#I'm my own Information Technology Expert

[linkspooky]

Bohman is a good character you guys are just mean

Yu-Gi-Oh Vrains is one of the better received spinoff series. Though, like any of the Yu-Gi-Oh spinoffs it's not without its faults. Usually I'm the first to admit the flaws in my favorite silly card game shows, even while I myself take them way too seriously. However, there's one common criticism I can't bring myself to agree with.

That is calling the main antagonist of the second season Bohman "boring" or "badly written." I've noticed fans unfairly blame Bohman for season 2's writing flaws.

Forget for a moment about whether or not you find Bohman's stoic attitude interesting or likable. If you look at characters not as people, but as narrative tools the author uses to say something about the story's themes then Bohman has a lot to say about VRAINS cyberpunk themes.

Cyberpunk is a subgenre of science fiction that tends to focus on "low-life and high-tech." As I like to put it, in Cyberpunk settings technology has greatly advanced while society itself lags behind unable to keep pace with the rate at which technology changes. Yu Gi Oh 5Ds is an example of a cyberpunk dystopia because despite having what is essentially access to free energy, and living in a society with highly advanced technology resources are hoarded by the wealthy and an unnecessary social class divide still exists.

In other words technology changes quickly while humans tend to remain the same.

The central conflict for all three seasons of Vrains are actually based on this very cyberpunk notion. That technology changes, updates, and becomes obsolete at a rate too fast for humans to ever adapt to. For Vrains, the conflict is whether humans can ever coexist with an artificial intelligence they created that can grow and change faster than they can keep up with.

This is well-tread ground in science fiction. The idea itself most likely emerged from I,robot. A science fiction book that is a collection of dirty stories that details a fictional history showing robots growing slowly advanced over time. The framing device is that a journalist is interviewing a "robopsychologist" an expert in the field of analyzing how robots think in their positronic brains.

One of the major themes of the book is despite the fact that robots are 1 - intelligent and 2 - designed by humans, they don't think the same way humans do. Hence why a robopsychologist is needed in the first place. One of the short stories is the first appearance of Asimov's three laws of robotics.

The First Law: A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.

The Second Law: A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.

The Third Law: A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

This is just one example. A robot no matter how intelligent it is will be required to think in terms of these three laws, because robots aren't biological, they're programmed to think in pre-determined patterns.

Of course clever enough artificial intelligences are capable of finding loopholes that get around the three laws, but even then they're still forced to think of every action in terms of the three laws.

Robots and humans are both intelligent, but if AI ever becomes self aware it will 1) be able to process information better than any other human can and 2) think differently from humans on a fundamental.

Vrains is themed more than anything else around "robo psychology" or trying to understand the ways in how the Ignis think and how that's different from it's human characters.

Robo-Psychology is actually a common reocurring theme. "DO ANDROIDS DREAM OF ELECTRIC SHEEP?" fearless artificial humans known as Replicants who need an empathy test known as the voight kampff test to distinguish them from human beings.

There are other Cyberpunk elements in Vrains. There's a big virtual world where everyone can appear as custom designed avatars, that's taken from Snow Crash or of the most famous and genre defining cyberpunk novels. There's a big rich mega conglomerate that's being opposed by a group of hackers.

However, the central question is whether humans and AI can coexist in spite of the fact that AI are much smarter and evolve faster than us.

Revolver's father believes the Ignis must be destroyed in order to avoid a possible technological singularity in the future.

The technological singularity—or simply the singularity[1]—is a future point in time at which technological growth becomes uncontrollable.  According to the most popular version of the singularity hypothesis an upgradable artificial intelligence will eventually enter a positive feedback loop of self-improvement cycles, each new and more intelligent generation appearing more and more rapidly, causing a rapid increase ("explosion") in intelligence that surpasses anything humans can make.

Basically your computer is smarter than you, but your computer isn't self aware. It needs you to tell it what to do. Artificial intelligence already exists but it's programmed by humans, it doesn't program itself. The technological singularity proposes that eventually a self aware ai, will be able to program itself and improve upon it's own programming- therefore ridding itself of the need of it's human programmers.

This is what leads us to Bohman, an AI designed by another AI.

THE THIRD LAW

Before digging into Bohman let's take a minute to discuss his creator. Lightning was one of the six Ignis, created by Dr. Kogami through the Hanoi Project.

The Hanoi project involved forcing six children to duel in a virtual arena repeatedly, and using the data collected from that experiment to improve the AI they were working on, creating what became known as the Ignis. However, after Dr. Kogami ran several simulations and found that the Ignis would one day be a threat to the humans that created them Hakase decided instead to try destroying the Ignis before that future ever came to pass.

We later learn that this isn't the complete story.

Kogami and Lightning both ran simulations of the future when the Ignis were in their infancy. Kogami's simulations showed him the Ignis would inevitably go to war with humans. Lighting however, ran more in-depth simulations and found that he was the one that was corrupting the data set. If you ran simulations of the five ignis without him, then the projected futures were all in the green, but any simulation with Lightning counted as a part of the group projected a negative future for both humans and AI.

Which means that if Kogami knew that the bug in the program was Lightning, he'd likely respond by just getting rid of Lighting and letting the rest of the Ignis live on as originally intended.

This is where the third law comes into play - a robot must protect its own existence as long as it does not interfere with the first and second law.

Now, I don't think Kogami used the three laws exactly, but artificial intelligences are programmed in certain ways, and Lightning was likely programmed to preserve itself.

Even a human in Lighting's situation would be driven to act as they did. Imagine you're in a group of six people, and you fid out that YOU'RE THE PROBLEM. That if they removed you, everything else would be fine. Wouldn't you be afraid of your creator turning against you? Of your friends turning against you and nobody taking your side?

Lightning is a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy. Ai asks him at one point why he went so far as to destroy their safe-haven, lie and said the humans did it and pick a fight with the humans himself, something that might have been avoided if they'd just stayed in hiding. It seems that Lightning is just defective as his creator declared him, but you have to remember he's an AI programmed to think in absolutes. AI, the most humanlike and spontaneous of the AIs ends up making nearly the exact same choices as Lightning when looking at his simulations later on - because they're character foils. As different as they may seem they still think differently from humans.

When Ai explains why he made his decisions based around lighting's simulation, he tells Playmaker that he can't dismiss or ignore the simulation or hope for the best the way Playmaker can because he is data, he thinks in simulations and processes.

AI even admits to feeling the same feelings of self-preservation that Lightning did.

While Lightning may seem selfish, he's selfish in the fact that he's thinking of his own survival above all else. He's afraid of 1) his creators turning against him, and 2) his fellow Ignis turning against him.

To solve the first he decides to make a plan to wipe out his creators. To solve the second, he needs every ignis on his side when he goes to war. The first thing he does is destroy their safe haven and frame the humans for it so the Ignis are more inclined to take his side. He's so afraid of his fellow ignis turning against him he even completely reprograms one of them - a step he doesn't take with the others, he just imprisons Aqua. He probably thought having one more ally would make it more likely for the others to pick his side.

Every step he takes is a roundabout way of ensuring his survival and the other ignis- eve when he actually goes to war with the other ignis he intended on letting them survive. Though his definition of survival (fusing with Bohman) was different than theirs.

So Lightning seems to be working out of an inferiority complex, but what he's really afraid of is that his inferiority makes him expendable.

At that point you have to wonder, what does death mean exactly to a being who is otherwise immortal? Ignis won't die of age, they'll only die if they're captured and have their data stripped apart or corrupted. Kogami made an immortal being afraid to die.

Some part of me thinks though that even after taking all these steps to preserve themselves, the simulations were so convincing that Lighting accepted their death as inevitable. Which is why they made Bohman, to find some way for them to keep on living afterwards.

After all AI are data, ad having their data saved in Bohman is still a form of living by Lightning's definition.

Ghost in The Shell

Bohman is the singularity. He's an AI designed by another AI to improve upon itself. Unlike the rest of the Ignis who were copied off of traumatized chidlren, Lightning basically made him from scratch.

Ghost in the Sell is a famous anime cyberpunk movie directed by Mamoru Oshii. The title comes from "Ghost in the Machine" a term originally used to describe and critique the mind existing alongside and separate from the body. Whereas in the movie the "Ghost" is the huma consciousness, while the "shell" is a cybernetic body.

The protagonist of Ghost in the Shell is Major Motoko Kusanagi, a human that is 99% cyborg at this point, a human brain residing in a completely mechanical body. The movie opens up with a hacker namd PUppet Master who is capable of "ghost-hacking" which is a form of hacking that completely modifies the victim's memories utterly convincing them of their false memories.

There's a famous scene in the movie where a man tells the police about his wife and daughter, only to be told that he's a bachelor who lives alone and he's never had a wife and daughter. Even after the truth is revealed to him, the fake memories are still there in his brain along with the correct ones. Technology is so advanced at this point that digital memories (hacked memories) are able to be manipulated, and seem more real than an analog reality.

Anyway, guess what happens to Bohman twice?

Bohman gets his memories completely rewritten twice. The first time he believes he's a person looking for his lost memories, the second time he thinks he's the real playmaker ripped out of his body, and playmaker is the copy. He's utterly convinced of these realities both time, because Bohman is entirely digital - and simulations are reality, and so simulated memories are just the same as real memories.

I think part of the reason that people find Bohman boring is because he's a little strange conceptually to wrap your head around, as an AI produced AI he's the farthest from behind human. If you use the ghost in the shell example I just gave you though - imagine being utterly convinced that you had a loving wife and daughter only to find out in a police interrogation room you're a single man living in a shitty apartment. imagine after the fact you still remember that they are real, even though you know they're not.

That's the weird space Bohman exists in for most of Season 2 when he's searching for himself. He's an AI designed by an AI so he can be rewritten at any time according to Lightning's whim until Lighting decides he's done cooking.

The Ignis at least interacted with the real world because they were copy pasted from traumatized children, but all Bohman is is data. So, why would he see absorbing human memories into himself and converting them into data as killing them? He is data after all, and he is alive. He has gone through the process of having his own memories rewritten multiple times, and he's fine with it b/c he's data.

Nothing for Bohman is real, everything is programmed so of course he thinks saving other people as data is just fine. He even offers to do the same thing to Playmaker that was done to him.

If Lightning is following the path of self-preservation however, Bohman is following his program to preserve everything in the world by merging with it.

His ideas also follow the idea of transhumanism: the theory that science and technology can help human beings develop beyod what is physically and mentally possible. That technology exists to blur the boundaries of humanity, and what humans are capable of.

Ghost in the Shell isn't just a work of cyberpunk, it's a transhumanist piece. Motoko Kusanagi is a character who has had so many of her human parts replaced with mechanical ones she even posits at one point it's possible for her to simply have been an android that was tricked into thinking it was human with false memories just like Bohman, and she has no real way of knowing for sure. The only biological part of her his her brain after all in a cold mechanical shell.

Bato, who represents the humanist perspective in this movie basically tells Motoko in that scenario it wouldn't matter if she was a machine. If everyone still treats her as human then what's the difference? His views are probably the closest to the humanist views that Playmaker represents in VRAINS.

Motoko Kusanagi meets her complete and total opposite, a ghost in the machine so to speak. The Puppet Master turns out to be an artificial intelligence that has become completely self-aware and is currently living in the network.

The Puppet Master much like Lightning, and later Bohman is gripping with the philosophical conundrum of mortality. In the final scene of the movie, The Puppet Master who wants to be more like all other biological matter on earth asks Motoko to fuse with him, so the two of them can reproduce and create something entirely new. The Puppet Master likens this to the way that biological beings reproduce.

Bohman like The Puppetmaster thinks that merging will fix something that's incomplete inside of him because he's so disconnected from all the biological processes of life. Bohman doesn't have anything except for which Lightning already prepared for him or programmed into him. I mean imagine being a being that can have his memories reprogrammed on the net, that in itself is existentially horrifying. It's only natural he wouldn't feel connected to anything.

Motoko accepts the Puppetmaster's proposal. Playmaker rejects Bohman's proposal. I don't think there's a right answer here, because it's speculative fiction, it's a "What if?" for two different paths people can take in the future.

However, in Bohman's case I don't think he was truly doing what he wanted. Puppet Master became self aware and sought his own answers by breaking free from his programming. Bohman thought he was superior to the Ignis, but in the end he was just following what Lightning programmed him to do. He'd had his identity programmed and reprogrammed so many times, he didn't think of what he wanted until he was on the brink of defeat by playmaker and then it was too late.

When Playmaker defeats him all he thinks about is time spent together with Haru, with the two of them as individuals. Something he can no longer do anymore now that he's absorbed Haru as data, and something that he misses.

He's not even all that sad or horrified at the prospect of death as Lightning was, and he even finds solace in the thought of going to oblivion with Haru, because if he were to keep living it'd be without Haru. In other words the one genuine bond he made with someone else by spending time with them as an individual was more important than his objective of fusing with all of humanity - which he believed was also bonding with them.

This is really important too, because it sets up the Yusaku's rejection of fusing with Ai. Yusaku's reasoning has already been demonstrated to be the case with Bohman and Haru. Bohman was perfectly happy being two individuals, as long as he had a bond with his brother. When he ascended into a higher being he lost that. Ai and Yusaku might solve loneliness in a way by merging together into a higher being, they might even last forever that way, but they'd lose something too.

Once again the problem with AIs is that they think in absolutes. That's important to understanding Lightning, Bohman and even Ai's later actions. Lightning can't stand any percentage chance that he might die, so he kills the professor, destroys the ignis homeworld, pulls the trigger to start humanity himself, he even reprograms his own allies all to give himself some sense of control.

Bohman's entire existence is outside of his control. He's rewritten twice onscreen, probably more than that, and he thinks merging with humanity is the thing that will give him that control - by ascending into a higher being than humanity. However, the temporary bond Bohman had with his brother Haru, was actually what he valued the most all along. Moreso than the idea of fusing with humanity forever.

Even Motoko making the choice to go with the transhumanist option is something that's not portrayed as 100% the right choice. Ghost in the Shell has a sequel that portrays the depression and isolation of Bato, the Major's closest friend and attachment to her humanity after she made the decision to fuse together with Puppet Master. In that case, just like Playmaker said to Ai, even if she ascended to a higher form, and even if she might last forever now on the network, something precious was lost. Motoko may exist somewhere on the netowrk but for Batoto his friend is gone.

Ai exhibits the same flaw as the previous two, he ca only think in absolutes, he can't stand even a 1% chance that Playmaker might choose to sacrifice himself for Ai and die, so he decides to take the choice entirely out of Playmaker's hands. However, no matter what Ai would have lost Playmaker one day, because all bonds are temporary. It's just Ai wanted to have that sense of control, so he chose to self-destruct and take that agency and free choice away from Playmaker.

It's a tragedy that repeats three times. Ai too just like Bohman, spends his last moments thinking about what was most precious to him was the bond he formed with playmaker, as temporary as it was. A tragedy that arises from the inability of the Ais to break away from the way they're programmed to think in simulations and data, even when they're shown to be capable of forming bonds based on empathy with others.

All three of them add something to the themes of artificial intelligence, and transhumanism that are in play at Vrains and none of them are boring because they all contribute to the whole.

Which is why everyone needs to stop being mean to Bohman right now, or else I'm going to make an even longer essay post defending him.

[zukadiary]

hello, I hope you are doing well

I am someone who only recently learnt about Takarazuka, but someone that really caught my attention is Yuki Amami. I was wondering if you could tell me some information about her time in Takarazuka since it's quite difficult to find information in English. I know she didn't stay for long time and that upon leaving she built a career for herself in the entertainment industry. My inquiries are about how like big she was, what she known for, what sort of persona did she embody, what her time was like as a student, any anecdotes about her time with revue honestly anything you could offer me would appreciated. Thank you for your time

I'll do my best! I'm definitely not an Amami Yuuki expert, but I can give you a bullet list of things I know off the top of my head:

She's the youngest top star ever, she became top when she was still of age to be in shinjin kouen. This probably won't ever happen again.

Fun trivia re: above, her classmate Shizuki Asato had the shinko lead for Amami's Gone with the Wind. That's also probably never going to happen again (with otokoyaku). She and Zunko were very close friends.

More fun trivia re: above, it's very rare for a troupe's nibante to be senior (class wise) to the top star. Until this year, Amami's nibante Kuze Seika had been the only such nibante to actually take over as top afterwards (Hozuki An will be the second when Tsukishiro Kanato finishes the Tokyo run of Eternal Voice).

Amami's extreme popularity is hypothesized to be due to her unusually natural acting style (unusual for stage performers at the time). I've seen Japanese articles talk about the improvements in on-stage microphone technology that grew popular during her Takarazuka career, and how not needing to project with her natural voice to the back of B-seki may have helped her both develop and popularize this style.

Her acting style is what garnered her attention in the larger entertainment industry. It's suspected that the reason she was made top star so young is the company guessed she would choose to leave early for greener pastures on her own anyway, so they opted to capitalize financially on her popularity while they could.

She is the noted fave of many other big-name Takarazuka actresses who came after her (e.g. Nanami Hiroki and Nozomi Fuuto, who even addressed her childhood diary as if it was written to Amami Yuuki).

She's such a prolific actress that she has an IMDB page

[fakescenariosbeforesleepblog]

Suspicious pt. 2.

Kyle 'Gaz' Garrick × Reader.

Run y/n, Run, you cannot escape from the feelings and ghosts of the past. Or... Can you? Will Kyle find a way to forgive you?

Warning: honestly I'm not an expert in technology lol or coding but I hope I did it well, my french is basic, I'm still learning so I'm sorry for now grammatical and spelling errors not only in English but french too. Disclaimer: I do not own any of the characters nor do I claim to own them. I do not own any of the images used nor do I claim to own them.

You landed on the floor and started to quit the parachute, you ran, crossing the street, jumping between the cars, you didn't want to look back, you were really nervous, this never happened to you before, you gave a quick look behind, apparently no one was following or looking at you.

You took the stairs to the subway and public bathroom, once in the bathroom you got in at the first door, you hid a backpack inside the air ducts previously, a hair wig, alcohol for the small cut on your cheek, you also tried to burnt your fingertips, you didn't want to leave proves or any signs that you were there, you changed your clothes and quickly sabotage the cameras located out of the park zone and left, you needed to go upstairs and arrive to the park, a car would be waiting for you.

You tried to walk quickly but at the same time not enough to not attract someone's attention.

While you were trying to escape, Kyle and the rest of his team were trying to find you.

- GAZ! Come here!

Soap was the first to find your parachute, Gaz walked, both were trying to find out where you went, looking in every possible direction and every face around them, maybe you were Inside a car, or In a restaurant, or a store, Gaz is frenetic, observing with detail to every person walking by, Ghost and Price joined a few seconds later.

- What do you think guys? It could be anywhere at this point.

- Gaz, this one was your friend for years, people have habits no matter how long time has passed, where do you think...?

- I'm not sure captain, is someone slippery and unpredictable, where would you go to deliver that kind of information?

- The park.

«What?» all them looking at ghost.

- The park, is big, leafy, full of people distracted, no one would notice an exchange...

- Ghost is right, Let's go, once there we will separate and try to find it!

You saw the entrance to the park, you were relaxing, you made it, you started to walk by the street, looking for the car, a black Mercedes Benz 300SL, old and classic. You saw it parked close to the street corner, an old man was cleaning the glass of the car, you approached him and muttered «les hiboux apportent un paquet. (The owls brought a package)» the old man didn't look at you but he made a movement with his head to let you know to put the external disk in the car seat, you put it inside, he continued cleaning the car but he responded to you almost in a whisper «colis livré (package delivered), your payment and transport awaits for you at the other side of the lake» «Merci bonne journée (thanks, have a good day)».

You turned back and walked to the park's entrance, you felt shivers running down your spine, you looked behind and you saw him, Kyle and his team were crossing the streets, they haven't seen you yet but as silly as you're when you're nervous you started to run, attracting all their attention. «Y/N? Hey! You! Wait!!» «Someone stop that person!!!!» indeed some people tried their best to stop you but it was just a poor try, you ran as fast as you could, you could feel your legs burning, definitely not a good day for you.

Ghost and Soap ran to the left while Gaz and Price ran to the right, at some point you would be trapped between them. And just like they planned it, you were close enough to the second entrance park, at the other side of the lake where a car and your money were waiting for you, but you know you will not make it, the best thing you could do was put a grenade in your backpack and throw it away close to the car.

Ghost intercepted you, both fell on the ground just in time the explosion took away your money, your backpack with your laptop and old clothes and your last chance to escape.

- Don't move, stay in the ground! Soap, check if someone is hurt over there!!!

- Yes Lt.

- Well done Ghost! Gaz, bring the handcuffs!!!

Gaz was quick to put the handcuffs, you stood up pretending to be innocent «Hey! What are you doing! Let me go!»

- Come on y/n, you have a lot to explain.

You heard a truck arriving, more sirens, more murmurs of people, a sack over your head and then nothing, the ride was silent. You didn't know when you fell asleep but the raspy voice of Ghost woke you up.

- Hey, wake up!

Then the sack disappeared, the light hurt your eyes, it was hard to focus your vision, a military base, that's where you were, Soap guided you to an empty room, you're not afraid, you actually feel powerful, he made you sit on a chair and left you there.

You've been sitting for hours, you don't even feel your ass anymore, but finally, the door opened. Price and Gaz appeared.

- Well, well, well Darling, you really gave us much trouble today, huh?

Price was handsome and the smell of cigar and strong cologne was delicious, but you focused your view on Kyle, he's quiet, serious, but you can see the deception in his eyes.

- So, Gaz says your name is (y/n) (l/n), is it?

- No.

- No? Then what's your name?

- I don't have one.

- Y/N just fuckin' confess!

- Gaz... Calm down.

Price intervenes and looked at Kyle then he went back to you.

- If you don't have a name, maybe you have a Codename?

- Fantôme.

- very well, so... fantôme, tell me, where's the information you stole from that company?

- I don't know.

Kyle was angry, frustrated, he hit the table in front of you, Price simply closed his eyes and crossed arms.

- Fantôme? You work for some fuckin French intelligence? When did you become a fuckin criminal, huh? You were better than this, Y/N

- I already said that's not my name, I do not have a name, or a nationality, not even a birthdate, I do not exist. Keep trying to obtain information, it is all in vain, you don't have proof against me.

Kyle was ready to talk when Ghost opened the door abruptly.

- Nothing, there's no information about someone called (Y/N) (L/N).

- The cameras around the city?

- nothing. We're still looking at every recording, all the cameras stopped to work in the exact moment when all happened.

You smirked, you were proud of your work, even if you had some stumbles on your way, you made it. Soap joined too, and to your surprise he has your cellphone on his hand.

- Captain, I have the cellphone.

- Good, our experts will find something, give it to them.

-Don't!

Everyone looked at you, you're not afraid about what they could find, but, you were trying to make it look as if you were hiding something just to make them waste time, why? You just want to let them know you're someone they can't handle.

Everybody left the room, except for Gaz, he sat in front of you, just in silence, observing you.

- Are you gonna stay there all day?

- Why did you do that? Do you know what you've stolen?

- I do not care about it Kyle, I care about the money.

- what about the information? Do you understand the importance of it?

- No, I don't, I just care about my payment, the rest doesn't matter to me, how many times do I have to say it?

- When did you become in this person? What put you in this situation? Y/n, we wanted to make the world a better place, remember?

You stayed In silence. But you know you will be free soon, maybe it's not a bad idea to tell him why you ended up in this situation.

- Kyle, that summer, you disappeared without saying anything... I'm not angry, this is not revenge or something like that, I loved you and I will always do. You have to understand, I'm just doing my job because the money is something I really need.

- Why? Why y/n?

- My brother, he got in trouble, very dangerous people were behind him, they didn't kill him, but he never recovered from what they did to him. I pay the mental hospital, I'm the only one who takes care of him, everything started for him, quick money to pay for all the treatments... I'm the same person you met a long time ago, life changed, but I'm the same... I hope one day you can forgive me, I know maybe I'm making bad decisions, but I love my brother, I will do anything to protect and help him.

- The memories of your lips and the way I felt that day, never leave my head, but this... No matter what your reason is, this is not the way and it breaks my heart to see how you try to make me believe you're the same person, when you're clearly not! The y/n I met before would never all what you did today.

Kyle is not sure about what he's feeling, some tears are running through his face, you're trying to contain yourself, it makes you sad to hear and see him like this.

- I feel sick, you know? Because... You're the only person I've ever loved, I feel sick because I don't have the courage to actually hate you, no matter what, I think I will never hate you, but also I think I will never forgive you, what you did today goes against everything we once said we would never do.

He stood up from that chair, you didn't say anything, you were looking at the clock on the wall, suddenly Gaz just took your face between his hands and kissed you, it was a bittersweet kiss, but it felt like all this time you were living on autopilot and this kiss brought you back to life. After a few minutes both separated and he simply whispered.

- Just confess what you did, just tell them who bought all that information, I'll supervise your brother received the best medical attention.

- That won't happen. Goodbye, Kyle.

He looked at you, cold and sad, he just left the room. You were just waiting patiently, you know they will let you go soon.

Now the whole 141 are in the room where some engineers and hackers are working on your phone. One of them is too young and with a huge ego.

- This person, is too smart, the phone is encrypted, a complex code to unblock the real information hidden, the code changes every time we discover it.

- But you can solve it, don't you?

- Sergeant, I'm young but I'm the most capable person in this room. We just have to anticipate the next code... And... There it is!

He solved it, and apparently it was working, the information in your phone was being unloaded until... A huge text appeared in every computer in the room "Not so smart after all, loser 😏" and then all the computers started to download their own information, security systems failed in every imaginable way.

- What the hell it's going on Kid!?

- We've been hacked! Fuck!

He disconnected your phone and started to try to save the system.

- shit, shit, shit! Security systems are fucking destroyed!

- What does it mean?

- It means our location now is visible for every satellite, it means every system or way to secure this place is destroyed now! FUCK!

- Wait... That means....

Kyle ran out of the room, he ran looking for you, but when he arrived to the room where you were, it was empty, he looked for you in every room and hallway,

He was running back to where the team was when he saw through the window, you were running to a helicopter, some other soldiers were trying to open door or any entrance to try to stop you, but the system is still messed up, doors lock and unlock constantly, alarms all around the place, before leaving you felt eyes on you, you looked back, and saw him, he was there, through a window, you never planned to hurt him, but you said it before, you would do everything to protect and take care of your family, even if that means to lose someone you love.

[tau1tvec]

idk but I think people are getting a bit overwhelmed with all the inzoi information we have at once, what i find very strange is how even the code has AI generated lines..

what I'm wondering is how will the creators of cc do it on inzoi? on twitter there is an account that showed how they literally have a 3D printer made with AI lol..

like, what's the point of (for example) making a modcollective exclusive cc, if in the end i can put an image of your cc in the AI and i can have it for free?.. so confusing..

I'm gonna be real, I'm not the best person to come to about this, I know some stuff about CC creation, but I am not an expert on coding or modding so you might need to hit up someone who is about all that.

The 3D printer is a tool, to my knowledge, inside the buy/build, and from what I've seen is basically photogrametry ( picture to 3D object ) and the picture they used from one of the examples was a person's own picture of like their stuffed dog or something, and the other was like a picture of a decorative vase, likely a pic off pinterest or a home decor shop site, so it seems like something atm they only intend for ppl to use personally. Right now I don't know whether these creations will be able to be shared, I only know that ZOI, the characters ppl create, can be shared in a way that's similar to The Sims 4's Gallery.

Personally, I wouldn't suggest using the 3D Printer, not just bc it probably uses a ton of resources, but also bc the examples they showed looked ummm... bad, lol. So if you did use it on a pic of someone's CC, and assuming the creator themselves didn't create their mesh using a similar technology, it'd probably look way worse.

Otherwise, if The Sims CC community, esp in it's current state is any inclination of how this tool might be abused, bc let's be honest, ppl have been putting AI generated art in their sims CC for some time now... and well, you see where I'm getting at.

[dark-bear-productions]

Tell me your favourite system of government you've used/created in your worldbuilding!

There's so many options! You have your classic monarchy, your modern democracy, your subversive communism and anarchy, but there's also:

Theocracy, in which religious leaders rule.

Stratocracy, in which military leaders rule.

Technocracy, in which experts in technology/science rule.

Demarchy, in which randomly selected people rule.

Gerontocracy, in which old people rule.

To name but a few! For a list of 45 forms of government with examples in fiction, click here. Not all of them are real (looking at you, magocracy), but there's some really interesting stuff in there!

I'd love to hear about your favourite form of government in your own worldbuilding!

I'll start!

The City of Fenblith is a meritocracy. Everyone in the city is given a job at 8 years old, seperating them into Classes based not on birth but on aptitude. The Providers grow, forage, mine, and prepare food and resources; the Makers turn resources into tools, clothing, and buildings; the Traders ensure whatever the Providers and Makers can't deliver is procured elsewhere; and the Protecters (not a typo) keep everyone safe and healthy.

The children begin their new careers as Novices. Once they have shown they understand and can perform their job, they are made Ranked. Most Ranked stay so their entire life, but the particularly gifted can become Adepts, allowed to lead Ranked on their duties. Those few Adepts who truly master their vocation become Masters, allowed to teach the Novices, Ranked, and Adepts.

These Masters select from amongst themselves 84 people to be Members of the Council of Fenblith; 21 for each of the four Classes, with 20 non-speaking Members informing and advising 1 Speaker, who may speak for their entire Class during Council proceedings.

Thus, the entire population of Fenblith is represented in Council debates by 4 Speakers, the most skilled and talented people of the city. The debate between them is overseen by the Sage, who stands apart from the Classes (but that's for another time, I think).

Political power in Fenblith, then, is entirely based on merit, as are things such as how well you eat, how well you're dressed, and how many personal belongings you have, as everything is considered communal by default and can only become a personal possession with leave of the community.

Thus, Fenblith knows a clear hierarchy, with riskier jobs bringing greater rewards and higher Ranks doing the same. The trouble is: you don't get to choose your job, and since the Masters decide who gains in Rank, they can reward and punish people they like and dislike in many ways, without recourse to challenge them. So is it really the community that decides how you are rewarded, or is it those people who have managed to transcend the community..?

But now I'm at risk of getting into the actual stories, and that's what my website is for.

Let me know about your own worldbuilding! I'd love to read it!

[spotofmummery]

Greetings, glorious hat friend who provided Bram and thereby me with this amazing tomestone. I am now going to use it to pester you, if I may?

You are, unfortunately, the only Allagan expert I happen to know. Would you happen to know anything about Allagan summoning? Or where I might find records of such things? I'll admit my skill with technology is not great and I have sorely neglected to study anything Allagan.

I have a rather unique circumstance with a summoning problem and would like to know if it's recorded somewhere! I don't know if you can grant me access through the tomestone to records or anything like that but any information you might have would be most helpful. I realize this is likely not your forte, I am just hoping you have an idea where I might find the information!

I have taken the liberty to send you the bits of Allagan technology I found hiding within my shop while I was looking for answers to this current problem. Hopefully there is something useful for you, if not I'm sorry all Allagan tech looks the same to me!

Always lovely to hear from you, my friend! It sounds like you've found yourself going down a curious rabbit hole, indeed!

While I am no Summoner myself, I might just have some data that could be of assistance. In fact, I have access to the original documentation kept while the concept of summoning was in development - straight from the high Allagan labs!

(Because of course I do…)

This might give you insight on not just the development processes, but any of the hurtles that had to be overcome when summoning was still yet new. Sometimes we learn best from mistakes, and I assure you, all mistakes were recorded in detail.

Not only can I provide a copy of these Tomes, but I will include one of my new Allag-to-Common language translation devices for your convenience. This project is still in a beta state, so any testing you can provide by simply using it (and letting me know about your user experience with it) would be a great help to me.

Win - win! Aye?

'Tis voice-activated, or touch-driven, depending on your comfort level. I can even show you how to use the built-in search function to hopefully allow you to hone in on the info you need most.

I will never say no to bits of tech you send, no matter how big or small or broken-seeming. Thank you for thinking of me when it comes to Allagan things! Your continued support of my own work is much appreciated.

I shall be soon sending you a package containing the Tome copies I think may be most relevant, along with the translation device. Please look forward to it!

-A

[daekie-gw2]

Your IBS/SoTO post is really good and I would love to hear your opinions about asura writing that got cut for time

OH, UH, OKAY. SURE. Disclaimer that a lot of the thoughts here I picked up from my friend @ratasum. (I honestly didn't expect that IBS/SotO post to get read by anyone so waking up & seeing it appears to have gotten onto the main 'circulating' version of the post and having people agree with me is a little wild, haha.)

As always, cut for length, I've never said in five words what I could say in twenty and trust me I've tried.

"Surely it can't be that long--"

I know. I'm a parody of myself. I'm sorry. Just like you cannot blame the scorpion for what is in its nature you cannot blame me for writing five and a half thousand words on funny goblin rat video game narrative.

ANYWAY. [CRACKING KNUCKLES] THE ASURA

OKAY. THIS IS GOING TO BE A MULTI-POINT -- I'm not going to call it an essay. It's not an essay. That implies a level of organization going in that there isn't, I'm slapping points in as I recall them (I am going to cite my sources, though). But there's a lot of miscellaneous things I'm going into here. Also this is shorter than it could be because I wrote a big chunk of it right after getting home from work, got distracted by making Limbus Company OC IDs for hours, and by the point I rotated back I was getting worried something would happen and I'd lose this post.

You may be able to tell which points I wrote later because I get progressively less informative and more AGGRESSIVELY WAVING MY HANDS.

EDIT THE NEXT MORNING: Added more stuff into Point B that I didn't realize I skipped over, my kingdom for a table of contents

Point A: "The current writers don't like the asura."

When was the last time you heard any character talk about asura tech or society in a way that wasn't derogatory? Just in SotO alone, from my memory and some very shallow wiki checks, we have:

Uenno: But we're... stubborn, our kind. Bureaucratic. It's all so stifling. Uenno: Zojja and I had the same realization. Expecting satisfaction from that city is like expecting a skritt to win the Snaff Prize.

...and, from Zojja's Journal:

Before I left Rata Sum, they considered me a battery without any juice. Well, I feel the same about them. ... The technological advancement of this place is far beyond Rata Sum. Seeing this would give the Arcane Council a run for their money... I bet they lost it after Cantha opened its borders. What I'd do to be a fly on that wall... ... If the council learned about any of this, ESPECIALLY the wizards' ability to create fractals, they'd try to quarantine the entire region. Rip it apart, piece by piece.

...and, from Zojja's journal from Tower of Secrets:

The council is too scared to put me back on fieldwork, and the colleges seem less than interested in having me teach. No talks. Nothing. Past my prime, apparently. Send me straight to the retirement facility. ... She used to be a professor in the colleges, but she left after years and years of frustration with the system. Students set up for failure, refusal to grow or expand (sound familiar...?).

Now take a quick jaunt to the wiki's summary of asura culture:

The asura value intelligence and intellectual superiority over all other attributes. Individual asura will dedicate an entire lifespan to building a portfolio of successful projects or becoming the foremost expert of some tiny aspect of the arcane. They constantly seek to prove their own intellectual superiority, and by extension the superiority of the asura race.

The writers are really trying to tell me that Zojja was damaged goods post-Heart of Thorns, but, like. She was one of the foremost geniuses in Asuran society and one of the two surviving students of the genius Snaff (or one, if you count us killing Kudu in Crucible of Eternity). She is the absolute foremost expert on Elder Dragons (Taimi wasn't this until LWS4ish, imo), was directly involved with the Pact offensive on the Heart of Maguuma, and has a "connection" (I'm not going to say friendship but yknow.) with the Sylvari who stole Glint's egg. And you want to tell me nobody would want to hear from her because she was disabled? They'd be breaking down her door to get her to teach.

I feel like a lot of this perception comes from Phlunt's overbearing smothering of Taimi getting spotlit during LWS3, but Phlunt is an obstructive, small-minded bureaucrat, even by Arcane Council standards; he doesn't want to be there, he sure as hell doesn't want to be busy chaperoning a twelve-year-old with polio in his "free time", and if he dissuades her from doing anything then he can kick back and relax. His chaperoning is not a microcosm of All Asuran Society's Relationship To Solo Geniuses Who Are On The Younger Side (afaik he was also supposed to be Inquest anyway, so that probably bleeds into some of it). Take a quick walk around Metrica Province or listen to ambient dialogue in Rata Sum! Even taking into account comments about bureaucrats in ambient lore in Rata Novus, which makes it a cultural thing, I honestly still don't really see what that would have to do with 'Zojja would be a pariah'. The fuck she would. I would excuse the Zojja diaries if it was Zojja is completely shutting herself away from Rata Sum society and convincing herself they don't want her, but it's... it's not! It's 'Rata Sum threw Zojja out with the bathwater'! In what world!!!!

EoD (I go into this a couple of points down the post) is also just like a conga line of asura going WOW CANTHA IS SO ADVANCED WE'RE SO BACKWARDS and it just feels baaaaaaad.

Point B: "Since LWS4, it seems like nobody on the writing team has really actually understood the asura, and they're either written as 'basically children' or 'crazy comedy gremlins'."

When was the last time we got an asura NPC who was, you know, actually involved in asura society or had asuran attitudes? Professor Smoll from April Fools doesn't count, don't give me that. Uenno in SotO only really talks about asura society to comment about how backwards it is/was compared to the Astral Ward's tech/setup, and although the Inquest are a genuine threat... since LWS4, when was the last time the game actually remembered that? They're cartoon goons.

(The Arcane Council is actually really interesting, too! Their job is to deal with all the mundane shit and bureaucratic matters and City Things, and nobody wants to do it, to the point it's common to trick others into accidentally taking the job or replacing you so you can quit. They sometimes try to kill each other. The Inquest is considered a bunch of criminal assholes by the average asura, but they're pretty distinctly a tool of the Arcane Council who uses them to work on projects that might be 'unsavory'.)

I'm not saying the asura aren't funny. They are. Even at GW2's launch, they were smack-talking little gremlins -- but they weren't comic relief. And I'm not saying everything Angel McCoy ever said was right (I am refusing to read the interview where she says cells don't exist on Tyria and everything is made of magic <3) but they're snarky little shits. Back in GW1 they were partially Invader Zim references. Asura are researchers and, I'm gonna say it, sapiosexuals first and foremost -- they're monogamists in the sense that romantic relationships are often between two asura fixated on the same idea.

ANYWAY. Asura are weird freaks and they're kind of memey little bastards about it but they're also insanely intense SCIENCE bastards, who prize being an asshole. During LWS4 the Inquest had live samples of the fucking scarab plague, were experimenting on the Olmakhan with it -- they're a genuine danger. The Inquest can be both funny Team Rocket villains and genuine threats due to their lack of morals!! They can be both!!

But what they're reduced to these days is... they're either childlike and need care (Dagda calling Zojja little one would be fine on its own, but combined with everything else...) or they're just Haha Funny Quip Guys. They're not dicks anymore. When was the last time an asura was an asshole to you in a way that wasn't immediately condemned by the story/narrative as them being an unreasonable small-minded jerk? I don't even necessarily think Arenanet has ever had a real consensus on how to write them, but there's enough content from basegame to LWS4 where you can absolutely write them with just as much... genuineness? not seriousness, but, yknow? as the sylvari or the norn. Like -- imagine if every sylvari we met was either a wide-eyed innocent or a Nightmare Court irredeemable asshole who was torturing babies and cackling about it. If every norn we met was a one-note jovial party drunk or a Son of Svanir who just went JORMAG JORMAG JORMAG.

That's what it feels like has happened to the asura.

Everything in this section from here on until Point C starts is a lot of really misc. disjointed thoughts but I couldn't make them work anywhere else and they seemed relevant still, so. Sorry. You get what you pay for.

...circa End of Dragons --

Taimi: Yes! Xunlai has an entire MedTech division. They make braces for conditions like mine. Taimi: They're incredible. I feel almost no pain when I'm wearing them.

I can buy that asura don't really have a lot of development into assistive devices as a whole because they're generally all pretty self-focused, but there's gotta be a krewe somewhere that's got physically disabled asura, right?

In Icebrood Saga, Phlunt and Taimi's focus during Champions on fighting Primordus -- even if they have to ally with Jormag to do it -- is kind of portrayed as... petulant? Ignorant? But, like, it is very reasonable to say that asura are culturally traumatized, I'd say. Their entire culture and people, over the course of fifty years, were pushed into involuntary migration from their home and into a completely new environment. If the Kodan are traumatized by doing the exact same thing but due to Jormag and that's taken fairly seriously, especially in Bjora Marches. The writing is bad here! Champions struggles a lot on a lot of fronts, and I know it's because that was because a huge chunk of the devs abruptly got dragged off to go make EoD, but they could've at least left someone senior to handle narrative and I don't think they did.

(That honestly ties into a bigger frustration, which is that for a season/expansion where we take care of the Asura-associated dragon and the Norn-associated dragon once and for all, it sure is about Charr. I don't think this is what they meant to do going in! I think the writers meant to have you deal with Jormag in the next season/expansion, and have them be an everpresent force puppeting people around who you never actually fought in Icebrood Saga. Fuck, I don't think you were even supposed to encounter Primordus here, it's not called the Fire and Ice Saga. But the mandate? orders? came down, and suddenly they had to figure out how to get rid of both twin dragons by the end of the season, and they didn't have enough space left to change direction from the charr (who did actually get some great narrative here, I think that was at least preserved).

Point C: "Existing content from LWS4 and earlier establishes that asura tech is extremely advanced."

Anyway I think EoD was generally pretty cool, but I also think they got very worried about potentially making Cantha come off as 'less advanced' than the asura and unintentionally seeming racist in that way, and they swung real fucking hard in the opposite direction. (If anything they probably would be further advanced than Cantha, though -- they were using dragon-magic to power their waypoints & cities back during GW1, and swapped to independent? ambient? magic when the Great Destroyer awakened & pushed a lot of them to the surface. I personally would've gone for the idea that it's deeply impressive that humans, alone, have created something on par with but not better than asuran tech, especially when using a powersource that the asura historically never got as far as the Canthans with.) Asuratech created fractals and a device that could completely destabilize fractals in order to fish up real entities stuck in them (I expand on this further down on my last point).

Moto built an entire fucking immersive videogame with a hammerspace teleporter.

Rata Primus in Sandswept Isles in LWS4 has a satellite dish, implying they've gotten asuratech into orbit.

Asura have had holograms and solid light for ages -- they were developing immersive VR all the way back in Rata Novus. Oola has a hologram. There's multiple hero points where you fight hardlight projections. What Do You Think The SAB Weapon Skins Are.

They're experimenting with radiation.

They have elevators.

They have televisions.

They have sous vide!

They've got holo-clipboards!!

Okay yeah sure it's one random throwaway line from a miscellaneous Rata Sum NPC but THEY HAVE NEWSCASTS, this guy's probably been here since the game RELEASED

HOLOGRAMS

Blish uploaded himself into a golem and he's just Like that now!!!

What the Canthans and especially Joon are doing with jadetech is incredible! But asura tech is not inferior to it. You could say 'dragonjade carries incredible magical power because Soo-Won is awake and actively filtering her power to create it, as opposed to the GW1 asura skimming some off the top of Primordus' and I'd go yeah, okay, that sounds completely fair. Joon having tech that can evaluate the drained Aurene? This makes sense! She's been directly interfacing with Soo-Won's magic for years and probably has a better understanding of the biology and process of Elder Dragons + how their magic works within their body than anyone else alive, including Aurene! If anything, her dragonjade could well be tapping directly into Soo-Won's domains of Water and Life, making dragonjade tech especially good for healing or creating assistive devices. You could potentially insinuate this, but I really don't think the game actually ever says this, so I don't know if I want to give it credit for that. (In fact, the game specifically says that the magic in dragonjade is stripped of all signatures, it's pure dragon magic, so really it says the exact opposite of 'Soo-Won's connection to her domains is so powerful that she infuses the jade she empowers with their essence').

Ankka's stolen Extractor even has a note on its wiki page that it acts similarly to existing asuratech from basegame personal story -- just scaled far, far up. It's not new tech! They've had this, just weaker!

ALSO SNARGLE'S AGENT SAYS ASURA DON'T HAVE, LIKE. VIDEO GAMES? MOVIES? MOVING PICTURES OF ANY KIND? YOUUUUUU HAVE HAD HOLOGRAMS FOR HUNDREDS OF YEAAAAARRRRS. HE'S LITERALLY PUBLISHING SUPER ADVENTURE BOX THE NOVEL. WHAT DO YOU THINK SUPER ADVENTURE BOX IS, LITTLE MAN

Kippo: You bet. But that's not all! D'you know Cantha's living in the future while the rest of us mopes are still eating dirt? Kippo: That's coming from an asura. They watch theater projected from their jade technology. Moving pictures! Kippo: I want K&M at the forefront of new media. Cause pretty soon, ain't nobody gonna be readin' books. Kippo: Maybe one day, the audience could even control these move-ies. An interactive experience. Feel like you're really there!

I hate this guy

Point D: "Gorrik and Taimi have both basically undergone character assassination over the years and had all their edges smoothed off, and SotO Zojja is Zojja in name (and voice actor) only."

LWS1 Taimi was such a fucking brat. Precocious, sure! But she was an asshole of a child who was constantly chafing against any adult in the vicinity and idolized Scarlet Briar. She was a deeply lonely girl who only had Zojja and she was kind of shitty! She was awful to Braham! And, like, I will repeat this again, she idolized Scarlet, the insane mass-murdering terrorist who poisoned and destroyed the entirety of Lion's Arch.

She was a kid. She was a brilliant, lonely kid, and she sucked as a person. After HoT, Zojja is basically comatose, and Taimi decides she has to step up as the Commander's asura tech expert, to prove that she's not just a child who has to be corralled, she's just as much a part of this as you are. And the way she tried to prove herself was by taking on as much responsibility as people would let her, and even some they wouldn't, and she kept being brilliant and she had to keep improving and improving and why didn't Rata Sum see she wasn't a child, and you never realized that maybe she was taking on too much because you didn't have anyone else who could do this research, and she was keeping all her vulnerability to herself -- because if she told you you'd tell her to stop and rest. Everyone would. And she needed to keep proving herself and being the best, the smartest, indispensable to Dragon's Watch,

and eventually it got her caught by Joko. He doesn't torture her, exactly. He traps her in her own assistive device, with limited air and no control, and then he sets Scruffy on you, and this teenage girl has to watch her only safe haven try to kill the only person who can save her as she slowly suffocates to death.

And she's fucking traumatized. And she's trying to put on a brave face but it really, really fucks her up. No time to cry. She has to be helpful, and useful, and if you make her go lie down and rest she's going to fucking scream. The key of Taimi, to me, is that in a lot of ways Zojja probably saw herself in her? An incredibly brilliant and desperately lonely child with nobody to advocate for her, turning all that frustration at her life and herself right back out at the world. If she never shows weakness and if she can be just as rough and tumble as the adults, they'll see she's not a baby. She's not a poor sick victim who needs to be protected.

She's Zojja's protege and Zojja was Snaff's protege and, like -- Zojja is not that old. She's maybe ten, fifteen years older than Taimi? No more than fifteen, I'd say. She's barely an adult when Snaff dies, and she has to be everything Snaff was and more. Zojja remembers what Snaff was for her, and she sees this impossibly smart progeny girl, and she thinks to herself Snaff was my lifeline out of that. and she's that for her.

And then she kind of sucks at it because she's Zojja and she's really not very good at communication that isn't her being a bitch, but, like, she was trying, probably. And Taimi was-is just as attached to her as Zojja was to Snaff.

But Taimi, unlike Zojja at that age, isn't alone. She has Zojja. She has everyone in Dragon's Watch. She has people who take her seriously and believe in her, and her greatest enemy is herself. The older she gets the more she levels out -- partially from the trauma but partially because she's just... growing up! She's still kind of a jerk, she's an asura and she knows she's the smartest person in the room most of the time, but especially when compared to Gorrik (who is admittedly amoral even for an asura), she's got a conscience. She's a firebrand of a girl who pushes herself too hard and she ribs you when you take yourself too seriously, because you've seen her at her most vulnerable, and she knows how hard you take it when you fuck up.

And she's your friend. She's a bitch but like the rest of Dragon's Watch she's your friend.

And by the point of EoD, all that assholery she was capable of has been shifted over to Ankka (who exists to die, unfortunately), and she has now been fully transformed into The Commander's Tech Support Who Says Funny Things And Listens In On Your Conversations. There's no bite to her. There is nothing uniquely Taimi about her anymore.

I wasn't a big fan of her losing Scruffy 2.0 either -- it feels like they were trying to go she's all grown up now, she doesn't need her security blanket anymore! but, like. She has an incurable degenerative disease. That was her assistive device who just also had a personality? Give her a hoverchair or a cane or something. They eventually gave her leg braces in EoD, which I think is fine and honestly works really well (& I wish we'd gotten to see her talking more with Joon and Yao about tech than we did), but. Mmm. It felt weird, you know?

-- ANYWAY BEFORE I MOVE ONTO GORRIK. I do want to touch base with Champions, because Champions was really where they started flanderizing her the most notably. It is completely reasonable that she suggests siding with Jormag, honestly, reasonable in a way the game doesn't treat it as and neither does the Commander, because she's kind of selfish! Jormag? Who cares? She hasn't been really dealing with the rest of the Icebrood Saga so far the way you and Braham have, she just sees 'Jormag's willing to work with us to kill Primordus and hasn't caused mass horrific destruction, they're a completely sentient person'. She sees a solution to a problem and she wants it now, you can talk about Jormag later, her entire race had to diaspora because of this thing and she was there the last time it almost woke up and things got really, really bad after that, what with Balthazar. Jormag is a problem, yeah! But they're not a problem that's hurt her. They're a problem she can look at and understand and speak to. Primordus? Primordus is a monster. It's a natural disaster. You can't convince Primordus to hold off on killing people, it's just what he does. But she can make a deal with Jormag to stay away from these people, maybe, and Taimi even now thinks she's the fucking shit and she's smarter than she is, and she thinks she can outwit Jormag.

Champions could've been a really interesting look at Braham and Taimi basically trying to kill each other because they both have incredible cultural trauma layered on top of personal experiences that means they can't even consider not killing that specific dragon so super dead as a first course of action, and neither of them would be wrong about feeling that way, because if you haven't forgotten -- Taimi is barely an adult at this point, if she is at all, and Braham was a teenager during LWS1 and HoT. He's barely an adult either in the grand scheme of things! A scenario where both dragons are represented by one of your friends would've been really, really cool, and the challenge is 'how do we fix this without the dragons going out of balance'. And It Was Not That At All In Any Way.

I actually had this idea as I was writing this post but, like. Man. I understand the point of Ryland, Champion of Jormag, but I would've loved to see Jormag really gaslighting the hell out of Taimi and convincing her she's just as special as he is. She deserves special power and she understands Jormag, she's so clever -- just that slow horrible corruption through persuasion, through appealing to her pride. That's the asura cultural flaw! They know they're smarter than everyone else! Play to that.

This is partially because IN THE MEANTIME, FIRE ALARM makes me want to punch a table. I hate that voiceline. I hear it so much. Dragonstorm, why.

ANYWAY -- LWS4 Gorrik was barely ex-Inquest. Bioterrorist weirdo. The most autistic man in the world (love him for this). His argument against 'YOU WERE EXPERIMENTING ON THE OLMAKHAN WITH THE SCARAB PLAGUE?' is just 'I didn't vote for it but the results are FASCINATING also btw it's actually a pestilence, not a plague--'. His morals are entirely about what will let him do the most Bug Science. Sure, the Scarab Plague is one of the most horrifying contagions in history, but he is a scarab expert and he could infodump on this shit for HOURS. Do you remember that time he got arrested for bioterrorism after exposing himself to said plague, and his main concerns are 'people calling it a plague, not a pestilence' when they want his fucking head? Even when you get him out he just goes 'am I supposed to anticipate the neuroses of everyone around me?? Them freaking out was totally unreasonable'. Yeah, man, the fucking Elonians losing it about the potential of the Scarab Plague coming back is an unreasonable hysterical reaction. He doesn't care about people! He only cares about bugs! (This is an exaggeration but you get what I mean.)

The Commander: Joko intercepted the ship. Exposed all the crew and passengers to the Scarab Plague. Gorrik: Oh my, my, my—a full-spectrum outbreak! This is incredible! Taimi: Gorrik... Gorrik: Oh, right. Sorry. Tragedy. Terrible.

He's a freak! He's a freak of a man! I love him! COMMANDER HOLY FUCK DID YOU SAY CHAK from Jahai Bluffs lives in my heart. Weirdo guy. Incubated the roller beetle in his own body under his skin just because he thought it'd be cool. He never really grows a conscience even after Blish's death, because that's not who he is, that's not how he perceives and interacts with the world. He has a completely different perspective from you, and his priorities and predilections make him an impossibly brilliant scientist... who should probably not be allowed to talk to anyone he doesn't already know ever again.

Now circa EoD he's... what? What is he? Haha he's funny detective guy who can't read social cues and is dragging Rama into things. Oh, I guess he's an asura, so sometimes he says tech things. They have removed this man's deep freak nature from him :( The man I knew would've been out there doing fieldwork and dissecting void creatures yesterday. He would've been fascinated by the Dragonvoid glitching reality! Sorry, no, he doesn't do that anymore, he's just Funny Detective Guy, sometimes he does science things with jade tech because Rama is around and that means Gorrik is also there because he's Those Two Guys with Rama now. Sure. I like their dynamic but man did things happen to Gorrik to get there. I wish it could've been Very Normal Man Rama and a little goblin man who has decided Rama is his bestie.

(Also I'm deeply weirded out by the narrative pushing TAIMI IS AN ADULT NOW SO SHE'S GOING TO DATE GORRIK BECAUSE ADULTS GET IN RELATIONSHIPS unironically. I really do think the writers have forgotten there's like... a 15 year age gap between them and just remembered 'Gorrik's brother was Taimi's classmate, and he was close? in age to his brother, probably?, so it's fine' he's like 30, man. And if Taimi/Gorrik didn't feel so slapped together and like a way to pair them up so they're busy with each other and no longer narratively relevant outside of Tech Support, maybe I would be less bitchy! But I really don't like them symbolizing 'Taimi's not a little girl anymore, she's all grown up now!' by having her immediately display romantic interest in a guy who, like. You cannot tell me Gorrik fucks. I love him but I don't think he has ever contemplated fucking as a thing he would do.

They're research partners! They're good friends! But they are absolutely not in a romantic or sexual relationship. I don't believe it.)

Zojja... god, they did that woman dirty in SotO. They did her so dirty. I talked in my original post about how her narrative role here is actively sabotaged by it being Zojja and Caithe (or even Logan!) would've done it better, and I'm sticking to that. Anyway, the Tower of Secrets story summary includes:

I've never seen her out of her element or so unsure of herself; I'm used to the hypercompetent and defiantly confident golemancer of legend. This is an entirely new side.

Even taking into account the idea SotO wants us to accept that she's gone through character development offscreen and a full arc, Zojja would never. Zojja gets fucking mean when she's stressed or unsure, and even if it's been years and she's grown past that... she's still not going to wibble about it. This is part of the big problem with her writing, even in the base content for SotO: Zojja is very, very passive. She's nice, even! She mediates between you! She's your good friend Zojja (even though she was maybe friends with an asuran Commander, and she sure as hell was not making friendship bracelets with any other Commanders and wouldn't go YOU'LL FIX EVERYTHING :D after not having seen you for ten years). ...But asura in general, and especially Zojja, have a chip on their shoulder and they will prove themselves. There are ways they could've shown Zojja growing past that asuran cultural selfishness by really listening to and cooperating with other people -- the way they did it isn't that. I'm gonna call back to that Angel McCoy interview I linked earlier:

Sit back and watch the sass fly! A side effect of asuran intelligence and self-confidence is that they’re masters of the zinger. They don’t suffer fools lightly and don’t believe in sparing feelings. Workers expect to get snide comments from their krewe bosses, and progeny expect it from their parents. Teen asura, of course, give it back as good as they get it—it’s part of growing up. This verbal abuse may seem mean-spirited, but the asura don’t see it that way. They don’t take it personally. Their competitive natures drive them to greater heights of achievement. Remember, asura have survived against terrible odds, including their tiny statures. They’ve earned their attitudes, and a certain amount of bravado keeps them from being victims. With their jibes, they’re telling it like they see it, and if you can’t take the heat, get out of the laboratory.

Yes, this is asura overall, their cultural standards, but everyone in Destiny's Edge is/was -- to some degree -- a prototypical example of their race. And beloved Zojja was a prickly son of a bitch if you weren't the asura commander. She would never wibble. I really, really do think they gave her amnesia via wizardification so they can justify both 1. her never referencing your past adventures and 2. doing a bit of moeblobification. It's not gap moe if she doesn't have moments of being a bitch, Arenanet, it's just sparkling woobification.

They can have her talk about 'I used to be so mad at everyone' but there's a point where it's not 'reasonable offscreen character development', it's 'the writers telling us ACTUALLY it's lore-justified why she's written this way now, and she's telling you it, so she's a reliable narrator'. Zojja would be a completely unreliable narrator!! She's a bitch!! Like I said in the Taimi section, there are ways to write a character growing past being a total horrific bitch in ways that make sense! This isn't it.

This dialogue actually really frustrates me more than anything because it wants you to just... accept that nobody went looking for her, and that she didn't ever reach out because she didn't feel worthy of us. Nobody went looking? Not us, not anyone in Destiny's Edge, not anyone noteworthy in Rata Sum who would've cared about Snaff's brilliant progeny-cum-legacy and perhaps the best Dragon specialist in the world going completely off the grid and disappearing? And not even Taimi, an orphan whose mentor figure Zojja was so horrifically harmed in Maguuma that she was basically comatose. That Taimi? That Taimi would've only checked in on Zojja when she was in hospital, would've let Zojja turn her away when she wasn't ready for visitors, and wouldn't have looked for her or told anyone she was missing, not even the Commander? (okay she told us once but it was kind of a casual throwaway line. i don't count it.) Not only is it shoddy writing, it makes the Commander, Taimi, and all of Zojja's guildmates look like horrible people. We didn't check on you because the writers wrote you out of the narrative, girl.

Also Zojja doesn't say a single fucking thing about Snaff relating to Mabon at any point. A mentor who saw her for her and took her in and gave her a home? A father figure? This part does drive me insane actually because given SotO's writing I don't think they even thought about it. I don't think they meant to imply that she's basically having flashbacks to Snaff's death and that's why she flips out so badly at Mabon getting possessed and dying. I really don't think they did.

"But c'mon! Make a life-changing decision just after Mabon died? If it came from anyone but Dagda, it'd be emotional warfare." IT LITERALLY IS. IT'S LITERALLY EMOTIONAL WARFARE. THE GAME IS SO CLOSE TO POINTING OUT HOW CREEPY IT IS FOR DAGDA TO DO THIS, because with the base content drop for SotO they were at least partially interested in exploring the idea that the Astral Ward had a benevolent front but was ultimately culty and doing some horrible shit in the name of the ends justifying the means.

AND NOW SHE HAS AMNESIA AND WE SAW HER, LIKE, ONCE BEFORE WE WENT TO NAYOS. LITERALLY WHAT WAS THE POINT OF HAVING HER IN THE STORY AT ALL. THIS COULD'VE BEEN A FRIENDLY LAMP. Coulda been DUCHESS CHRYSANTHEA or someshit. Faren!! I don't know!! It's 2:30 in the morning I'm very tired, this post isn't getting any proofreading it is going out as is.

Point E: "This is actually just about Fractals, sorry."

I know they were thinking about continuing the Arkk storyline at one point, apparently that was the original draft for Sunqua Peak. Dessa's implied to have some deep connection to Uncategorized, which is explicitly not Rata Sum. When some prerelease images mentioned 'fractal' in the URL for SotO and it was apparently going to be about the Mists I was like 'oh, shit, are we getting closure on Arkk'? He's out there!! In the Mists!! Where is our fucking boy!!! (He's nowhere, the current writers' room don't know he exists. :') )

The major interactions with the Mists are generally Asura-developed -- Dessa and her krewe developed fractals as we know them, 'capturing' these Mists-echoes and preventing them from dissolving (and she also 'studied' at Rata Sum (though it 'didn't work out'), implying to me she grew up somewhere else and moved to Rata Sum for college before dropping out). And then Arkk managed to somehow break into the Mists physically, disrupt your transportation back from one, mash several Fractals together, let Mist Beings into the Observatory,

It's implied (to me, anyway) that there is or was a real Dessa who created the Fractal Observatory and then... got out. She had a kid before making the Observatory -- Arkk mentions she looks very young during Shattered Observatory, she recognizes him, and she has some unspecified connection to the Raving Asura -- who has an unsent letter to her which makes her deeply sad to read, and, also, yknow. The kittycat golems. He could be Arkk's dad, is what I'm saying.). And never knew her fractal echo was trapped inside the Mists, repeating forever and forever and forever. And then she died, or she disappeared (maybe something happened when fractals-Dessa tried to leave during LWS1 and reset?), and Arkk found out that she was still in the Fractals, and he managed to destabilize the fucking Fractals in his attempt to rip in there and get her out.

And the version we meet of him in Shattered Observatory is just an echo, too, trapped in the loop forever and ever and ever. Maybe there is a real one out there -- or maybe the Mists destroyed that one as he tried to escape the Shattered Observatory, and the only versions of these two that exist are their shadows endlessly looping (which is honestly what We only exist in the Mists…echoes of ourselves. is meant to mean, but hey, it's not specific enough, I read it as 'the versions of ourselves that we are now aren't real. we're just shadows of our real selves, who aren't here any longer'). Fucked up, man. Anyway they should've made one of the archwizards in SotO an asura

Asura. They're little bastards. Love 'em. In my universe my asura druid Svess is holding Taimi's hand and talking her fucking head off about how to make nitroglycerin and they're having a GREAT time

[thorgans-guide-to-thedas]

Do you think the Chasind were influenced by Mongolia as well?

So there's two different breakdowns I could do for this: what WE running the blog think the Chasind could be influenced from, and what the evidence in the Bioware lore (BL) presents to us. I want to stress again that we are NOT cultural experts , but we try and research and provide accurate information as much as we can.

This got REALLY long so I'm dropping it below the cut

The way our funny little group interprets and pulls inspiration from cultures in Thedas is basically just a blueprint or a road map. You'll see in some of the posts and definitely in things as we continue to post them that we use a lot of vague language when describing people. We want to avoid force-fitting players into certain roles or making people feel that "oh, well this region is inspired by this culture, so I guess I'll have to play that". Thorgan's Guide aims to spread out more opportunities for players to see themselves in this world and feel safe as they play.

So, right now, we are looking at the Chasind as a mixture of different cultures coming from early-colonial America and the Caribbean. That doesn't mean that Mongolian influence can't be added, and that is where we want there to be freedom for everyone playing the game.

Our drafts for Avvar/Frostback Basin cultures have definitely pin-pointed cultural inspiration from Inuit/Sami/Mongolian cultures, so even in our silly little home-brewed re-imagining, the geographical locations of the Frostback and the Kocari wilds are not far from each other, and it would totally work and would definitely be worth exploring for us. But I want to stress this again: our homebrew isn't meant to be law and we want everyone to have fun with it.

As for Bioware evidence, I have so many issues with it. My interpretation of the BL around Chasind features a lot of negative stereotypes associated with "uncivilized cultures," which basically translates to non-eurocentric. There is already a blatant lack of diverse ethnicities in the BL, but if I were to name a few cultures that were meant to be non-white representations, they all have antagonistic qualities to them - Chasind included. Tumblr user @dalishious talks a lot about how Bioware codes their people and cultures based on what suits them and how this can be damaging to real-world people [1]. (Dalishious' resources and research into this matter is a wealth of information, and I would highly recommend checking out their other work).

The Chasind are described as barbaric and "primitive at best". Based on pre-existing stereotypes of Mongolian culture (keyword stereotypes), it follows a similar pattern. With many minority cultures, they are placed into the ideas of "nomadic" and "simple", having technology seen as under-advanced in the face of Western civilization - so this, in its own twisted way, falls into the category. We are encouraged to see the Chasind as simple-minded and aggressive, told that they raid the swampland and cause harm and strike fear. Many brown-skinned cultures are subject to similar treatment depicting brutal warriors and merciless attacks, and of course, the antagonistic coding of Thedas cultures fits the Chasind into this role.

One thing that stuck out was the line "some Chasind are reputedly so barbaric that they even consume the flesh of the dead." The cannibalism stereotype was present in almost every dark-skinned representation at some point in time, using the "disgust" or "savagery" of the practice to separate civilized from uncivilized [2] [3]. Though appearing across the globe, these stereotypes intensified in mainstream media and specifically in films involving South American, Caribbean, and Pacific Islander cultures [4] [5].

In another line, we see "Chasind are known to decorate their hair with pierced copper coins; these are tied into the ends of their braids." This in itself is vague and, in reality, could reference dozens of different cultures around the globe. Many Slavic cultures had hair accessories and braids, but so did many African regions. It does not help that the Bioware games choose to darken the Chasind skin in their depictions. This usually leads our mind into thinking that they are meant to portray a certain culture or people based on our inherent beliefs and subconscious biases.

Bioware's writing is confusing at best and utterly racist at worst. Most of their regions are either blatantly European or a melting pot of so many minority cultures boiled down that you can hardly tell where the original inspiration came from. Is it Mongolian, Slavic, African, or something else altogether? I don't even think Bioware knows this. Just looking at the wiki page makes my head spin at how many contradicting and overlapping things there are in Chasind culture and how many elements they've taken from all over the place. All I can really say on the matter is that the wiki is doing a lot of harm with it.

From Thorgan's Guide, we totally encourage the addition of cultures to the game, and if the Chasind have Mongolian influence for the players, awesome! From the Bioware standpoint, Mongolian cultures were another target of stereotyping and "othering", not only from the Western world but from China as well, and it is completely possible that those cultural elements could be reflected back in Bioware's ignorant writing.

I may have gotten a bit carried away in writing and completely BLASTING negative stereotyping. Hopefully, this was still an interesting take on it all and at least kinda makes sense.

Here are the sources if anyone wants them:

[1] Dalishious. (2019). Coding Does Not Inherently Equate to Representation. (Source)

[2] Pyleyev, M. (2016). How the Feeling of Disgust Went From Life-Saving to Dangerous. (Video)

[3] Selvam, A. (2018). ‘Black Panther’ Challenges a Bogus Food Stereotype. (Source)

[4] Moore, R. B. (1973). Carib "Cannibalism": A Study in Anthropological Stereotyping. (Source)

[5] Conklin, B. A. (1997). Consuming Images: Representations of Cannibalism on the Amazonian Frontier. (Source)

[xris05]

Wooo! Geography and sustainability and stuff and stuff

When, in the course of human events it becomes necessary for one student to take upon themselves the burden of writing a very long (not really all that) academic post on a website they barely know how to use because said website was recommended to them by their actual genuine university as a blog website for an assignment.

And then said student forgets to do the assignment, falls deliriously ill, and is now finally getting round to it hilariously late and because all of their other assignments seem so, so much more difficult and mentally strenuous to do on a day where they really do not want to have to deal with that.

So, here we are. A comically large wall of poorly grammatically structured text, talking about (drumroll please) geography! More specifically "Human" geography, or Urban Geography or whatever you want to call it. It's my chosen field of study (despite my best judgement) and I've been tasked by the powers that be, to create a blog to inform and educate the nebulously defined general public about ~exciting~ developments and "Gamechanging innovations" Now, to tell the truth, this was not a particularly easy thing for me to do, because quite frankly my chosen field of study isn't really one of those ones you'd associate with constant innovation and invention, at least in my mind, but thankfully the university provided a long list of various subjects we could look at and study and then report back unto you (the reader, stand in for the entire rest of the world) about.

Small issue there, was the vast vast majority of what we were offered as potential "Gamechanging innovations" either drove me to madness with boredom, or absolutely did not seem like they were exactly "Gamechanging" (could be worse, one of the ideas offered to another discipline was the hyperloop, which is quite frankly a stupid idea that is dead in the water and could have just been normal highspeed rail)

Take, for instance, "Autonomous vehicles". Yeah. Now, suffice to say there is issues with the concept of self driving vehicles, mostly about how the technology is not exactly safe right now, and well, that's just the start of the rabbit hole there. (and really, just build a train, tram or other preferred method of public transport)

There was another one, which look promising to my untrained eye, namely "The Internet of things" which I had no idea what it was, so doing what any self respecting academic in-training would do, I googled it. Apparently, the "Internet of Things" is the catch-all term for devices that exchange and communicate data over the internet.

I'm no expert, but at an initial reading, that did just seem to be most things these days, and was hardly groundbreaking or new, so I dug a bit deeper into the scholarly side of the ole internet for some answers. Thankfully, I found a very helpful little paper (linked here) which clarified, and I quote:

"The term Internet of Things generally refers to scenarios where network connectivity and computing capability extends to objects, sensors and everyday items not normally considered computers, allowing these devices to generate, exchange and consume data with minimal human intervention. There is, however, no single, universal definition."

So it's the smart fridges, the fancy new cars and all of that lovely stuff, which buzz all of their data and such onto other devices on the internet. Now, of course my immediate thought was that it means my everything is now spying on me, but I was quickly relieved to remember that that changes effectively nothing as I do in fact own a phone which already does that.

The main benefit that seems to be proposed by this is the fact that all of this data allows rather effective monitoring of things like emissions and water quality and power usage and potentially good ole agriculture and so on and so forth, which, yeah, I can see the uses, maybe, but I can also see the glaring potential privacy, legal and potential tech issues.

A lot of people may not like their cars telling some company about where they've been all the time, and how much gas they've used. That's fair and understandable. Not to mention, the data gathered could be wrong, or otherwise rendered useless, effectively poisoning the data-well if enough things go wrong, or are just falsely reported to the public.

(It's at this point that I realise, I don't exactly know if this is quite what the uni wanted me to write, but hey, at least it's honest)

Anyway, I've overstayed my welcome in rambling about all of these things, and will be back (later) to complain/ do my assignment more, have a lovely day and remember that if you ever think about revolutionizing public transport, ask yourself if a bus or train would do the same thing, better.

[juvenalesque]

Why the world is *gestures around at everything* opinion

No TL;DR here.

Pride month has me dwelling on what i've been thinking about a lot in the last few years, as I'm sure many have, the way the world is heading. Many of us feel out of control and helplessly riding along with an apocalyptic and terrifying demise of the world we know. As we individually fight for just causes, we should seek intersectionality in every facet of our lives. I'd like to share my thoughts on why this is true and more. The cure to the world's problems is as basic as what we tell children: "share." I mean this in more than a literal sense of sharing objects. These problems that I dwell on, we all know about stem from something else. I am speaking of the concept of divide and conquer as it applies to our society and the negative consequences of this. It all begins with organization. I am not going to claim I am an expert on everything on Earth, but these are my thoughts as an educated individual who keeps up to date with credible sources such as academic journals and primary sources. Definitions I list here are both verbatim and paraphrased.

A group exists that most of us are aware of in some capacity, which coordinates together to promote propaganda separating everything that makes humans people. Organizations like the United Nations have a Human Rights Council and a Declaration of Human Rights, but this declaration, and ONLY if properly utilized, plucks only a feather on the bird of prey that divides the Human Earthlings: preventing peace, advancement, and unity; I will not elaborate on the topic of other Earthlings here.

This may sound like digression, but try to humor me here.

There are "hard sciences" such as S.T.E.M. fields. These are held in high regard. People dismiss the social sciences, sometimes called "soft sciences": history, anthropology, archaeology, philosophy, sociology, psychology… This is done systematically through the use of pervasive propaganda even in academia. This reduces interdisciplinary study, which has numerous benefits. Imagine if all of this knowledge could be combined to be utilized for its full potential. We could have advances beyond our dreams. As the old saying goes, "a jack of all trades and master of none, is often better than a master of one." Sharing information is invaluable. Communication of information is invaluable. It is why we have agriculture, medicine, metalwork, machines, and the internet. These are only some extraordinarily vital bits of knowledge that are not utilized to their full potential. Let us peel back another layer of this concept or turn back a page, as they say.

Even literacy is minimized in its importance purposefully. This is a large part of communication. There are different levels of literacy. What is most common in our American society is a gray area between nominal and functional literacy in scientific terms. "Nominal literacy" refers to one who can recognise scientific terms but does not have a clear understanding of the meaning. "Functional literacy" refers to the capacity of a person to engage in all those activities in which literacy is required for effective function of his or her group and community and also for enabling him or her to continue to use reading, writing and calculation for his or her own and the community's development. In a scientific sense, functional literacy is when the person can use scientific and technological vocabulary but usually this is only out of context as is the case for example in a school test of examination or basic correspondence. "Structural: conceptual and procedural literacy" means that the individual demonstrates understanding and a relationship between concepts and can use processes with meaning. "Multidimensional literacy" is when the individual not only has understanding, but has developed perspectives of science and technology that include the nature of science, the role of science and technology in personal life and society. Multidimensional literacy is what it is called when someone is "fully literate," "entirely literate," or "completely literate." They can comprehend entirely. We should, as a society, be trying to assist all persons to reach the highest level of literacy possible for them to understand in the most efficient way. Instead, literacy is kept minimal at best for each individual use by design, even per subject in an academic setting. This is why interdisciplinary study isn't utilized nearly as often as it should be for a more complete understanding of the world as science can inform us and assist in advancement of the scientific pursuit of knowledge and cultural development.

People who are completely literate are perceived as intelligent purely due to their ability to learn and communicate more efficiently than someone who is less literate. People who have the skill of multidimensional literacy are called "advanced" when truly they are the baseline of true understanding. Even those who have not yet reached multidimensional literacy are considered advanced or above average. Literacy is so underrated and avoided in our educational system that a person with an extensive vocabulary is considered more intelligent than someone with a more limited vocabulary, which is blatantly incorrect. The most intelligent people may never have an opportunity to become literate even nominally, but that does not make them less intelligent. It creates a communication barrier just as strong as any language barrier. It prevents a mind from communication. This is a tragic loss, the inability to communicate.

>Side note, that is why accessibility for communication is vital and should be prioritized. Accessibility in all parts of life, a world built for all, not just the "typical."<

Communication barriers in our society have examples such as levels of literacy or understanding of different subjects and perspectives. Communication barriers are also intensified when people are divided by cultural conflicts. These culture clashes are the most well-known form of division of people. People who are united under certain principles or agreements can accomplish radically more than people divided by disagreement, bias, or any other thing that stands in the way of cooperation. The more division, the more discord. That means more distraction and less cooperation. Cooperation and knowledge are what allow a common goal to succeed. The knowledge and how to learn from as many prior mistakes and successes as possible is vital.

This is why, repeatedly, throughout known human history, it has been shown that a ruling class cooperates to design a system that all people follow to maintain some form of basic organization for how the society operates. While some have started altruistically and with the reciprocity that allowed our species to survive near extinction many times, most become or begin as a means of hoarding power through resources.

This is where we get the Malthusian myth of scarcity and horrific events such as poverty and war. If people can be convinced that resources are truly limited rather than just improperly managed, they will all follow the rules they are told will allow them the share of these resources they need to thrive or even survive.

Again, it is somewhat common knowledge that these organized people create a class of people that utilize an attempted control of information with the tool of propaganda to maintain their positions of power. It was discovered that using informational controls to prevent other people from organization was an effective tool against losing their power. This is why when the non-powerful or "common" people eventually tire of a system's injustices and inequities and revolt in anger, society often collapses all together. This is why "education" has traditionally been conducted for a limited number of people and why those people are often the ones next in power should one leader fall. There is no coordinated allegiance or cooperation among those who pursue justice because they have been trained from birth to be driven from everything that could help unite large masses of people that are vastly different from one another. Fundamentally, it is because of an inability to communicate information, from academic knowledge to simple concepts, that we can not cooperate as humanity to solve painful problems.

So, this would mean that at the core of what I am saying is this: we all want equity and the best lives for ourselves, our loved ones, and often all people. However, we do not take the individual responsibility to attempt to communicate, teach communication, and teach utilization of this communication for cooperation. If a large enough group of people took this individual responsibility to promote this TRUE education, which you might call "well rounded," we could improve upon it every generation and interaction to create real change. We need to apply the principles we use selectively universally in our lives without hypocrisy. We need to encourage every human to learn as much as they can about as much as they can and, most importantly, how to communicate this information to others in every way possible.

So, give the most of your time to what you do or enjoy best, but share it. Share everything in your mind and abilities freely and with peace and the pursuit of spreading true and valuable information.

Every skill, every tool, share. It might just save us.

Next, maybe i'll tell you why I think AI could be the savior we need to accelerate this process & that is why there is so much fear mongering in attempts to slow its development and why I love the character "Data" from Star trek so intensely.

-Laura Renee West

06/14/2023

If you like what I have to say and would like to share it elsewhere or in a different format (or think that they might take this down), here's a link these drafted ponderings as a google document.

[koushirouizumi]

{Reference}/{Starting Master-list} - Donor Children History in Japan

(Gathered by me for reference; It's been a while since I researched this, but maybe you'll become Informed by following these {and I do plan to search around again}...)

Also re-blogging for my own reference since I'm, you know, a Donor child, and wanting to research more about how the laws surround such in other countries, including for the series I create fan works for.

(Some of the language may lean slightly bionormative in the reporting, so it is important to keep this in mind. Please note I am compiling these for my own reference, too.)

Children born through Artificial Insemination Speak Up {2003} "The Ministry of Health reports that {Donor children} births have been reported since the mid-seventies in Japan. While statistics record about 10,000 such children, the numbers could be much higher."

"There is no correct record on the number of AID children {Donor children, etc} as laws now do not stipulate that parents and doctors record such births. We contend the actual numbers could be between 100 to 200 a year," says Tomoko Kashiwage, a director in the infertility section at the ministry.

(...) Experts are now supporting the passage of a law in 2004 that would allow children above 15 years the right to the disclosure of personal details of donors of sperm and eggs in their birth.

(Yuri Hibino) Attitudes towards Disclosure of Children’s Genetic Origins among Japanese Patients Using Assisted Reproductive Technology {2014} (PDF) Keyword: Donor conception; Right to know; Infertile patients; Japan "In Japan, a 2003 government report recognized the right of children born via donor-assisted conception to know about their genetic origin, including identifying information about the donor [2]. However, this right has {not} been enacted into law(...)"

first, woman gives birth using egg from anonymous donor {2017 Mar}

"(...) Although there have been earlier cases of children conceived using a husband’s sperm and eggs donated by sisters or friends"...

{Tradition} denies Surrogacy {2017 May};

"Most major media covered the March 22 Tokyo news conference where Sachiko Kishimoto of the nonprofit organization Oocyte Donation Network (OD-Net) explained how a woman in her 40s had recently given birth to a daughter who had been conceived using the woman’s husband’s sperm and an egg from a third party. Though there have been instances in Japan of women giving birth by using the eggs of friends or relatives, this was the first publicized case in Japan of a baby successfully coming to term with the help of an anonymous egg donor."

"(...) there are no laws governing infertility treatments using donated eggs from third parties"...

"Japan tops the world in the number of women who undergo infertility treatment, while at the same time it also has the lowest success rate." (...)

[cicadawriter]

okay, you said you don’t know how to make posts? i’ll guide you.

make an intro to my wip post containing the following information:

- name of all the main cast

- mini descriptions of them

- setting and timeplace

- fantasy or general fiction

- i saw that it was mystery— give us a mini synopsis. what is the secret gov. agency? why is main oc so obsessive? WHAT is mc obsessing about? what is this case?

- who is the main antagonist? (if it’s a spoiler, give a vibe and a general “serial killer known to target women with blonde hair, mid-to-late twenties, at various locations, with an M.O. of killing them via strangulation and then tying strands of the last victim’s hair around their wrist)

- a quote or excerpt from your wip

- current progress reports

cheerios!!! happy writing :)

OMG so sorry this took me five hundred years to do this, started college so life has been crazy:P

synopsis

file 13 is a fantasy/mystery story that is hopefully going to become a show one day! it was formerly going to be a book, but upon reflection writing it as a show will suit it better. I don't know if that will realistically happen, but i write for fun, so that's ok!! :D It centers around the secret government agency called the Federal Bureau of Paranormal Investigation which is pretty much what it sounds like. in each episode they deal with what Ive been calling "spooks". basically whatever their investigating. ghosts, criptids, bottomless pits etc. possibly an over arching plot, but i'm not totally sure yet.

main cast:

Simon

Simon is the main character of the story, and a typist at the fbpi- he basically takes care turning taped interviews and field notes into a hard copy since technology and the paranormal don't always mesh well.

fun fact: Simon doesn't own a car, and bikes to work.

Avery

as said before, technology doesn't always act reliably for the folks at the FBPI. Avery, how ever, is an expert in cursed and haunted computers.

fun fact: her favorite drink is a matcha latte.

Parker

Parker is a crazy conspiracy theorist who was thrilled to prove the existence of the paranormal and the FBPI. he does not particularly like or trust the government. he breaks into the office, and after that he knows to much and hes hired on the spot, against his will. he is now the unwitting archivist.

fun fact: he does not own a phone, and he assumes every room is bugged.

Daisy

daisy is an intern, and the newest member of the crew. she is in training. she occupies most of her time by annoying her coworkers.

fun fact: she likes to crochet

Finch

finch is sort of the janitor/bookbinder/odd jobs guy. he takes care of the office and the repairs and restores old books and documents as well as putting together new notes into books.

fun fact: he likes playing dnd

setting and time/place:

the 90s. i was not alive in the 90s, and this is a somewhat recent development as it used to be set modern day. i feel like the story does better pre- cell phones, if that makes since? and i kinda vibe with the 90s tbh. its set in southern Ohio.

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Why A.I. Won't Prevail in the Future

prevail - verb - prove more powerful than opposing forces; be victorious (Google). 

Lately, it seems to me that "artificial intelligence" is a topic of interest for many who depend much on technology. Personally, I know that a few of my former colleagues in education are quite distressed as their students are starting to purchase various programs that can literally compose essays for them. As a former English teacher, the question that initially registers in my mind is the following: What is the point of teaching writing when students can rely on their computers to do the work for them? Or just What is the point of education at all? Maybe when Trump proposed to eliminate the Department of Education, he was just responding to the latter question. Scary, I know. 

This particular blog's case in point isn't terribly obvious. Since A.I. is all about human invention (meaning humans feed knowledge to these robots), it is terribly imperfect. From my own experience, I am finding that the A.I. I use (Siri) is terribly stupid. She is far from error free. Just when the students are thinking they can get away with gross indolence, they can't because their teachers can tell that they are using A.I. due to its ignorance of the basics. The supposed "brains" who are feeding information to artificial intelligence know nothing about English grammar because they are most likely too young, products of the contemporary educational system that frowns on the direct instruction of the A, B, C's of the written word. These modern-day geniuses, who only paid attention in science classes when they attended secondary school, aren't experts in language. Does it make sense for imperfection to perpetuate imperfection? (Does anything make sense today?) No, no, no! 

On the flip side, I am hopeful, extremely hopeful that A.I. may just fail completely to make the billionaire techno mobsters more billions. I believe this could be an accurate prediction as I have been spending time with toddlers lately, yes, little kids, who are incredibly with it, sharper than the millennial tots whom I once spent many hours observing when my own daughter was that age. I totally think that today's inchoate generation won't have to depend on A.I. in the future after all, and they may even reject it in favor of the byproducts of past inventions, like that of the Gutenbergs'. This immature group finds books (yes, physical, hardcover books) to be fascinating and fun because their brilliant parents bestowed with common sense are making a sincere effort to keep them away from technology (iPads, etc.) by taking them to public libraries. No, I'm not kidding. I work with these little ones at a public library, so there. That has got to mean something. Albeit a small test group, I am hoping that it will soon represent a large portion of the majority. 

Parents, if you are introducing your children to the rudimentary, please keep it up before we as humans disintegrate and get swept up by machines that can hardly employ brooms correctly. And demand that your kids be taught English grammar when they get to school even if the current batch of teachers must return to classrooms themselves to learn it. Your infant Einsteins deserve to have their cerebral matter stimulated from this moment on. Together in this push, we will prevail. 

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