irradiate-space - Tumblr blog

[irradiate-space]

Cast into The Unescapable Prison by the Betrayal of my Crewmate, I Escape and Inherit the Considerable Cultivated Wealth of a Mysterious Old Man, Allowing Me a Position of Much Comfort as My Revenge, through Financial Speculation, is Enacted upon Those Who Betrayed Me!

by Alexander Dumas, père

[irradiate-space]

Mobile Suit Gundam and contemporary media, set in UC 0079, gives Char Aznable (aged 20) a romance plot with Lalah Sune (17).

Char's Deleted Affair, set around UC 0081, gives Char Aznable (22) a romance plot with Natalie Bianchi (18). Haman Karn (14) is infatuated with him; he holds her at a distance. (Haman's older sister Marlene (?) is the political-arranged-mistress of Dozle Zabi, who sired Char's god-daughter Mineva Lao Zabi, born. 0079.)

Mobile Suit Zeta Gundam, set in UC 0087, gives Quattro Vajeena (28) a romance plot with Reccoa Londe (23).

Char's Counterattack and contemporary media, set around UC 0093, gives Char/Casval (34) a romance plot with Nanai Miguel (24). Char is pleasant with everyone, and encourages Quess Paraya/Air's infatuation with him — in order to get Quess (13) to be a Newtype pilot. He definitely pushes Quess and Gyunei together. I think the question of whether Char is leading Nanai on, in order to gain access to the products of her Newtype laboratory, is a very valid question.

But by the year UC 0093, I think Casval (34) is attracted to neither young girls nor old women, nor even really to mecha. He is only attracted to two people:

♥️ Lalah Sune (17 at death in 0079)

♠️ Amuro Ray (30)

(The Origin's timeline messes these numbers up some; in that timeline Char was born two years earlier and Lalah's age is unknown.)

The biggest tragedy of Char Aznable is that a MILF could have fixed him, but he's only attracted to little girls.

[irradiate-space]

Felt kinda weird that I've drawn so much TI fanart and haven't drawn Saladin yet. Decided to correct that, so have some wholesome murdercannibal siblinglovers <3

[irradiate-space]

Given that 'SWERF' means "Sex-Worker-Exclusionary Radical Feminist", we must conclude that 'SERF' means "Sex-Exclusionary Radical Feminist"

read the word "serf" and couldn't parse it because I couldn't figure out what thing starting with S radical feminists were being exclusionist about now

[irradiate-space]

House construction is amenable to waterfall-style development, though sometimes there are interim check-ins regarding the placement of outlets and light switches, or regarding what colors of interior paint to use. I wouldn't want to see an agile scrum development of a house.

For some software contracts, where the requirements are extremely well defined, it makes sense to do waterfall. For others, where you need to check in with the client on new specifications or specific QA foibles ("does this work on the director's out-of-date iPhone?"), it often makes sense to use something closer to Agile.

As opposed to trying to take every task in one big go and never check if what you're doing is working? I swear every business strategy sounds like this

[irradiate-space]

shirt that says I VIOLATE ASIMOV'S THREE LAWS OF ROBOTICS SAFELY, OFTEN, AND EXTREMELY WELL

[irradiate-space]

A. G. Streng, with difluorine dioxide:

FOOF is only stable at low temperatures; you'll never get close to RT with the stuff without it tearing itself to pieces. I've seen one reference to storing it as a solid at 90 Kelvin for later use, but that paper, a 1962 effort from A. G. Streng of Temple University, is deeply alarming in several ways. Not only did Streng prepare multiple batches of dioxygen difluoride and keep it around, he was apparently charged with finding out what it did to things. All sorts of things. One damn thing after another, actually:

"Being a high energy oxidizer, dioxygen difluoride reacted vigorously with organic compounds, even at temperatures close to its melting point. It reacted instantaneously with solid ethyl alcohol, producing a blue flame and an explosion. When a drop of liquid 02F2 was added to liquid methane, cooled at 90°K., a white flame was produced instantaneously, which turned green upon further burning. When 0.2 (mL) of liquid 02F2 was added to 0.5 (mL) of liquid CH4 at 90°K., a violent explosion occurred."

And he's just getting warmed up, if that's the right phrase to use for something that detonates things at -180C (that's -300 Fahrenheit, if you only have a kitchen thermometer). The great majority of Streng's reactions have surely never been run again. The paper goes on to react FOOF with everything else you wouldn't react it with: ammonia ("vigorous", this at 100K), water ice (explosion, natch), chlorine ("violent explosion", so he added it more slowly the second time), red phosphorus (not good), bromine fluoride, chlorine trifluoride (say what?), perchloryl fluoride (!), tetrafluorohydrazine (how on Earth. . .), and on, and on. If the paper weren't laid out in complete grammatical sentences and published in JACS, you'd swear it was the work of a violent lunatic. I ran out of vulgar expletives after the second page. A. G. Streng, folks, absolutely takes the corrosive exploding cake, and I have to tip my asbestos-lined titanium hat to him. Even Streng had to give up on some of the planned experiments, though (bonus dormitat Strengus?). Sulfur compounds defeated him, because the thermodynamics were just too titanic. Hydrogen sulfide, for example, reacts with four molecules of FOOF to give sulfur hexafluoride, 2 molecules of HF and four oxygens. . .and 433 kcal, which is the kind of every-man-for-himself exotherm that you want to avoid at all cost. The sulfur chemistry of FOOF remains unexplored, so if you feel like whipping up a batch of Satan's kimchi, go right ahead.

Do you have ships which are comparably energetic?

do chemists ever, like. get extremely fixated on this One Weird Molecule That Will Go Great With EVERYTHING

& then they totter around their lab trying to figure out every possible weird way this molecule can react with other stuff

& eventually they run out of all the obvious candidates, so they start working themselves into a tizzy, b/c what the fuck do you MEAN xeon won't react with my cool molecule. fuck YOU noble gases. i'll show YOU who's boss

& then they waste SO much time and energy pioneering bizarre new techniques to make this reaction kinda sorta work, but in circumstances that ONLY exist in a lab but never ever in nature in a million years

...because i feel like this is my general approach to what is known as "shipping" in fandom circles

[irradiate-space]

Expanding further:

The Guerillia Union of Shrews in Mossflower: Canonically a union, communal but not anarcho-communal; they have a leader whose job it is to lead. Yet they are also fiercely democratic. Possibly Communists.

The Guerrilla Union of South Stream Shrews of Mossflower: Canonically a union, yet more monarchical than other shrew bands. Leadership is determined by possession of a sacred relic, the Blackstone.

The Guerrilla Union of Roving and Fighting Shrews: Canonically a union, but more anarchic than Guosim or Guossom.

The Wainscott Weasels: They live in Long Island, New York, and this reads like The Great Gatsby at times. Very American. Possibly even Capitalist. Solid middle-upper-class weasels, and entitled to boot.

The Rats of NIMH: The leader of the rats is the elder, but the rats themselves have a fairly egalitarian, meritocratic and technocratic ad-hocracy that nevertheless mimics Human society. A major turning point in the story is the question of whether the rats will continue to depend upon, and steal from, Humans.

I don't know what paddington is doing on that list, but it made me think of the time someone drew a picture of the queen with paddington after she died, and we had scores of people losing their minds at the idea that paddington bear wasn't the same kind of communist as them

[irradiate-space]

I think your conception of how Hives and Romanova treat Minors is wrong, unfortunately.

Romanova's Minor Law is its own whole separate thing, above and beyond the restrictions of the Black Laws, the Grey Laws, and the Hives' own laws. It doesn't just apply to kids; it applies also to people who are too old to function, who are disabled in various ways, to monkeys and dolphins raised among humans, and to certain AIs.

The dividing line between Minor and not is whether you can pass an Adulthood Competency Exam, and there are varieties of it to account for Hive language or regional things. It seems that most people take the ACE at an earlier age than someone of the 21st Century would consider to be the verge of Adulthood. The Mardi bash' were murdered when their murderer was 17, and it happened when they were 17 because they had been putting off the ACE and felt they could put it off no longer. That 21-year-old J.E.D.D. Mason hasn't taken the ACE is extremely anomalous, until it is explained at the end of the fourth book. IIRC, the earliest person noted in the books to pass the ACE was a 14-year-old Blacklaw, but I could be wrong.

A 16-year-old who wants to take testosterone and stay out past curfew would simply take the ACE, assume responsibility for their own decisions, and join a Hive or Law that doesn't ban testosterone.

From that, I think this bit of what you say is wrong:

i think where the hives come down is that you're a minor until you pass Law And Moral Reasoning 101, and your guardians have near-full legal control over you until then (presumably limited somewhat by grey and hive law).

"your guardians have near-full legal control over you" until adulthood is the current state of things in the US, and indeed in most Westernized countries. Your conception changes where the "adulthood" line is drawn, but doesn't change anything else.

Because of the Minor Law, I think that Romanova's 25th Century goes a lot further in protecting the rights and independence of Minors than current Western law. But we don't have to ask Dr. Palmer for the text of the Minor Law; we need not go that far. The Black :aws are laid out in the book's text. The Third and Fourth Black Laws are a good indication of Romanova's treatment of Minors (including children):

Third Law: It is an intolerable crime to kill or seriously harm a minor. [For the definition of a Minor see Senatorial Order 2114-8 ‘Minor Law’ and Senatorial Order 2114-33 ‘Rights of High-functioning Non-Human Animals and Artificial Intelligences.’ Fourth Law: It is an intolerable crime to deprive a human being [or nonhuman Minor] of the ability to call for help or otherwise successfully contact fellow human beings. [Clarification by Senatorial Consult 2192-21: destroying or removing a tracker or the means to access and use a tracker violates this law.]

In the US it is permissible, and encouraged, to limit the ability of children to communicate with their agemates and with people outside their immediate family.

Can you imagine the US (or any other Western country) passing a law today which mandates that every child have 24/7 possession of a cellphone with location tracking turned on? That no parent or school be able to tell the kids to turn their phones off? This would be shot down as an imposition on the rights of the parents to raise "their" child in the way that the parents want.

(Romanova gets away with requiring such access somewhat due to its pervasive surveillance regime, where communications and contacts are assumed to be logged and tracked, which enables correction of some harms.)

A parent who wanted to prevent their child from taking the ACE would not be able to prevent their child from calling a social worker or cop to complain, or presumably from taking the ACE via a remotely-proctored correspondence test. A parent who succeeded in preventing their child from taking the ACE through any means other than persuasion would be in extreme trouble.

But at the same time, this other part of your conception also is wrong:

We get a lot of "is it okay to teach my 2 year old hypermath?"

We don't get that.

We get a lot of "is it okay to rewire my fetus' nervous system as a computer interface so that they will someday become capable of learning hypermath?"

It is near-universally acknowledged that this is a decision that the parents have the right to make, save for the faction which would make it an intolerable crime. The language of the proposed ban:

It is an Intolerable Crime to take action which will cripple a child’s ability to participate in and interface naturally and productively with human society and the world at large.

The proponents thought that set-sets (those people with the rewired nervous systems) were somehow deprived of "natural" interface with human society, despite the set-sets' own testimony to the contrary. The economic-powerhouse Utopian Hive went on strike, because there were serious worries that this law would be used to ban having or raising children on the Moon or Mars. And in the end, the law was rejected because Senator (and Masonic Emperor) Mycroft MASON filibustered (for reasons) so hard that they were assassinated.

So we see that parents can consent to things on their children's behalf, but can Minors consent to contracts on their own? Let's reread the Seventh Law:

Seventh Law: It is an intolerable crime to break a legal contract which one has made voluntarily without duress or pressure, and with full understanding of its terms, conditions, and consequences, unless an unforeseeable change in circumstances renders the contract’s terms destructive, absurd, or cruel, in which case a settlement must be found which is as fair as possible to all parties who have acted in good faith throughout.

Given the role of the ACE, I don't think that a Minor could legally qualify as someone who has "full understanding" of a contract's "terms, conditions, and consequences." Without the ability to contract, I don't think Minors would be legally able to work — though I note that probably does not prevent their custodian from creating custodial bank accounts on the Minor's behalf, and holding that for the Minor's use.

Sure, you can describe Terra Ignota as being about liberalism (in part), but I think that Terra Ignota has resolved much of the current discussion over "child's rights" versus "parent's rights" in favor of the child, with the child's caretakers merely being custodians of the Minor's welfare until the Minor can take up those rights on their own.

im like tangential to the ada palmerverse fans right?

i feel like an underdiscussed theme there, just from the posts ive seen. is like, children's rights vs parents rights. like plenty of discussion of set-sets and the ethics of raising a set-set. everybody loves set-sets. set-set, set-set, set-set.

but like. aside from that. the books are about liberalism, right. and a central contradiction for me in liberalism is what to do about kids; in the contemporary discourse, "children's rights" vs "parent's rights" vs "hey you are a kid you should be safeguarded from some decisions."

this is present to some extent in terra ignota, though we don't really have a "normal" kid, we've got like

god

god

mycroft

general hyper-AP-students, princes, and heirs apparent

(but like. yknow. i think that's a broader thing with terra ignota is that the camera focuses primarily on the movers and shakers, for some very narrow definition of movers and shakers)

but like. essentially i think where the hives come down is that you're a minor until you pass Law And Moral Reasoning 101, and your guardians have near-full legal control over you until then (presumably limited somewhat by grey and hive law). this is cool! i mean, it's cool in the terra-ignota fucked-up sense of you can think about how it's grounded in different ideas than modern law around children, and both makes some sense and has wild results if taken to its conclusions.

Like... if a child is useful to you, there's a perverse incentive to prevent them from being ready to pass the adulthood competency exam. And there's certainly LOTS that can be said about it from a learning disability angle. (Especially since hive membership is a major social and economic barrier!)

(It's striking that the defining trait of an adult, the ability to make an ethical argument, is like, closely related to "making a spiritual or metaphysical argument" which is Fucking Megaillegal.)

At the same time, it feels like the reader is starved for scraps because the series never really considers it head-on. We get a lot of "is it okay to teach my 2 year old hypermath?" and almost no "my 16 year old wants to take testosterone and stay out past curfew."

(The sanctity of contracts is like. THE THING in terra ignota, right. They're a blacklaw, I think its implied that contract law is the legal undergirding on which hive membership rests. Can minors enter into contracts? If they can't, can they work or have a bank account? If they can, are there protections against minors making unwise contracts aside from the general requirement to fully understand the terms?)

idk. like there's meat left on the bone there.

[irradiate-space]

Recently finished reading The Deluge by Stephen Markley, which is a book that's much more related to Neal Stephenson's Termination Shock and Kim Stanley Robinson's Ministry For The Future than it is related to Ada Palmer's Terra Ignota, but I'm going to make it about Terra Ignota anyways.

Common themes:

Internal migration and refugees, and postnational order

The end of trait-based identity

I'm picking on these two because they're handled so very differently. Sure, each book is about a different thing (climate change, war) and so that figures into each story's handling of those. But even then, there are nuances.

In Terra Ignota, when War and Famine caused people to flee locations in the 2120s, the big relocation companies were the self-driving flying-car companies, who swooped in to save their paying subscribers. The flying-car companies and the EU and the big conglomerates formed a new government system, with democratic representation for all. When the war was over, those who were left behind in the "Reservations" system stayed not because they had to, but because they wanted to. The new government system's surveillance and censorship apparatus was aimed at preventing another such war, and did so by excising gender and religion from public discourse.

Contrast this with The Deluge, in the 2030s, where the big relocation companies are faceless corporate monoliths running indentured-servitude human-trafficking schemes for the third-world poor. Their programs are run by algorithms and the stock market; they're not particularly responsive to human concerns. The rich get relocated via bespoke extraction teams to private compounds. The governments of the world farm security services out to private contractors, whose surveillance and censorship apparatus focuses on predicting terrorism. The rejection of sex, gender, race, religion, nationality, class, and so on happens not because of censorship or to escape The System, but instead almost as a "kids these days" footnote regarding radical self-liberation politics in a post-climate-crisis new world order.

They both address war, but Terra Ignota doesn't address global warming because global warming is a solved issue by the 2400s of its narration: global warming was an ecological issue less worth noting than already-remediated nuclear fallout from the 2100s. The primary global concerns in the 2400s are the cost of rent and the share of seats in the legislature. The Deluge talks about global warming because that's the primary present-day issue of its narration.

[irradiate-space]

Time to make a tokusatsu of Mobile Fighter G Gundam, and have the actors — chosen for their stunt and fighing abilities, not their looks or voices, in the finest kung fu filmmaking tradition — play both the pilots and the mobile suits.

It's kinda bullshit how the only merging of Gundam and tokusatsu was that dogshit G-Savior movie. God why was I put on this earth during an era where we haven't gotten some kind of proper toku Gundam property.

[irradiate-space]

saved $20/mo by switching to the same ISP's unmetered no-contract 500/50 plan, nice.

backing up everything is still gonna take days, but only 20% as many days.

> start my first offsite backup of a few gigabytes of data > upload speed immediately saturated > 10.5±0.7 megabits per second up > check my ISP plan > 100 down, 10 up megabits per second

Why on earth do US ISPs sell anything other than symmetrical?

[irradiate-space]

Been pickin up bits and pieces of contemporary fiction secondhand and keep going "This sounds totally unappealing" and after a bit of consideration what I end up thinking is that all of these plots are about the identity of the characters and not the desires of the characters and I can't fuckin stand it.

[irradiate-space]

of course, by "a few gigabytes" I mean about a terabyte, which is going to take approximately nine fucking days at this rate

> start my first offsite backup of a few gigabytes of data > upload speed immediately saturated > 10.5±0.7 megabits per second up > check my ISP plan > 100 down, 10 up megabits per second

Why on earth do US ISPs sell anything other than symmetrical?

[irradiate-space]

> start my first offsite backup of a few gigabytes of data > upload speed immediately saturated > 10.5±0.7 megabits per second up > check my ISP plan > 100 down, 10 up megabits per second

Why on earth do US ISPs sell anything other than symmetrical?

[irradiate-space]

MEGAUSB Type A:

@andmaybegayer

[irradiate-space]

watching today's video, I had the same reaction as when I first saw this happen in The Mandalorian:

namely: Ohohohhhhooooooohoho!

the new Atlas bot from Boston Dynamics has servos instead of hydraulics which means it can do terrifying horror movie things, it's great.