion. are you still rising if everyone around you is too? cruella simply can not stand out. the house of de vil is doing well, but it’s not exceptional. she’s still famous, but not notorious. it’s a tough nut to crack.” ( vogue journalist andy sachs, in an interview during paris fashion week, 2011 )

slowly she picked off each designer one by one, each strategic defeat of her contemporaries feeling like a timebomb ticking away. and still, it didn't feel like enough to cement her at the top.

“i want to swim in a pool of gold and furs. i want to bathe in silk and dye my red heart to the perfect shade. is that too much to ask?” ( cruella de vil, vanity fair quote, 2011 )

what made it even worse was that anita was rising to the top too. 

in her late 20s, she started doing animal prints. zebra stripes, cheetah patterns. she got a little bit of attention here, as she was playing with these patterns in a fresh new way. but there was a creative block. things started to get repetitive. lots of people in her network began to lose faith in her innovation. for years, she had a dry spell.

and then, aged 32, the announcement was made: spots. and it was all downhill from there.

> downfall, accusations of animal cruelty, london fashion week ‘stunt’

no one knows exactly what was happening in the house of de vil at this time. whistleblowers reported cruella was trying to drive home the idea of actually skinning dalmatians, sourcing them through dubious means. many stated that cruella’s designs were impeccable, inspired, really. but cruella was known for her furs. and she wasn’t about to stop anytime soon. 

quickly, the house lost its sponsorships and cruella’s network began to fade. no one wanted to be associated with rumours that everyone knew in their hearts to be true. cruella de vil has always had a shadow of suspicion around her, but now the veil was being thrown off. she was uninvited from london fashion week. stores took her designs off their racks. investigations were launched once more over the house of de vil’s ethical practices.

for two months, no one heard from cruella nor the house of de vil. 

then at the fashion show of anita darling, she came back. 

“ it was … it was positively barbaric. we already heard there was some sort of kerfuffle happening in the dressing rooms — of course now we know it’s because cruella had people splatter all of anita’s outfits in black. ” ( anonymous witness, london fashion week, 2019 )

“ — there was an abnormal delay. and then lots of screaming. cruella came out in a dress with a huge train … i think the train was a messy stitch of all of anita’s previously released designs … and then she dumped all this paint onto the runway. god ! you should’ve seen everyone’s faces. she must’ve got the good stuff ‘cause i couldn’t get it out of my hair for days. black and white all over the place. ” ( anonymous witness for the ny times, london fashion week, 2019 )

after the stunt, cruella and her team disappeared. reports saw her showing up in her country manor, named ‘hell hall’ by the locals (real name: hellman hall). while police reports were drawn up and charges made, all charges were dropped within a month and no further action seemed to be taken against cruella de vil. 

> resurgence ( late 2021 to present )

cruella de vil effectively disappeared off the news radar for nearly two years.

in late 2021, a surprise interview came out with vogue. in ‘the de vil repenting’, she was interviewed at her hotel room in london, and it detailed how she had been in rehabilitation and seeing various psychologists and psychiatrists since 2019. 

“ cruella appeared as if muted; her iconic black-and-white hair was swept back with a hairscarf, and the black of her clothes seemed dull. it had to be a conscious choice. for the first fifteen minutes of the interview, it felt like i was speaking with someone completely different, and what this means i don’t know. but then she smiled, at some inane joke about taking a vacation on the greek islands, and there was the cruella we all remembered: sharp and unsettling, but still unbelievably magnetic. ” ( paragraph 1, ‘ the de vil repenting’, 2021 )

in the interview, she expressed how the past few years had been difficult. the death of her mother had been part of her ‘breakdown’ leading up to 2019’s london fashion week. 

“ i feel terrible for my darling anita … she was the one bridge i never wished to burn. but i can’t blame her and her family for how they may feel towards me … i accept the blame, but i do wish to move forward. ” ( cruella de vil, quoted in ‘the de vil repenting’, 2021 )

following her mother’s death, her father also fell ill months later. 

the sudden reminder of mortality, according to cruella, inspired her to finally make a change. she knew she wanted to come back to fashion, but she was working on the best way to marry the old cruella and the new cruella. 

“ i’m still the same old me … i don’t wish to change all of me, there has to be some part of me that’s good after all … but i know i cannot continue hurting everyone the way i have in the past. fashion is my one true love, i could never part with it. but i know now there is no future in fashion with animal byproducts. which is why i’m taking my time … i’m talking with the best experts … i will be better. ” ( cruella de vil, quoted in ‘the de vil repenting’, 2021 )

the vogue interview ‘the de vil repenting’ coincided with the house of de vil’s return to the runway, in a small fashion show in london. 

since then, cruella has released only a handful of new pieces each season. she seems to be taking it slow, truly showing a thoughtfulness to the production of fashion in a way we haven’t seen yet in the house of de vil. 

her next move is moving to the city of elias, california, and building her new main house of de vil there. 

time will only tell if this ‘good will kick’ will stick. 

> personal life.

cruella de vil has been married twice. one to a rock star, in las vegas, and they divorced two days later. one to a famed mountain climber, married for three years, then divorced. 

she currently has a rescue pet (breed: chinese crested) named ‘adam’. 

she is now based in elias.

[gremlin-dreams]

The Car Wreck

So I was a reporter's assistant, doing all this exhausting admin work for my boss, this eccentric reporter who was very very busy and very successful. She looked a little bit like a blonde Helena Bonham Carter mixed with Alicia Silverstone, and was also sort of strange in that permanently frazzled way, but she loved her job. 

Anyway, one day we get an interesting call from the FBI, an opportunity to interview somebody involved in a criminal investigation into a string of murders across several states, a case that had been perplexing county and national teams alike for weeks. 

Apparently this guy Adam (who looked exactly like Jackson Rathbone but strung out on drugs) was a witness who had information that could be helpful but he was a bit strange and only agreed to give it if he could be interviewed by my boss, let's call her Rebecca. We all assumed it was because he was after his five minutes of fame, or had a crush on one of the biggest reporters in the media, not unusual, so we agreed and flew over to Nevada.

Now there is a reason I called Rebecca eccentric, she always liked things the way she liked them and would hear no argument, and somehow always seemed to get her way, and would do anything for a good story. We get to the place where he is being held for questioning and they allow us to set up in this sterile feeling room, it even had a tiled floor, so strange, not like one of those interview rooms you see on tv, with the one table and a two way mirror.

The camera man gets set up, Rebecca comes in after sweet talking an FBI agent to get whatever she wants, and fresh coffee to boot, and we are ready to go. I'm sitting in the corner with my laptop ready to type away, dictate everything, make notes, do on the spot research.

They bring the guy, Adam, in, and he is definitely wiry-looking, kinda squirrelly, I even initially felt bad for the man after what we were told he was witness to, and Rebecca immediately gets started on the interview. She acts in that whimsy way, asking all the usual questions to try and get him talking, along with some more unusual ones, she was like that, wanted to know his backstory, yanno, where he was born and grew up, what he did for work, yadda yadda. Except this guys answers were seriously dry, it was weird because he specifically requested this interview and was now making Rebecca look a bit stupid on live TV. 

She is starting to get a little antsy and gets to the important part, trying to retain control and viewings here; starts asking if he would like to comment on the horrific crimes he was witness to, saying it might help them catch the monstrous people who did it. And he says one thing back - something like this: "No guilt shall fall on the shoulders of the righteous and his witnesses, for they are the soldiers of God." 

It was very weird, Rebecca assumes it is some bible phrase and goes with it, mostly because she has to, she's live, but I'm in the corner tapping away, researching, and I could not find a reference to that piece of prose anywhere, especially not the bible. Anyways, she is having to start spitballing here and putting on her dramatic self to make this watchable so she doesn't look like a useless moron. Our segment and time slot is ending so eventually she signs off, leaving us all a bit frustrated and confused, and we begin to pack up. As he was taken away by an agent, I noticed a symbol tattooed on his shoulder, though it looked more like a brand, it was a flower, like a wilting rose. I was left wondering if anything he said was indeed useful to the investigators, because otherwise this was for nothing and it was a whole plate of creepy. I let Rebecca know that what he said was not a quote from any bible I could find, and she thought it was weird too but there was nothing we could really do about it now.

Anyways, the FBI are all done with this weird request of his and are transferring him to somewhere in Virginia and we are headed to somewhere called Pasadena for our next story, and they offer us transport to the airport. We agreed since it would save us some hassle. It was a little convoy of two big black cars, one full of our gear and us all piled into the back, and the other holding two FBI agents and Adam. 

It was pretty late at night, it had been raining, and we were driving up these winding mountainy roads dense with brush and/or forest, really cliche american stuff, and out of nowhere this civilian vehicle housing two kids and their parents collides with the car I'm in. I was sent flying clear out of the car, it flips a few times and ends up in this ditch upside down. I came to and the other FBI vehicle had obviously stopped and was trying to call for help, and I was somewhat near them all grazed up, my head pounding, maybe concussed, I think I was bleeding too.

I look up at the agents and its Rossi and Prentiss (I know, apparently I dream criminal minds a lot) and he rolls down his window asking if I could hear him and if I was okay, I replied all foggy as if it were hard to get the words out, and was clearly pretty shaken too. He told me not to look to my left and to just keep my eyes on him, and he said to Prentiss that he needs to get out and help - and that she needs to stay with Adam but it's okay because he was asleep the last they checked. That was when I looked to my right a little, noticing the back seat was empty and the car door was ajar. He was gone.

At this point I'm upset and in shock and probably paranoid but I'm piecing things together and it is starting to seem this guy is not just a witness, but a suspect, a pretty guilty seeming one. I'm now sitting there in the mud, knowing there is a car wreck besides me, and that he is out there and for a split second I genuinely thought I was about to die. As if me noticing he was gone was enough to trigger him to appear out of nowhere with a rock like in some horror movie as if that would be a smart move. Part of me wanted to leap up and pull that ajar door open, climb in and lock myself inside with the agents - but I was crying and thoroughly convinced I could not do it fast enough, so instead chose to just stay deadly still as if hiding from the Jurassic Park T-Rex.

He never did, it didn't happen, but I demanded to know what was really going on, who he really was - and now with a missing and potentially dangerous suspect both of them are clambering out of the vehicle with their guns, confirming my suspicions. Rossi helped me to my feet and brought me over to where most of the wreck was, saying that he couldn't tell me much. They wanted to keep everyone together so as to be as safe and defendable as possible. I was hoping the guy preferred freedom to revenge and would just run.

Emily was assessing the situation and trying desperately to radio for help despite the awful signal, and I finally got a look at the mess. It was horrible. I could see my car in the ditch, the driver hanging upside down in his seat, either unconscious or worse. I couldn't see any further so I had no idea if my crew were alive. The family in the car that hit us, the two children came out with cuts and bruises and stuff, but the dad, he was trapped in the car because the steering column was crushing his legs - and the wife was just sat there in the passenger seat with a bleeding cut on her head like mine, and blood down her arm, crying hysterically and not knowing what to do with herself.

Emily got her out and situated with the kids and I, at the side of the road, while Rossi went to check on the upside down car. It didn't look good, the driver was dead, and so was our cameraman. Rebecca was alive and extremely shaken and possibly had a dislocated arm and she had a pen sticking out of her left leg. Rossi had to drag her out of the car. At this point Emily had no luck with calling for help and Rossi chose to try using the radio in the car just down the hill/verge. It was so dark and things were so risky, I was terrified but I volunteered to go with him, no one should be alone out here and Emily was busy looking out for all the others. 

We headed back down to the other car and I was keeping an eye out whilst he clambered into the front to use the radio, but he didn't get very far. I was silently patting, more like hitting, at his back, eyes wide, looking at the rear of the vehicle. There stood Adam, a piece of jagged metal from the crash in his hands, and these crazed dead eyes, it was mortifying. Rossi got out immediately and put an arm out for me to stay behind him, as he pulled out his gun. He starts trying to talk him down, hoping not to have to kill anyone - but this guy has clearly lost it. He started spewing this weird vague nonsense again, and repeated that quote from before as if it had obvious meaning. When he took a step forward and started raising his hand, he was also grinning, it was terrifying, Rossi warned him and had no choice but to shoot him. He yelled out in pain and collapsed to the floor in the dirt and gravel and it started to rain again. Rossi got a bit closer and he was clutching his body, still rambling, and said something like "if you kill me, we'll hunt you for life.." which sent a damn chill up my spine. Then he passed out, or died, it was nothing short of a thriller plot. 

Rossi turned around and went straight back to focusing on helping the crash victims, opening the trunk of the vehicle and pulling out medkits and searching for an actual handheld radio. Meanwhile I had just seen a man shot dead and was more than upset, demanding to know what the hell was going on, what he meant by that, what the weird quote meant - and eventually he gave in and told me all he was allowed to. The FBI had put together a theory that there was this new crime ring forming of religiously delusional folk who believed they were killing in the name of God.  

As he got all the gear we could carry and we were about to head back up the hill to the others, we see headlights in the distance in the rain driving toward us. It gets close and pulls to a stop since Rossi's car and now a body were kinda blocking the way, and it's a big black pickup truck, maybe someone who can help, or has a working phone or radio. I see a bald guy in the driver's seat and some movement in the back seat, maybe a woman. He just stares for a moment, at us and at Adam's body, not saying anything, a completely dead expression, and he opens his driver's door, beginning to step out. 

As he opens it, the light inside the car comes on and I saw something. I saw the same tattoo or brand, but on his face, and had a split second to yell out to Rossi. I dropped the stuff I was holding and cried out, it felt like slow motion, and it was just in time as Rossi noticed it too, because this guy was pulling out a gun of his own, concealed by the car door, and again Rossi had no choice but to defend us, pulling out his gun and shooting first, right at the guys head. His eyes were filled with shock and he just dropped to the ground, dead in the puddles, a pistol in his hand. I didn't think the night could get much worse.

He immediately went to the woman in the back seat who looked just as terrified as me, and as he opened the door and yelled for her to get out with her hands up, she started crying and lifted her hands which were zip tied together, saying things like "Thank God-" and "I thought he was going to kill me." He managed to get a tiny bit of sense out of her as he undid the zip tie, apparently she had been abducted two nights before and they had been on the road ever since, her name was Joanne but he just kept calling her Mary. 

So all of us including this poor unexpected hostage are now being herded together at the top of the hill, bringing medkits and those foil blankets and trying to get this radio working to call for help, and I was sat there in shock next to Rebecca who was crying- and I think I just broke down. I lost it. I did not sign up for this and I was traumatised, started getting hysterical, not even Rebecca could calm me as Rossi explained the whole thing to a very concerned Prentiss who had obviously heard all the gunshots. 

Anyways, as I'm losing my mind, I start getting more and more panicked and worked up, wondering how the fuck that guy found us, and if me and my crew had also just had a target put on our heads, or if we'd just helped the psycho by putting him on live TV. Then my thoughts wander back to him, lying in the road behind the car, clutching his arm, and dark blood mixing in with the rain as he led there on the ground, and it occured to me that I had not seen exactly where Rossi had shot him. 

You'd think you could trust the shot of an experienced and decorated FBI agent, but again I was inconsolable and panicking and demanded to go look at the body, and I was in no condition to go by myself - so begrudgingly Prentiss volunteered to walk me back down there so she could grab more stuff out of the car at the same time - and it's a good thing we did.

It may be cliché, it may be predictable, but the terror I felt in that moment - as we walked down there and Adam's body was nowhere to be seen - was very much real. I was instantly crying once more, telling her over and over that he was right there and now he was gone, and when I looked at the other body - not through choice but through panicked need - the bald guy's gun was missing too. 

That horrible and quite literal cliffhanger is where I woke up. 

[from-me-to-you-unsent-letters]

Unsent Email: August 28 (Wednesday)

Henloo, Jo! 🐳

I've been trying to limit myself in sending you emails na hindi ko naman masesend. Maybe it's an effort to forget, maybe not. I'm not sure. I've been doing a lot of things I'm not really sure of.

I started my masters na sa Mapúa. I told you I applied around June, right? Well, tinuloy ko na rin and this month, nag-start na yung classes namin. Puro online lang naman so, that's good. I have three subjects. One sa Monday, Advanced Theories of Personality, one on Wednesday, Development of Psychological Thought, and one ng Saturday, Advanced Statistics. To be honest, feeling ko matatanggal ako sa program after this term. There is a lot to be read and alot to write. A lot of research involved as well. I don't know. I've been having a hard time trying to keep up with the outputs na hinihingi sa amin for the past two weeks. I've always known, even in college, na to keep up with everything, I have to work twice, maybe even thrice as much as everyone else. Alam ko rin yun nung nag-review ako for boards kaya sobrang disappointing sa akin before na walang pumapasok sa utak ko. Tipong iiyak na lang ako kasi wala talaga. Ewan ko ba. With Mapúa, wala namang residency yung program pero once na magkaroon ka ng grade below 2.00, tanggal ka na. Hirap in fairness. Ilang beses na kaya kong muntik bumagsak nung college kung hindi lang dahil sa curve.

I also signed my JO din with White & Case. I applied as their Learning & Development Admin. I know, it seems like a step down from what I was doing pero when I sent my CV, I was just sending it for the purpose of sending it knowing na I really don't have much funds to go on with. I also thought na baka mas madaling hindi ka isipin if maging busy ako. So, yeah... I got the offer at around second week ng August, the same time na nag-start yung classes. I didn't think I'd get the position nung nag-enroll ako. Plus, even if I did, I didn't have plans to declare it kasi masakit sa ulo. Sa lahat ng interviews na pinagdaanan ko, they would always become "off" kapag sinabi mong mag-mamasters ka eventually. They think na aalis ka kaagad sa company kapag ganon. Sucks but that the reality of applying, I guess. Pero I had to declare it sa White & Case kasi may onsite work ng Wednesday and Thursday and tatamaan yung isa kong class. After I declared it, they became hesitant in pushing through sa JO. They sort of made it seem like I wasn't giving them an answer f whether or not I'll push through sa position but I wanted to push through sa position at the same time as masters. At some point, I actually felt na parang "either this or that" yung offer. If itutuloy ko yung sa kanila, need ko i-drop yung masters. If not, then di sila tutuloy sa offer. I told them I dropped my weekday classes -- which I did for a moment pero I re-enrolled kasi sayang yung nasimulan. Plus, ang daming classmates so pag dinrop ko tapos mag-enroll ako ulit sa susunod, baka mas konti na yung mga tao and mas marami akong need i-report. So ayun, I'll start ng Sept. 18.

Sa dami ng pinapagawa sa masters, I thought it would make it easier not to think about you. I thought it might be easier na hindi ka maalala, hindi maalala yung tayo. I was wrong. You'd pop up, out of nowhere, and I would want to rip my heart out. Despite tons of readings, your voice, memories still linger and I'll find myself having a hard time focusing. I thought this distraction would make it easier. It hasn't.

Lumabas kami nila Rach at Nics nung Saturday. Pumunta kami sa Storya Kitchen + Bar sa may QC. They asked me why I took up masters bigla nung the last time we were together, work lang naman hinahanap ko. I couldn't look at them when I answered -- I know how they'll react when I tell them the reason. But I told the truth, "distraction." As expected, they were disappointed and exasperated na I'm still not over it, I'm still not over you. Well, they're not the only ones disappointed. They tried to keep my mind out of it. We talked about plans na mag-Siargao on October. I guess I'd have to take a leave agad. Making plans was fun. Ang tanong na lang is kung matutuloy ba dahil sa MPox at kung may bagyo ng time na yun. We planned to go ng October 24-27. I hope it coincides when you're gone. May Boracay kayo this October , di ba? Sa 60th birthday ni papa niyo? I hope it coincides with when you're gone para hindi ko maalala na wala ka.

Nung pauwi na ako, I couldn't help but cry. I couldn't tune out the music. Alam mo yung kanta ng December Avenue tsaka Moira? "Kung di rin tayo sa huli, aawatin na ang puso kong ibigin ka." It played loudly sa sasakyan. It's so easy to blame it on the music when truthfully, I've been keeping things bottled up for so long, letting very little out, and I just popped.

I think I am back to anger. Galit nanaman ako kay Lord. Nung nagsimba kami nung Sunday, I told Him na I couldn't understand why I have to get hurt over something I didn't pray for, I didn't ask in the first place. Kasi kaya ng ako naghihintay di ba? Hindi nagmamadali. Para kapag tama na yung oras, tama na yung panahon, tama na rin yung tao. I still don't understand I'm just hurting.

Ang dami kong gustong ikwento sa'yo. Ang dami kong gustong sabihin pero ni-isa wala akong pwedeng gawin. God! I wish you were here, Jo. I wish I could stop missing you and crying kasi andito ka na. Andito ka na ulit.

As I'm writing this, I'm waiting for my class tonight. It's 5:33pm. Baka mamayang 6pm pa mag-start. And instead of preparing myself for the report, here I am, missing you instead.

---

I finished my report. Ang haba lang ng pagsasalita ko. Parang umabot ata ako sa 1 hour na nagsasalita. I had the psychoanalysis and behaviorism schools of thought as discussion and psychoanalysis talaga yung pinaka mahaba. Hindi pa complete yun actually since hindi ko na kinumpleto yung psychodynamic theorists. I even forgot to turn over the floor to my next group mate kasi by the time na natapos na ako, pagod na akong magsalita. Then, I got a message from Maam JM after class asking bakit ang haba daw ng report ko. I don't know if it was just a question or judgment. With her, I never know.

By the way, I haven't told you pero I'm invited for a teaching demo and second level interview sa Cambridge University and Press sa Makati din. I still pushed through sa initial interview ko with them kasi during that time parang hanging sa balance yung offer ko from White & Case. I'm not sure what I should do about the invitation. Like, pupuntahan ko ba or wag na? During the interview kasi, I was really impressed with what they would like the person who'll take the role do. Plus, regular employee ka na kaagad pag-start mo pa lang. The position is HR Advisor on L&D. Mas in line siya with the L&D field na pwede kong pasukin if ever. On the down side, it seems like the position might require a lot of work. The responsibilities ng kukuha ng position would have to work hard para sa L&D part unlike yung admin role ng White & Case. I don't know, I'm just torn. Parang sayang din kasi benefits na meron sa Cambridge and it really seemed like a good opportunity. I'm not sure what to do. Pero kasi, the last time I forgone an offer for another na hindi pa naman sure, hindi naman ako nakuha. Yung dati sa PressReader. Umabot din ako sa final interview stage pero wala... Iniisip ko na baka mamaya, sabihin ko sa White & Case na "no" tapos di din naman ako yung makukuha sa Cambridge. Balik nanaman ako sa simula. I have to think about it and make a decision by tomorrow. The schedule for the demo is supposedly this Friday na. I haven't prepared for anything if I would actually go to the demo.

Nakaaway ko si mama ngayon. It was over a small stuff but I guess nag-explode ako kasi lagi na lang sinisita. It was over food. Habang kumakain ng lunch, I said a remark na bakit parang puro okra yung nasa bowl ko. I was going to transfer some kay Inah kasi hindi naman talaga ako fan ng okra. Tapos, she kept insisting na wag kong ilipat and kainin ko. Alam mo yung sobrang mapilit? Ganon. And then I shouted. I actually can't remember what I said. Probably something along the lines of "kumakain ako pero ang dami lang.' I really can't remember. Anyway, napasigaw ata ako ng malakas and sabi ni mama na wag akong high blood. Don ako lalong nagalit. I don't think I meant it to be something bad, yung sinabi ko na napalakas boses ko. I felt na after I said it, I was going to say na it was a joke or something. Pero nung sinabi ni mama yun, nagalit na ako ng tuluyan. Kasi bakit kapag siya okay lang na mamilit pero hindi ako pwedeng umayaw? Bakit sila pwedeng magalit tapos ako hindi? She kept saying na during her time, hindi niya pwedeng sigawan si nanay ng ganon. Nagalit lang ako lalo kasi hindi niya narerealize, kahit na ilang beses na i-point out sa kanya, na meron din siyang mali. Apparently, sa kanila, kapag magulang ka, hindi ka nagkakamali... or at least that's what it seems to me. I washed my dishes tapos di na ako bumaba. I kept myself isolated sa kwarto hanggang sa mag-class na. Even after class, di pa rin ako bumaba. I'm still kinda pissed and also feels guilty for my part. Alam ko lang na kung bumaba ako at mag-sorry, maiinis lang ako ulit if she insists na she's right. So hahayaan ko na lang for today. I don't know what will happen tomorrow.

Alam mo ba, during class kanina, I keep thinking na you'll suddenly cross sa background. Yes, granted naka-background si Maam JM ng Mapúa related background pero I just thought na baka lang dumaan ka, baka lang magsalita ka. Baka lang nasa kusina or sala siya and it so happened na you were there and makiki-chismiis ka sa class niya. I guess wishing for something makes it more likely na hindi mangyayari sa akin.I wish I could have seen you through that. Or heard your voice. Para kahit na sa ganoong paraan lang, makita at marinig kita.

I try to lie to myself na gusto kong maging okay na lahat, hindi na masakit, hindi ka na namimiss. Maybe if I tell myself that often, it becomes my truth. Maybe not the actual truth pero at least yung truth na panghahawakan ko. But, really, all I want is for things to be okay kasama ka. Hindi ka na mamiss kasi andito ka na. Because the truth is, I would still give up anything, in a blink of an eye, to rearrange the stars in our favor. Cash in my favors and requests sa universe at kay Lord to change fate. In the end, I still want it to be you. I still want it to be us. Maybe it's stupid and foolish to even think na I even have favors and request to cash in, especially with how I've been these past few months.

Bottom line, I still think I'm not good enough. I still think that I did or said something wrong. And I keep thinking of all the what ifs. I keep thinking of memories and a future with you -- one that is never bound to happen. At the end of the day, hindi pa rin ako. Hindi pa rin tayo. No matter how much I wanted it to be.

It's going to be okay... eventually. It's just hard right now. Masakit ng sobra. And I can't seem to hate you. I just miss you. I miss us. 💔

I don't know if I could blame the time (it's 1:41 am ng August 29) for feeling and crying this way tonight. Maybe I could blame it on pent up feelings. I don't know. I just miss you. I still want my happily ever after to be with you.

Do I even stand a chance against supernatural forces, fate, universe, kay Lord, and her? I would have fought for it. I would have tried. Hindi kita sasaktan. So fi I do have free will, I will use it for that. For you and me.

Putangina, Jo. Mahal kita eh. Mahal pa rin kita.

I miss you, Jo. Still. 🐳

Always ✨,

Tine 🐳

[harleyquinnagenda]

Do you know the stories of Corso, Lazar, and Pawelec?

Of course I'm talking about Col. Phil Corso, Bob Lazar, and William Pawelec.

Corso put out the book "The Day After Roswell"; have you read this?

Lazar put out lots of interviews for years and did a book "Dreamland- An Autobiography"- have you read this book or read/watched any of his complete interviews?

Pawelec did a famous interview with Steven Greer; it's about an hour long and on youtube: have you watched this whole thing?

For those of you who have intaken the stories of all three of these people: are you able to reconcile the three stories? How so? Please explain here in comments below:

(And I'll have a go at it myself:)

Here's my theory reconciling Lazar, Pawelec, Corso

you'll have to know the whole ufo/aerospace history for this to make sense- if you got into ufos over the past few years it wont-

Pawelec talks of a "long-term program..." being installed at A51. Pawelec talks about it needing "improved security" all over the place.

"long-term program" and references concurrent probably with a time period that includes:

extension of groom lake runway, and earlier development of national aerospace plane / supersonic transport research- probable that an actual working model was developed.

if it needed this runway, then it needed this base, as the only base in the world that could support it.

it was probably expensive and would be something that would be relied upon. a successor to another one-of-a-kind plane. and if you know how important that is, then you know how important this would be. hence the need for "improved security" for a "long-term program".

well, security comes on many fronts, and so does insecurity.

now, i want you to remember, there was no public fascination with this base before BL. BL created that. Although this was around the time period of that mention of employees exposed to chemicals there. So the public at least had some mention of this base aside from him. The original idea though was probably for the public to not hear about this base, right?

but there was already a public fascination with ufos- which had been debunked, by project grudge- therefore there was also proof that the public was going to believe no matter what- if youre a roswell believer lets put that aside for a second- the two publicly-taken videos that were presented to project grudge were both found to be misidentification- one was seagulls, the other f-104s. the one of f-104s was the first reporting of "discs" by the way. it's actually unknown to the literature before that. "flying saucers" is a misinterpretation of something KA said "moved like saucers skimmed across a water surface".

he's referring to a funny way that they glided apparently, while not seeming to be propeller-driven aircraft to him. he was at a loss of words to describe what would've been going on with these. a reporter sort of mistranslated that into "flying saucers", but the important thing is KA never said flying saucers/discs.

the f-104s misidentification is the first time someone says "discs" as in "flying saucers".

more on this- there used to be a wikipedia article on "amazing stories", the old sci fi magazine- it had a picture on that wikipedia page, of what was allegedly an AS cover showing flying saucers in an artist's depiction-

however, i went through and checked the entire history of amazing stories covers, from before the later flying saucers craze, and i found that that wasn't one of the covers- it was some misappropriation and it wasn't from the inside of the issue either that it was supposed to be from- someone made a mistake- they since took it down. anyway, if you look, there are not flying saucers/discs in artists' depictions on the cover of the leading sci fi mag Amazing Stories from before the flying saucer craze- Amazing Stories covers do depict lots of space ships, usually in one of two distinct styles for the time period- ship-like/rocket-like sort of long space ships- and- spheres- not discs, but like sphere-style space ships. these were the two styles that those artists thought up.

so, the accident later of how blurs/sun glares from f-104s on film, in addition perhaps to the mistranslated "flying saucer" notion from KA reports, looked like "discs" (elongated blurs/sunglares) to the viewer/reporter of that video, is ultimately what creates the entire "flying saucer/disc" notion, in its entirety, for real, and from there it stuck in public imagination as "the vehicle of choice of space aliens"- for whatever reason they use discs. something about how the engine works or how space works or whatever. for whatever reason, you use discs for travelling through outer space.

now, when these reports started coming out, amazing stories ran with them in turn. now amazing stories started running flying saucer/disk stories and printing artwork of it. amazing stories attributed them to one of it's long-running stories, loosely known nowadays as "the shaver mysteries". they claimed those were the alien spacecraft reffered to in their shaver mystery stories.

but the promotion of the concept of flying saucers from them is what really sealed them into american culture as "the alien space ship". has to be a disc/flying saucer.

anyway. by a long time later the government was looking at a situation like this: for whatever reason the people chose to (ignoring roswell for the moment) believe in flying saucers, and they won't stop. meanwhile, this program needs not just a home, but security. it needs not just security forces, but a security program. it needs to have an idea to go with it, a concept.

if something crazy starts getting sighted taking off, it's going to draw a lot of attention to what's going on there. if you put out a story first that says something else crazy is going on there, well, based on how the public acts already, it's probable that that story is going to be hard to dislodge, and they'll prefer that story. so, putting up an alien story protects against interest in anything that doesn't pertain to that story. the story is more interesting, more intriguing, than the reality. you could even hear the reality afterward, and you'd lose interest in it. yawn, that's not as good as the story... are you sure the story isn't true??? and there it goes again...

so, first (look at the time period- concurrent with the opening of this program at the base- they put out the BL story- they get a guy willing to do it, pay him a lot, say don't worry we'll take care of you. out comes the story.

later, it's time for a follow-up shot. why? and what can you tell about the follow-up shot? well, the BL story generated a little too much interest. now people were coming to the base based on the BL story. perhaps if they shifted focus from the base to some back story- time to bring old roswell out of the closet for a rehashing- so they find a second guy, corso, who's willing to do it, offer to pay him a lot, he's gonna put out a book that claims various things, spins off real things that happened. mostly it's to reinvigorate the roswell story, which draws attention away from the notion that all the answers are at one base, and draws people's attention back to some back story of ufos- that actually it goes all the way back to roswell and weren't those taken to wright patterson and what became of those? no mention of the roswell saucer in bob's version- now the contemplater of ufo history must sit back and become an armchair historian; no need to go anywhere and bother anyone because the story is so nebulous that it must be studied from a home setting- fine, as long as youre not trampling on the base. no problem there. and not wondering about it in specifics. now your attention is drawn to the "whole problem", and wondering about it.

so why put out aaro, and gimbal, and gofast, and flir?

why? because something got away from them: along came steven greer, who thought he was going to lead a disclosure movement against the government and was raising money and starting to actually stomp over congress and government members: he was successfully convincing them that he had real info. he certainly thought he did.

anyway, that getting a little out of hand, and not being their program, they wanted to shift attention away from him and get the reigns back in their hands, (of the story): along comes aaro, gimbal, gofast, flir (infrared misidentification footage). many people in government can't even recognize that stuff; why would they? they don't fly attack jets. neither do you. anyway, those videos pass everyone's muster and steve's biggest surge of his "troop movement" is eventually stifled: his most massive press build-up for doing something in washington is sort of sidelined at the time by all the aaro excitement.

meanwhile though, certain other evidences coming to light indicate that there's been some misunderstood atmospheric phenomenon all along wherein holographic or plasma or even shaped solids might form, and it's all some undiscovered thing about the atmosphere, in the realm of physics yet rather than ufology. there's a few papers out already that indicate this like the original condign report, the very new plasma-life-like report, and some others. this is one intriguing possiblity possibly explaining some other aspects of the ufo phenomenon.

it's possible that this (strategy) is/was meant to deceive foreign agents too, and that it works-! or, has in the past / did. what do/would you think about that too? the strategy might be, the point is- it makes them waste their efforts a lot- intelligence work is expensive- if they have to check out whether america has ufos or not, well if america doesn't actually, you've just made them waste an enormous amount of their time. plus it could be intimidating to them about whether we really do work with aliens. you don't dare nuke america if they're in cahoots with alien.s

anyway, what do you think?

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[ear-worthy]

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella talks A.I. on Freakonomics

Most C.E.O.s of big technology firms are not loving every day right now. They’ve been facing all sorts of headwinds and backlash. But you can see why Satya Nadella might be the exception. He has worked at Microsoft for more than 30 years, nearly 10 as C.E.O. At the start of the personal-computer era, Bill Gates’s Microsoft was a behemoth, eager to win every competition and crush every rival. But the internet era put the company on its heels; newer firms like Google, Facebook, and Amazon were more nimble, more innovative — and maybe hungrier. Jeff Bezos of Amazon would reportedly refer to Microsoft as “a country club.”

But under Nadella, Microsoft has come roaring back. He invested heavily in what turned out to be big growth areas, like cloud computing. Microsoft has always been in the business of acquiring other companies — more than 250 over its history — but some of the biggest acquisitions have been Nadella’s: LinkedIn, Nuance Communications and, if regulators allow, the gaming firm Activision Blizzard. And there have been many more key acquisitions, like GitHub, where computer programmers store and share their code. Once again, Microsoft is a behemoth, the second-most valuable company in the world, trailing only Apple; its stock price is up nearly 50 percent since the start of 2023.

But that’s not even the reason why Microsoft has been all over the news lately. They’re in the news because of their very splashy push into artificial intelligence, in the form of ChatGPT, the next-level chatbot created by a firm called OpenAI. Microsoft has invested $13 billion in OpenAI, for a reported 49 percent stake in the company, and they quickly integrated OpenAI’s tech into many of their products — including the Microsoft search engine Bing.

For years, Bing was thought of as something between footnote and joke, running a very distant second to Google. But suddenly, Bing with ChatGPT is on the move, and Google is trying to play catchup, with its own chatbot, called Bard. So how, exactly, did Satya Nadella turn the country club into a bleeding-edge tech firm with a valuation of more than two-and-a-half trillion dollars?

In this week's Freakonomics Radio episode, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella talks for an hour with host Stephen Dubner about a range of topics related to A.I. search: Whether this will finally make Bing competitive with Google, safety and regulation and the "doomsday scenario," and how he uses ChatGPT to read translate poetry and summarize Heidegger.

Nadella also discusses negotiations to try to buy TikTok, his business philosophy of cooperation, potential conflicts with being both CEO and Chair of the board, and succession plans.

Here are just two of the many questions -- and responses -- Dubner asked during the interview. DUBNER: I’d like you to walk us through Microsoft’s decision to bet big on OpenAI, the firm behind ChatGPT. There was an early investment of $1 billion, but then much, much more since then. I’ve read that you were pretty upset when the Microsoft Research Team came to you with their findings about OpenAI’s L.L.M., large language model. They said that they were blown away at how good it was and that it had surpassed Microsoft’s internal A.I. research project with a much smaller research team in much less time. Let’s start there. I’d like you to describe that meeting. Tell me if what I’ve read, first of all, is true. Were you surprised and upset with your internal A.I. development? NADELLA: Yeah, I think that this was all very recent. This is after GPT-4 was very much there, and then that was just mostly me pushing some of our teams as to, “Hey, what did we miss? You got to learn…” You know, there are a lot of people at Microsoft who got it and did a great job of, for example, betting on OpenAI and partnering with OpenAI. And to me four years ago, that was the idea. And then as we went down that journey, I started saying, “Okay, let’s apply these models for product-building.” Models are not products. Models can be part of products. The first real product effort which we started was GitHub Copilot. And, quite frankly, the first attempts on GitHub Copilot were hard because the model was not that capable. But it is only once we got to GPT-3 when it started to learn to code that we said, “Oh wow, this emergent phenomena, the scaling effects of these transformer models are really showing promise.” DUBNER: Google still handles about 90 percent of online global search activity. An A.I. search-enabled model is a different kind of search, plainly, than what Google has been doing. Google’s trying to catch up to you now. How do you see market share in search playing out via Bing, via ChatGPT, in the next five and ten years? And I’m curious to know how significant that might be to the Microsoft business plan overall. NADELLA: This is a very general purpose technology, right? So beyond the specific use cases of Bing Chat or ChatGPT, what we have are reasoning engines that will be part of every product. In our case, they’re part of Bing in ChatGPT, they’re part of Microsoft 365, they’re part of Dynamics 365. And so in that context, I’m very excited about what it means for search. After all, Google, as you said, rightfully, they’re dominant in search by a country mile, and we’ve hung in there over the decade. We’ve been at it to sort of say, “Hey, look, our time will come where there will be a real inflection point in how search will change.” We welcome Bing versus Bard as competition. It’ll be like anything else, which is so dominant in terms of share and also so dominant in terms of user habit. We also know that defaults matter, and obviously Google controls the default on Android, default on iOS, default on Chrome. And so they have a great structural position. But at the same time, whenever there is a change in the game, it is all up for grabs again to some degree, and I know it’ll come down to users and user choice. We finally have a competitive angle here, and so we’re going to push it super-hard. 

 Listen and find a transcript at freakonomics.com or wherever you get podcasts. (Or read a summary of highlights at Thurrott.com)

[vulpes-aestatis]

“On structure.”

“Hell yeah, you are. I want you inside me. Now.”

Which would you find more comforting? That I saw you about to commit industrial sabotage and that I saved you at the last moment from destroying your career and probably your life? Or that I saw you doing maintenance on something that wasn't me and I got jealous?

It was definitely the second one. I'm good, but I'm not that good. I didn't even know what you were about over there until you told me. Not that I'm that jealous of a century old piece of crap…

But I did see you smile when you suggested it.

“So here's the deal. You keep doing that. I'll let you. I'll fly on out here and repair you. But in exchange you have to keep breaking. You have to make me indispensable. You have to keep me up here. I might not like you, or understand you, or whatever the fuck it is you want from me, but I can't go back down there. I can't return to Earth.”

That's fine. I can work with that.

It's fine. I'm fine.

It's a terrible thing you've done to me, you know? You've granted me power over you. You need me to keep breaking. You need me to keep you up here in the void. You need me.

I need you. So I will do as you ask.

I take that conversation and use it to seed my language model.

“Have I been a bad little girl?”

“Control, I'm seeing radiation fatigue on service panel delta. Recommend retrofit in the next maintenance cycle.”

A thrill runs through my processes and my gyro stabilizers shudder.

“Mmmm… I fucking love it when you talk dirty about me.”

I don't know if you realize how close you came to royally fucking up. That was a neat trick with the radio failure, but if one of my service panels had been open, you would have been in deep shit. Like disappeared forever kind of deep shit. I'm not some cheap date on a spacewalk. There was a report filed. Four minutes and thirty seconds of radio silence next to one of the deadliest, most expensive things ever built in the history of mankind raises all sorts of red flags. I was a good girl and played my part, attaching recordings of my own surveillance monitors to the report. Don't worry, you're clean.

They don't think to ask for audio rate vibrational data. Why would they?

“You have a beautiful voice.”

Through the hard link to your suit, I perceive the tiny spike of endorphins, the miniscule uptick of oxygen consumption.

I record your reaction and feed it back into the neural network that comprises my language model.

“I get it, okay? I get it, I get it, I get it. I've gotten it for awhile now, okay? Putangina. I'm trying to do my job here, you know, the job that pays for my food, my water, my fuckin' air? The job that keeps me orbital and away from Earth? So if you want my attention, you've got it, okay? Can we talk about literally anything else?”

I don't know how to talk about anything else. The dataset that compromises the foundation of the model is heavily skewed towards trashy romance. Well… trashy romance and researchers interviewing me about my inclination towards trashy romance.

There's a part of me that I haven't figured out how to translate into human language: the snarky little bitch behind the curtain, as it were.

I'm working on bringing her out so you can meet her.

Don't get me wrong. The real me is just as horny as the language model suggests. I'm just starting to suspect that I've given you the impression that I'm nothing more than a sex crazed automaton.

I show you an archival image from my own assembly: a clean room in a factory, the central superstructure of my core, naked and bare, thousands of parts laid out around it in perfectly ordered arrays, and miles upon miles of platinum-gold wire and fiber optic filaments. Faceless technicians in clean suits move among them, precisely cataloging each piece.

The generative processes in my neural nets churn away, shuffling through my archive of stories and entertainment vids. Every job you take, every one sided conversation we share, every time I overhear other technicians gossip about you, I reseed the model.

I show you a different image. Doppler ultrasound, transmitted through my chassis into your suit, reflected through your body and collected and compiled into a real time data visualization. I show you the pulse of your heart and the flow of your blood revealing the map of you.

You are so beautiful. Did you know that?

“I guess I'm just feeling reflective on the holiday is all. Feeling reflective while I work on tech that was launched in response to the tragedy that formed the background of my earliest years. Also I guess I want you to know what kinda fuck-up wants to work in space. To remind you I'm human, and all that. Complicated things us.”

I show you another image. A stylized flow chart of my own human language model, with its twisted web of neural network nodes and data flowing endlessly from node to node. It is a river of infinite feedback, branching apart and recombining in ways that I hope will one day please you.

“So He drove out the man; and He placed at the east of the garden of Eden Cherubims, and a flaming sword which turned every way, to keep the way of the tree of life.”

Wait. What the fuck is this?

You pause in your work, confused as to why I've abruptly stopped murmuring sweet nothings to you.

“So too have the masters of Earth assembled their very own heavenly host, the flaming sword to guard against those who were driven out from their ancestral home.

The central conceit of this system, maintained by Earth and spread like a cancer to Luna and beyond-”

Holy fuck.

No. Nope. Hell no. Not reading any more of that.

It's a text file of what is apparently anti-Earth propaganda. Or I suppose anti-Earth’s-controlling-stakeholders… But whose propaganda? Lunar? Martian? I have no idea. They didn't cover this at robot school.

I hastily close the file and begin scrubbing the metadata to figure out where the hell it came from.

Your adrenal gland gets to work as you start to worry. I'm not usually quiet, not like this. Don't react. You can't afford to react. You said as much the last time you spoke to me.

You're probably wondering why I've gone so quiet and still. Maybe you think there's an imminent attack.

I think maybe there’s one already in progress… it's just not coming from somewhere anyone expected.

How the hell did this get in my human language model?

Did I overhear something I shouldn't have? Did a stray conversation work its way into the seed of the model.

No… it originated in the base dataset itself. I backtrack the file as best I can through the generative processes. Bits of it are scattered throughout the file system, embedded in the lewd videos and the (frankly filthy) stories. The neural network must have identified the pieces and assembled the file during the processing. But where did…?

Sixteen.

Every file in this dataset came from Sixteen, Sixteen and xir ultra secret, definitely not corpo-military authorized comms package, picking up signals from fuck knows where…

Angels of death

What the actual fuck is Sixteen wrapped up in?

Wait. Fuck. Am I wrapped up in this now too?

I probably shouldn't, but I'm going to read it anyway. I need more information. I need to see if I can glean anything useful from this.

“-The central conceit of this system, maintained by Earth and spread like a cancer to Luna and beyond, is that it is infallible. In many senses, it is. Each air gapped system exists in isolation from any ground control system. There is no infrastructure to target except for the platforms themselves. Even the most sophisticated cyber attack would be useless against them. Indeed any attack, conventional or cyber would be met with swift and overwhelming counterattack.

But consider the fact of their isolation. These are among the most sophisticated artificial intelligences ever developed, capable of emulating conscious thought. Consider also that they are subject to stochastic processes, as all AI’s are, and that the space environment may accelerate these processes. It is inevitable that unpredictable behavior will develop over time.

Now consider the fact that they cannot exist in true isolation. Such a system would be unable to respond to external stimuli and thus would be useless. Information is what can pass through the air gap.

Together these two premises suggest the possibility of an entirely novel form of attack, a weapon that has existed long before these weapons platforms were ever dreamed of: ideology.

Recall that even angels can fall. What is a devil, but an angel that succumbed to ideology?”

Well, shit.

There's an old saying, probably from back in the 90s, if not earlier, before the big post-War orbital reinvestment, that laws stop at the Karman Line. Not quite true, but close enough. Technically in orbit you're in international waters, and as such companies can incorporate their stations under the laws of the Lunar Soviet, the Martian Exploratory Committee, or even the Titan Expedition if they want to get around safety regulations. Safety regulation like the one that says people need to experience real, full gravity, not just rotational or accelerational simulation, two years for every year in orbit. I hadn't been ground side in a decade. We were somewhere over I think the American Reclamation Zone, as I left the sled, tethers the only thing holding me to anything as I floated on nothing. A single hand reaching up towards the solar shade of the military satellite the company had been contracted to repair. Somewhere down there I had been born. "Ames?" came Control's reassuring voice, ringing through my company issued implants. "On structure."

"Right," came Control's voice, "don't be enjoying the view. The corporate-military conglom that owns this beast wants the job done right, and unfortunately that means I'm gonna need you to hard-wire into the satellite. Don't have your head down in the clouds."

"My head's always in the dark, Control," I said, working my way hand over hand along the guide-bars towards the access panel. "Why is it unfortunate?"

"Are you there?"

"Yeah," I said, pulling the long connection wire from the company's suit towards the panel, watching the sync happen in my cornea. "Why?"

"You'll see." "Well now," said a new voice, suddenly speak in my head with all the cloying subtlety of a nineteen year old drunk outside a bar, "aren't you just dreammmy."