#i renamed for science

[lycosiday]

a new design AND a new name... which makes them basically unrecognizable. Anyway this is Thistle but better

[m0e-ru]

in my mimiposts tags hashtag social link hashtag social link hashtag social link hashtag social link hashtag social link h(bangs my head against the wall)

[evilkitten3]

hey so uh. semi-religious jew here. souls are absolutely a religious thing, there is no "soul" outside of religion, it is literally a thing with zero evidence of its existence. if you believe in souls the that's fine and all, but that belief does not manifest material evidence of a soul

if you're thinking of "the thing that makes you you" that's your brain and most of us use it pretty often

"corporations don't have a soul" "machines don't have a soul" neither do humans. I won't convert to your religion. Think up a new argument.

[midnightwind]

need to draw Ziirae again just to put my one trans character back into the world in protest

[ponds-of-ink]

Quick Spooky-Post Scene: “Meet-Spook at Castle Von Dunkle-Herz”

So, last night, I came up with this idea for a dude getting a heavy crush on this Frankenstein’s monster-type woman. I got so caught up in it that I wrote this scene just to get it out of my system.

Hopefully, this’ll be fun to read as it was fun to write.

-

Rain poured as the lone convertible battled the slippery country road. A fast-paced tune of yesteryear kept the driver’s mood calm and collected. Not even a sudden outburst from his robotic French tour guide could make him jump. And, given the sharp bends, he needed this kind of composure.

Eye-brow raising was allowed, however. “Could you repeat that, please?” he asked his guide, once in English and once in French.

“Castle von Dunkle-Herz is a few miles ahead,” the guide repeated in accented English, highlighting something on his car’s electronic map for emphasis. “Locals advise to approach with caution.”

“‘Dunkel-Herz’?” the driver thought as he focused on the road ahead. “This is the very south side of France. What’s a name like ‘Dunkel-Herz’ doing here?”

And the closer he got to said castle, the more puzzled he became. The cliffside gave way to a hilly forest. Lightning flashed much more frequently, as if drawn to the shadowy castle. As he finally neared this foreboding building’s iron gates, the manor itself reminded him of old houses from ancient Dracula films. A far cry from the modern seaside property he left mere hours ago. “Might as well ask the master of the house if I’ve entered another dimension,” he muttered as he parked alongside the stone arches of those gates. “It certainly feels like it.”

He exited the car and stepped into the outside world. The music still played from inside the car, its lyrics now sounding like a beckoning siren.

“I’m waiting for you… I’m waiting for you… I’m waiting for you to come to me…”

Whether or not the music “spoke” for the car or someone in the castle, the man couldn’t tell. It was probably best to leave it up to interpretation.

With this thought in mind, the man shook off any dread and strolled up to the gates. He tugged on the left gate, then nearly stumbled as it swung open. “Hello?” he called out, not knowing what else to do besides entering the front yard. “I think I’ve gotten lost. Very lost, in fact. Can anybody tell me if I’ve accidentally slipped into another world?”

An elderly man emerged from the front door. “What other world?” he asked with an untraceable accent 

“The kind where castles like Von Dunkle-Herz can exist in the south part of France,” the traveller explained, more baffled than annoyed.

The elder’s eyes lit up from the lightning. “Ah,” he said with a grin and a bow. “You are not the first to question the location of the modern Von Dunkle-Herz. Consider me and my household a transfer from a different ‘world’— Not you, sir.” He watched his listener process this new information. “Well, don’t stand there getting sick!” the Von Dunkle-Herz cried out impatiently. “Come inside! We can discuss more in the foyer.” So saying, he slipped behind the front door.

The man, against all better judgment, followed inside. He took off his wool beanie and hung it on the closest thing to a hat rack. Then, realizing his lack of manners thus far, smiled sheepishly at his host. “I don’t think I’ve introduced myself,” he said, holding out his hand. “I’m Vince. Vince Phillips, if we’re going by full names.”

The elder returned the gesture with a surprisingly firm handshake. “Doctor Lucius Von Dunkle-Herz,” he replied cordially. “Though you can simply call me Doctor Herz. No need to complicate what can be simplified.”

“‘Guess you can call me ‘Phillips’, then,” Vince shrugged before letting go of the doctor’s hand. “So, if you don’t mind me asking, what’s your doctorate? I’ve got a bassist gig back home, but you sound like you’ve got a pretty hefty degree.”

“It is more of an inherited title,” Doctor Herz said before gesturing to the entire room before then. “Though the house is much different, our family creed stays the same: ‘das Unerreichbare verfolgen’. That is, to put it roughly in your tongue, ‘to pursue the unattainable’— And I do it through my various experiments.”

Vincent nodded. He was ready to ask about these experiments, but something moved in the corner of his eye. His head turned towards the foyer’s massive staircase. A towering shadow stood on the top step. “I-Is that one of your experiments?” he questioned in a hoarse voice.

Doctor Herz followed his visitor’s gaze. His jolly mood dampened. “Yes, that she is,” he answered flatly. “My prized creation, in fact.” Then, raising his voice, he called out: “Igorine! What are you doing out of bed?”

The bulky figure descended the top step. Her yellowed eyes twitched with uncertainty. “I heard noises,” she responded, her husky voice rumbling the air. “Are your machines all right?”

“They are fine, Igorine,” Doctor Herz said flatly. “But our new guest won’t be if you do not make yourself friendly. Come down here and introduce yourself.”

Igorine cautiously climbed down the rest of the staircase. She brushed back a strand of her long, curly hair; then trudged her way towards Vince. “I am Igorine Von Herz,” she announced calmly, holding out her heavily-stitched arm. “The Doctor’s only assistant. And you are?”

Vince took Igorine’s hand. His face burned red as he kept glancing at various traits. The multicolored patches of skin that made her the living equivalent of a patchwork quilt. The equally varied strands of curled hair— Clearly a result of limited resources on the Doctor’s end. Those yellow, wide eyes that seemed to always stare with a sense of dread and curiosity. All of these (plus the general looming build) made his heart race. “Vince,” he sputtered after what felt like an eternity on his end. “Vince Phillips.” He paused to compose himself, then resumed. “Has the doctor ever told you that you look absolutely stunning?” he questioned softly, helpless to his own flustered state of mind.

Igorine raised her head. “No,” she replied simply. “Have I stunned you like a deer in the headlights?”

“You have surprised him like a sunset after a thunderstorm,” Doctor Herz cut in, pulling Vince away with his arm. “A strange reaction for one so misshapen, Mister Phillips. Perhaps all of your travelling has made you out-of-sorts.” He guided the poor man towards a side room. “Some of my best soup will bring you back to reality.”

All Vince could do was give a few quick glances in Igorine’s direction. “I hope that soup isn’t some rose-tinted potion,” he thought as they entered a spacious dining room. “Igorine would just look boring underneath that spell.”

[novanhistorian]

Why, oh why must plate tectonics be like this?

I've got the landmass, I've got a general idea of how it evolved, and now I've just got to sketch the thing out and hope it could possibly have come about.

But HOLY GOD is there a lot to do as part of that.

And then I've got to figure out the biomes myself because Azgaar's fantasy map generator (into which one can scan self-designed maps, which is what I have heretofore been doing) has proven quite unreliable for that.

[mariacallous]

The Ocean Sciences Building at the University of Washington in Seattle is a brightly modern, four-story structure, with large glass windows reflecting the bay across the street.

On the afternoon of July 7, 2016, it was being slowly locked down.

Red lights began flashing at the entrances as students and faculty filed out under overcast skies. Eventually, just a handful of people remained inside, preparing to unleash one of the most destructive forces in the natural world: the crushing weight of about 2½ miles of ocean water.

In the building’s high-pressure testing facility, a black, pill-shaped capsule hung from a hoist on the ceiling. About 3 feet long, it was a scale model of a submersible called Cyclops 2, developed by a local startup called OceanGate. The company’s CEO, Stockton Rush, had cofounded the company in 2009 as a sort of submarine charter service, anticipating a growing need for commercial and research trips to the ocean floor. At first, Rush acquired older, steel-hulled subs for expeditions, but in 2013 OceanGate had begun designing what the company called “a revolutionary new manned submersible.” Among the sub’s innovations were its lightweight hull, which was built from carbon fiber and could accommodate more passengers than the spherical cabins traditionally used in deep-sea diving. By 2016, Rush’s dream was to take paying customers down to the most famous shipwreck of them all: the Titanic, 3,800 meters below the surface of the Atlantic Ocean.

Engineers carefully lowered the Cyclops 2 model into the testing tank nose-first, like a bomb being loaded into a silo, and then screwed on the tank’s 3,600-pound lid. Then they began pumping in water, increasing the pressure to mimic a submersible’s dive. If you’re hanging out at sea level, the weight of the atmosphere above you exerts 14.7 pounds per square inch (psi). The deeper you go, the stronger that pressure; at the Titanic’s depth, the pressure is about 6,500 psi. Soon, the pressure gauge on UW’s test tank read 1,000 psi, and it kept ticking up—2,000 psi, 5,000 psi. At about the 73-minute mark, as the pressure in the tank reached 6,500 psi, there was a sudden roar and the tank shuddered violently.

“I felt it in my body,” an OceanGate employee wrote in an email later that night. “The building rocked, and my ears rang for a long time.”

“Scared the shit out of everyone,” he added.

The model had imploded thousands of meters short of the safety margin OceanGate had designed for.

In the high-stakes, high-cost world of crewed submersibles, most engineering teams would have gone back to the drawing board, or at least ordered more models to test. Rush’s company didn’t do either of those things. Instead, within months, OceanGate began building a full-scale Cyclops 2 based on the imploded model. This submersible design, later renamed Titan, eventually made it down to the Titanic in 2021. It even returned to the site for expeditions the next two years. But nearly one year ago, on June 18, 2023, Titan dove to the infamous wreck and imploded, instantly killing all five people onboard, including Rush himself.

The disaster captivated and horrified the world. Deep-sea experts criticized OceanGate’s choices, from Titan’s carbon-fiber construction to Rush’s public disdain for industry regulations, which he believed stifled innovation. Organizations that had worked with OceanGate, including the University of Washington as well as the Boeing Company, released statements denying that they contributed to Titan.

A trove of tens of thousands of internal OceanGate emails, documents, and photographs provided exclusively to WIRED by anonymous sources sheds new light on Titan’s development, from its initial design and manufacture through its first deep-sea operations. The documents, validated by interviews with two third-party suppliers and several former OceanGate employees with intimate knowledge of Titan, reveal never-before-reported details about the design and testing of the submersible. They show that Boeing and the University of Washington were both involved in the early stages of OceanGate’s carbon-fiber sub project, although their work did not make it into the final Titan design. The trove also reveals a company culture in which employees who questioned their bosses’ high-speed approach and decisions were dismissed as overly cautious or even fired. (The former employees who spoke to WIRED have asked not to be named for fear of being sued by the families of those who died aboard the vessel.) Most of all, the documents show how Rush, blinkered by his own ambition to be the Elon Musk of the deep seas, repeatedly overstated OceanGate’s progress and, on at least one occasion, outright lied about significant problems with Titan’s hull, which has not been previously reported.

A representative for OceanGate, which ceased all operations last summer, declined to comment on WIRED’s findings.

[crispsandkerosene]

Extended "Tell a Story..." Interaction

A small default replacement (of sort) for this Apartment Life social. The original includes five "stories", each boosting a hobby and relations with a an AL social class: -> "Mechanics", tinkering, Gearheads. -> "Art", arts & crafts, Bohemians. -> "Sports", sports, Jocks. -> "Computers", games, Techies. -> "Economy", film and literature, Socialites. I added five for the missing hobbies; reusing the social classes: -> "Camping", nature, Gearheads. -> "Baking", cuisine, Bohemians. -> "Health", fitness, Jocks. -> "Science Fiction", science, Techies. -> "Orchestra", music and dance, Socialites. All the new stories use custom sprites in their speech bubbles. These are from the Sims 2, 3 and 4. Their action strings have localization for French, Russian, Polish, Spanish and Portuguese. Other game languages will display the basic US English. I also renamed the "Economy" story to "Celebrity" in the English localization. I replaced its sprites as well as some of the "Computers" story's. The preview image shows one of the "Celebrity" sprites. Internally, the mod replaces components of the existing interaction: BHVs, STRs, TXTRs, and the OBJD (but not its GUID). The only new resources are additional textures. As far as I've tested, it should be safe to remove. The game will simply go back to using the original "material". Thank you to Gayars for helping me test it, and Tvickiesims, Gwathgor, Freezer Bunny and Logan Simming Wolverine for the various translations! -> Download at SimFileShare.

[julkasims]

TS2 - Career Levels Numbered, Careers Renamed

Know this mod by Phaenoh? So I remade it from scratch. The original one had issues; some careers didn't have numbers, and some levels were swapped (according to people). Now instead of "Lvl X" numbers are in brackets, which is more aesthetically pleasing to me. English only, incorporates this.

While I was at it, I renamed some of the careers to my liking. This is a separate mod with its own package file of course. English only, again.

(Athletic > Sport, Criminal > Crime, Culinary > Culinary Art, Slacker > Service, Artist > Art, Natural Scientist > Natural Science, Paranormal > Parapsychology, Security > Pet Security, Service > Pet Service, Show biz > Pet Show Business)

Credits: Phaenoh, Menaceman44, diwasims

SFS / MEGA

SFS / MEGA - Basic tutorial on editing custom careers for those unexperienced with SimPE

Update 30 November 2024: fixed Politics career.

Update 08 December 2024: fixed part-time careers that had female levels numbered 4-6 instead of 1-3. Must have been tired while doing them, sorry. Also added numbers for pet careers.

Update 21 December 2024: added a second version of More Consistent Titles with Slacker career renamed to Freelance, as suggested by dmckim (thank you!).

Update 25 May 2025: reworked the second mod, changed the thumbnail.

[thesummerestsolstice]

People seemed interested in Library Orc Blorbo so I decided to write down my headcanons about him:

His name is Garthaglir (it’s Sindarin for “poem keeper”)

He renamed himself after discovering a love for library sciences, shortly after he moved to the valley

Rivendell’s head librarian

Used to be an extremely dangerous warrior, now considers himself retired

Extremely tall and buff, blue skin, salt-and-pepper hair and a well-trimmed beard

Very distinguished, very polite

Has a tiny pair of spectacles he uses to read because he's farsighted

He doesn’t look like an old man but he is one deep in his heart

He was one of the first reformed orcs to end up in Rivendell, so he helps other orcs adjust to living there

Basically invented Middle Earth’s version of the Dewey Decimal system

Look, Rivendell’s library is like, unfathomably huge, there’s 6000+ years of books in there, someone had to organize it

He, Elrond, and Erestor are the only people who have keys to the part of the library where they keep the cursed books

The three of them also have a monthly book club

He holds a weekly story time for the kids

(Yes, he does do funny voices, no, you are not allowed to comment on it)

Has tracked people down at 3 AM before because “M’am? M’am you have an overdue book, here, I brought my library stamp would you mind just checking this out again? You can keep it out for another month that way. Just a moment, ah, yes thank you, I’ll be on my way now. Excellent choice in reading material.”

He has a fancy sunhat he wears outside during the day so the sun doesn’t burn him, it was a gift from small Arwen and he cherishes it

He has a library cat, her name is Mittens and he would die for her

Uses his free time to teach himself different languages; there are hundreds in Rivendell’s books

Enjoys recommending books to visitors, he’s gotten really good at getting a read on what people will like

Personally, when he’s in the mood for fiction, he prefers a good mystery

[httpvomitello]

Helloooo, can I request something for the 2018 turtles (ROTTMNT)? The reader arrives with the guys to show them the softshell turtle they got as a gift at a school science fair. Since they're not very sure how to take care of it, they go to the guys for help. And the turtle... it looks just like the one from The Amazing World of Gumball. I just think it would be fun to see the turtles (especially Donnie) interacting with the evil turtle haha 😭

OMG NOT THAT FREAKING TURTLE 😭😭 When I learned that Donnie is a softshell turtle, my mind immediately went to that turtle from Gumball. Like... Seriously??? That turtle is the reincarnation of evil, that's for sure. Anyways ~ i hope you like it! ♡♡♡♡

Leo is so pumped when you show up with a turtle

He’s already imagining the epic sibling turtle bonding he’ll all have, and he’s definitely scheming ways to turn your new buddy into his own personal sidekick

But as he leans in to get a better look, he catches the turtle giving him a super intense, villainous stare

"Uh, why is he looking at me like that?" Leo laughs nervously, tapping the glass of its little tank

The turtle does not break eye contact

In fact, it somehow looks like it’s plotting something

After a long, intense staring contest (which Leo loses), Leo's more hyped than ever

“Oh, we’re keeping him. This little guy’s got edge.”

He decides to call it something like "Sidekick Jr", and he tries to train it to glare on command, thinking it’ll be perfect to bring it to battle with him

Obviously you don't let that happen.

Raph’s eyebrows shoot up the second he sees the turtle

“Whoa. That turtle is… cute.”

Lying is not Raph's focus

He is all in for helping you take care of it

But as soon as he leans in, the turtle levels him with a stare so intense that Raph is slightly taken aback

“This guy looks like he could plan a heist,” he jokes, but he’s half-serious

He’s convinced the turtle has some secret agenda and will not let it out of his sight

Raph takes pride in helping you build a “fortified tank” to protect it from any “potential escape attempts.”

He even draws up “exercise drills” to help it “build character.”

He ends up calling it something like “Lil’ Warrior”

The turtle's name is Bob

And he spends a suspicious amount of time training it to recognize commands, because “A turtle like this needs discipline.”

Donnie’s reaction is extreme caution

Like... wtf? How is this turtle so ugly?

(He completely forgot that he is also a softshell turtle)

He’s thrilled you came to him about turtle care, especially because this guy is a fellow softshell

But then he notices the turtle’s… ominous glare

For the next ten minutes, Donnie just stares back, analyzing every detail

The turtle doesn’t blink

It feels like a showdown

"This isn’t just any turtle, you know," he mutters, more to himself

He immediately runs diagnostics on it, pulling out his tools to test its temperament and intelligence level, just in case

Donnie takes the turtle care seriously, sets up the perfect tank, gets the optimal UV lamp, and is constantly researching enrichment activities, but he still doesn’t entirely trust it

You catch him putting up tiny lasers around the tank "just in case."

And he insists on renaming it something like “Professor Menace” because, in his words

“Look at that face—he’s clearly up to something.”

Mikey’s reaction is pure delight. “Aw! Look at the lil’ guy!”

He immediately wants to hold it, but as soon as he picks it up, the turtle gives him a side-eye that could curdle milk

Yes, the turtle is judging Michelangelo

He tries everything

Offering lettuce, sweet-talking it, giving it little pets, but the turtle just stares, expression unreadable but somehow… sinister

“Why does he keep looking at me like that?” Mikey wonders, confused but determined to win the turtle’s affection

He’s convinced it just needs a bit of “good vibes,” so he tries playing calming music, talking to it about his day, and even painting a little flower on the tank

Despite the turtle’s apparent indifference

(And slightly ominous glare)

Mikey’s convinced they’re best friends

He starts calling it “Lil’ Grump,” swearing it’ll warm up eventually.

[fatehbaz]

oh zoe schlanger, you don't even know 💀 by the way, have you read "bastard breadfruit and other cheap provisions" ?

Yo. Yea, actually, read "Bastard Breadfruit." Got references to and excerpts from Anya Zilberstein's work on the blog, including linking of the breadfruit scheme with appropriation of manoomin/wild rice here and here. The frustrating antihero botanists of Britain in the 1770s (including Joseph Banks, to no surprise) were simultaneously working on projects to naturalize/appropriate both plants; just like how DeLoughrey highlights that the breadfruit scheme was spurred by British anxiety about cultivating cheap food crops to prevent Black rebellions and slave insurrections in the Americas, Zilberstein in "Inured to Empire: Wild Rice and Climate Change" shows that rebellions also factored into British fixation on cultivating manoomin. (For anyone unfamiliar, plantation owners in the Caribbean were scared about revolts 1770s-1790s, and they sponsored a major plan to have Britain's top botanists/administrators bring breadfruit from Polynesia to the Caribbean, so that they could "feed the slaves" and prevent unrest with the "exalted benevolence" of "colonial science." They, at the time, were pretty explicit about this. Also, the British voyage sent to get the breadfruit had it's own rebellion--lol--the now-famous Mutiny on the Bounty.) I've got other references to Zilberstein's work here on British/Canadian commodification and renaming of manoomin/wild rice ("cottage colonialism"; "names are not neutral"; how leisure tourism, portraiture, scientific field stations are implicated).

I'm interested in what she describes as "history of science and empire"; also encountered her work through her association with the journal Arcadia/Environment and Society Portal. The way she makes connections between spatially-distant centres of calculation in British administration (London, Nova Scotia, Caribbean, etc.) reminds me of Elizabeth DeLoughrey's similar tracing of the networks/routes of British and US ideas/material, especially the circulation of ideas about environment (so, appropriate that DeLoughrey wrote about breadfruit). There's already broader academic coverage of the role of botany in building of Empire/racial capitalism in the late eighteenth century. Like Zaheer Baber's “The Plants of Empire: Botanic Gardens, Colonial Power and Botanical Knowledge" (2016); Schiebinger's Plants and Empire: Colonial Bioprospecting in the Atlantic World; Lafuente and Valverde's "Linnaean Botany and Spanish Imperial Biopolitics"; the anthology The Botany of Empire in the Long Eighteenth Century; and two dozen others. But I do like this little nook focused on how British/US imaginaries of nineteenth/twentieth centuries inherited those frameworks/approaches in ways that still strongly persist today.

Last year, read Zilberstein's book Temperate Empire: Making Climate Change in Early America. More on British fixation on "land improvement." In these cases, professional(ized) institutions are nodes in networks that bring peripheral ecologies "into being as objects of knowledge" to induct the colonies into imperial life.

Reminded me also of Kirsten Greer's work on British imaginaries of ecoregions in the nineteenth century; including the division/dichotnomy of temperate/tropical and the crafting of a kinda standardized "universal" idea/taxonomy of "neotropical, nearctic," etc. Like in Zilberstein's Temperate Empire, Greer also describes the social and ideological connections between British administrators in Atlantic Canada and the Caribbean and how their field stations (and the professionalization of knowledge at metropolitan London institutions) composed ideas of "ideal" landscapes; she also takes a look at how British imperial interest in Gibraltar, Cyprus, North Africa, Ottoman-administered lands, etc., fed-off of this scientific imaginary being practiced in the Caribbean (a similar thing happened with twentieth-century scientist-as-white-savior and scientist-as-agent-of-plantation-companies in US plantations in Latin America). If you're into ecoregions generally but ornithology or birds specifically, might like Greer's "Geopolitics and the Avian Imperial Archive: The Zoogeography of Region-Making in the Nineteenth-Century British Mediterranean," excerpt on my blog but also the article's accessible online. However, she's also got a recent book, Red Coats and Wild Birds: How Military Ornithologists and Migrant Birds Shaped Empire.

Linking the treatment of prairies and grasslands from Canada to Oceania, Zilberstein's work also reminds me of the writing on pasture grasses in Aotearoa and Australia. In Zilberstein's "Inured to Empire" and PG Andersen's "Grasses tame and wild" (both on manoomin in "Canada"), they discuss how Indigenous erasure and technocratic refashioning of landscape affected manoomin/agriculture 1900-1920 and paved the way for industrial monoculture extraction in the prairies/Great Plains. This reminds me of Brooking and Pawson in "Silences of Grass" ("grass built the British Empire"; Aotearoa will be "the Empire's dairy farm"), where they also focus on 1900-1940 and describe how sheep herding, dairy farming, landscape portraiture, pop-sci literature, technical science, etc. kept alive the earlier eighteenth-/nineteenth-century British fixation on "productive" land. (Excerpts here and here.) Very similar to Zilberstein's writing on "naturalizing" manoomin at field stations to make the rice into a commodity but also to make the idea of a "foreign" food plant "familiar" to European consumers, they discuss naturalization of other grasses as important tool of empire-building, both materially and imaginatively (how literature, scientific discourses, and visual art compose the "dreamwork of imperialism").

In all of these cases, there is British fascination with making "new" worlds into familiar, temperate, "improved" landscapes. Of course, a lot of "land improvement" has to do with commodification and profitability (plantations, monoculture, industrial-scale extraction), but it also has to do with imaginative control, too. This brings to mind Anna Boswell's writing on "anamorphic ecology" and Aotearoa specifically, where the "alien" ecologies of "strange" endemic species and "putrid" temperate rainforest provoked introduction of non-native species and installation of gardens, pastures, etc. This also implicates the role of gardening and monoculture lawns as sometimes-tools of British/US ways to bludgeon and re-make landscape in colonial settings. The garden makes them feel at home; they've transformed the unagreeable exotic ecosystem into a replica of an aristocratic English estate.

So it kinda makes the case that what some people might think of as "antiquated" old-school British/US imperial cosmologies (perhaps more overtly racist/militaristic/silly; "no way, do those old ideas/ideologies still permeate stuff today?") actually persisted as influential and continue to poison the well of contemporary imaginaries/science.

[jochi-the-veristithaylen-baker]

Dawnshard naming speculation. Wind and Truth spoilers. Long.

In Dawnshard ("Stormlight 3.5") we learned the name of one of the four Dawnshards. And that one is Change.

In Wind and Truth (Stormlight 5) we learn the name of a second Dawnshard, Exist.

The Shards of Adonalsium are named after concepts (Preservation not Preserve, Cultivation not Cultivate). But the Dawnshards are named after actions. Specifically verbs that are imperative. They express Intent directly.

And now is when I bring in a parallel to make guesses at the last two Dawnshards.

In Computer Science there's a model of interaction called "CRUD". It's an abbreviation for "Create, Read, Update, Delete" and are the primary four actions of interacting with a system.

Exist and Change could be seen as synonyms of Create and Update, when taken as verbs. That implies the last two are equivalents of Read and Delete.

The last one, Delete, would be easy to rename "Destroy".

In that phrasing it sounds ominously related to Nightblood and whatever is going on there.

But it doesn't quite fit. Destroy has an external grammatical object. Someone destroys something even if it is unspecified in a sentence. The two know Dawnshards don't have grammatical objects. You exist. You change. Delete and Destroy translated into a parallel of that could be Die.

The second action, Read, is a bit more of a challenge. I will suggest that the Iriali people have a central religious tenet of Experience. Their religious duty is to experience the cosmere from as many viewpoints as possible so the memories can be collected back into "The One" that they believe everything (or at least every Iriali person) originates from.

And the Iriali feel way more important than the impact they have had on cosmere politics so far

Thus we end on four dawnshards named

Exist • Experience • Change • Die

It feels like a complete set and very much like four commands that could create a living universe. Or kill a god.

As a post-script, let me just state that if I am right and one of the Dawnshards is the command Die, I am already really storming scared of it.

[seat-safety-switch]

In the glorious new Century we are approaching, the old empires will be ground beneath our feet as we rise to meet humanity's glorious destiny. The oppressors of mankind will at last be defeated, ushering in an eternal peace and boundless prosperity. Also, we're going to come up with new kinds of potato chips.

One of the first things my school guidance counsellor told me was that I was "too fucking dumb" to work at the potato chip factory in town. And for good reason. Although my academics were excellent, I had an attitude towards slacking even then that would have severely damaged the productivity of our proudest industry. He recommended that I instead go into theoretical computer science, where it seemed less likely that I would do any lasting damage to something important like the Russetizer®.

After I had burned out of a career of thinking about touching computers, and ended up scrounging for subsistence in a series of increasingly desperate small towns (like most of my graduating class) I thought about going back to the potato factory. Surely, they would accept me now. I have all this worldly experience, all these social oddities beaten out of me in favour of a newfound conformist urge to make just enough money to pay my mortgage and occasionally finance a round of golf at the cheap course.

Bad news, though. It turns out that while I was away, the practical computer scientists had taken over. When the venture capitalists realized that "we made a website for a thing" suddenly meant that you could charge a billion dollars for that thing, the hastily renamed High-Tech Potato Chip Company put the town on the map. And then, quickly thereafter, was erased from the map in a series of debt-based transactions. It has zero employees now, and the old factory was sold for scrap, but the corporate entity still makes several million dollars a year. This, despite the fact that nobody in town is sure exactly what it actually does, other than that it is "not making potato chips."

One night, I went to go see the place where the potato chip factory was. I wanted to stand where the Russetizer® once stood, before it was ripped out of the concrete and sent to some potato chip factory in a country that I can't find on a map. Unfortunately, my old high school guidance counsellor was there. Working as a security guard to supplement his retirement. I figured he would be real pissed to see me there, after all this drama, so I just turned around and left.

[bonebeautyart]

“On social law”

—Posthumous text by Louis Antoine Saint Just.

(Personal translation project in TUMBLR format: French to English)

| Preface

Following Anne Quennedy's critical and philological reading of the posthumous writings of Louis Antoine Saint Just, I have deemed it pertinent to prepare an English edition of his manuscript "On social Law"—renamed by Quennedy (2008).

The flawed editions of his theoretical work, which have in most cases disregarded this text—as Alienard said in his 1976 edition—have diminished the interpretation of his philosophical thread, from which his political actions stem. That being said, the first version of the text, published by Sobboul (1951), was published alongside a bilingual edition in Italian. However, there is no English translation of the work.

My intention in rescuing these texts for a semi-serious translation into English—with my personal decision to publish it in this forum—is for more comprehensive dissemination within the community, benefiting not only our political constructions or philosophical reflections, but also our dialectical parameters with its author.

| HERMENEUTIC READING AS A PRELIMINARY

It is necessary to clarify some issues.

They exist in various texts, which, when encrypted in their own language, the meaning is not the induction to their first reading, that is, superficial. It would be necessary to determine the direction of the underlying meaning of the text. A philosophical science of interpretation, it helps us understand—in accordance with temporal and historical boundaries—the being of the author's text.

Saint Just is not a particular case in methodological hermeneutics. We can trace the readings of his theory of transmutation throughout history, based on the following biases when approaching his work:

The establishment of universal abstract will and the embodied contradiction of the social contract (Rousseau)—a trigger, so to speak, for the French terror. The critique is primarily of the "mythic" ethos of Saint Just as the "Archangel of Terror." Written in summary by Jules Michelet and Albert Camus in his essay "L'homme révolté."

The theoretical archaism of Saint Just, criticism established from two frameworks: the Thermidorian, characteristic of the commentary established by Edmund Courtois, and the second—therefore more extensive—established in the criticism of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in their work "The Holy Family":

"Revolutionaries must be Romans." Robespierre, Saint Just and their party fell because they confused the ancient, realistic and democratic republic based on real slavery with the modern spiritualist democratic representative state which is based on emancipated slavery, on bourgeois society. What a terrible mistake it is to have to recognize and sanction in the Rights of Man modern bourgeois society, the society of industry, of universal competition, of private interest freely following its aims, of anarchy, of the self-alienated natural and spiritual individuality, and yet subsequently to annul the manifestations of the life of that society in separate individuals and at the same time to wish to model the political head of that society alter the fashion of the ancients! This mistake appears tragic when Saint Just, on the day of his execution, points to the large table of the Rights of Man hanging in the hall of the Conciergerie and says with proud dignity: "Yet it was I who made that." It was that very table that proclaimed the right of a man who cannot be the man of the ancient republic any more than his economic and industrial relations are those of the ancient times.

To close the circle of my proposals for a new reading, it is pertinent to establish a universal critical edition that is not cryptic in its reading.

Quennedy, from a philological revisionist perspective, has done incredible work editing "Republican Institutions" (ed. 2015) As far as I am concerned, this work is personal—due to my inexperience in the philological field—it may be inaccurate with the correct revision of the work; however, I will take it as an attempt to get more people to read it, since—repeating—the only decent editions that exist are only in French and with low circulation.

This is my decision to publish a more educational version on this blog, with my humble intention to edit and share his work.

FORMAT ESTABLISHMENT

System of Symbols:

Indications next to each line where these annotations exist

(X): crossed-out text and the number of times the correction was removed.

(Corrected word): Grammar corrections on the original text. Saint Just usually writes the names in lowercase

[Emphasis required]: A brief addition of mine for a more comprehensive or updated understanding.

Purple: Term to add to a glossary

The original text is not just a complete book, but three different texts scattered throughout its pages.

To do this, the editors have decided to assign 3 levels of depth to these works, more similar to a mapping of his philosophical reflections. Regarding the various thoughts, I will do my best to integrate it in order. (I will make an edition similar to Pascal's "diverse thoughts")

The colors to be assigned will be referred to in the text of each chapter:

First book [start of the notebook]—> Blue

Second book [back of the notebook]—> orange

Third book [in the middle of the notebook]—> Pink

I will soon be publishing chapter by chapter, as well as preparing a Spanish version for those who want to universalize the knowledge they have about Saint Just a bit more.

Book I.

Part One [Preface]

(Nature is a circle, whose order of things in this world is for us the center. Belonging to this circle, the individual becomes the central point, because the connections are [everywhere] and are equal; even from fate to the individual, or vice versa.)

These connections cannot be private or personal contracts; [if they are conceived as such], nature itself ends. Thus, social state, [in essence], is the homogeneous connections that unite through the eternal principle of conservation.

The [natural] social state does not, therefore, derive from the contract; the art of establishing a society through a contract or, [in other words], by the modifications of force, is the very art of overthrowing society.

Because of the physical order, if things could be governed for the moment by a positive contract, everything would dissolve into the moral order: it would be diffuse, because man has put the contract in place of nature.

In the social state, man was supposed to be dispassionate, because he lived according to his nature. In the current state, [the passions are detached from the state of force]

The feelings of the soul should not be confused with the passions: the feelings of the soul are the [gift] of nature and the [very] principle of social life, while the passions are the fruit of the usurpation and the [establishment] of the principles of wild life.

Men are civilized as long as they follow their inclinations (which push them to unite and love one another). [The savage state of man] is when political laws take the place of these inclinations and are added through domination and slavery.

In this sense, the earth is now populated only by savages, and the most tender heart—with the help of the most vivid imagination—can scarcely conceive of primitive society. Such is the great alteration of the human spirit. Whatever the origin of the present order of things, it is the work of darkness; for the world is unhappy.

Therefore, I have little faith in religions; they have engendered many crimes, bad laws, and impieties. There's no need to talk about them.

(All the arts have produced wonders. The art of governing has only produced monsters, because we have sought the image of art in nature and principles in our pride.)

I am no more austere than is my duty; I do not condemn a strong and sensitive soul that does not desire evil. I truly pay to nature and to my fellow human beings the tribute of love I owe them.

(I wanted to know the principles of the social or natural state and the path that could easily lead us to it. From our perspective, such is the subject of this book, which I titled "On Social Right.")

[iztarshi]

I was thinking about the origin of Piltover and Zaun in Arcane.

In LoL lore, Zaun (Oshra'Va Zaun) came first. Then, due to a very mad science attempt to build a canal with explosives, it sank and Piltover was built on top of it. In this version Zaun has to come first because Piltover was literally built on top of it.

In Arcane lore the main thing we know is that Heimerdinger founded Piltover to be a place safe from magic less than 300 years ago. Zaun is considered part of the same city and doesn't have a name until Silco gives it one. It's possible to combine the two sets of lore. Maybe Heimerdinger took over the city when it was in disaster from the flooding and built Piltover/renamed it to Piltover. Maybe Silco revived an old name.

Looking at what we get in Arcane though, without importing lore, the implications seem to be different. Say Heimerdinger founded his city devoted to science and really did build it from the ground up (consider the parallels to Ekko who also built a place for people away from something he saw ravaging communities and the way he and Heimerdinger end up being companions and foils). He wants to keep magic out, but this means industry. So, mining. On one side of the river is the city, on the other they dig the mines. The refineries and factories are also on that side of the river, away from where the people live. Then the mines get deeper, the ore near the surface is gone, there's just deeper and deeper pits. The miners, underpaid and overworked, start living in the abandoned pits. The fact that they can do that, that they don't "need" to afford places in the real city now leads to them being underpaid further. Mining supervisors probably let them stay there in leiu of some amount of pay. The factory workers are also staying there soon enough. People move in to serve them, people too poor or unwanted for the uppercity, food workers, mechanics, brothels.

I feel like taking it that way it's a very real kind of split. Inequality festering and feeding on itself from relatively benign beginnings with the poor literally being driven further and further underground.