#community management is complicated...

[hpowellsmith]

I'm seeing noises about Tumblr becoming more precarious once again, and I'm very nervous indeed because this is the main space I enjoy hanging out in public online and it's a huge part of my work! Looks like it would be a good idea to branch out more though, so... where would you most want to follow me to keep up with updates, ask questions about my games, and so on?

None of these really does everything that Tumblr does and a lot of them would make it harder to make off-the-cuff posts (I wouldn't want to send people emails every time my wife says something witty about my games) but I could use something like curiouscat or a google form to simulate anon asks I guess.

[kaiserin-erzsebet]

My hottest take: if we must continue to make shows with Empress Elisabeth, I want a long series in the style and spirit of The Crown about Franz Joseph.

I think freeing Sisi from being a girlboss critic-of-monarchy main character would actually be much better.

[arrayoflightarchives]

Have religion as a queer person is so so difficult

My religion is so so personal to me but the moment I express my faith it immediately feels like I'm being a traitor to my community because I hold that faith - because of what that 'community' has done to MY community

Especially when religion is such a huge part of why my rights are being taken away

Why does it hurt to be who I am as a trans queer person and also as someone who believes in God

[sun-marie]

unicorn overlord absolutely rocks btw.

[batsplat]

A sentence in Casey’s book impressed me, even though he didn't name anyone explicitly

“Maybe someone who could put on the charm when they need it regardless of sincerity could have turned the situation around but I don’t have that skill.”

He totally gets that Valentino has endless charm, lol. I’m sure he felt it too when they hung out

yes!! this was about casey and his relationship to the fans wasn't it, and in a section of the book where he was talking about his rivalry with valentino, so hardly a stretch to say it was deliberately alluding to him. and of course casey talking about valentino's charm is not unrelated to how casey did seem to like valentino perfectly fine back in the day... how he said back in 2007 that he liked talking to valentino, that they generally talked about stuff other than racing, how valentino gets on with most guys in the paddock... though it's interesting (if not particularly surprising) how by the time the autobiography is written, casey portrays the early dynamic between the pair of them pretty dispassionately. just from the book you'd get the sense of someone who was coolly respectful of valentino until valentino started pissing him off, rather than someone who was... y'know, also a bit of a fan. somebody who got the valentino rossi appeal, shall we say. we all have our crosses to bear

which, I don't even think it was just about the racing. I doubt he ever wanted to emulate valentino in the same way jorge or marc might have wanted to do off the track, but stuff like calling him a "great competitor and a great sportsman"... that for years he'd been "dreaming to be like him"... that valentino and doohan were "the sort of people I wanted to become like"... I reckon that's a little more than simply respect for him as a rider, and I don't think casey back then would have said that stuff just because he knew it'll play well with the public. he found valentino exciting, like so many before and since have done - and still did so for the entirety of 2006 (he said more recently that he was even more impressed by valentino after that season, which is kinda noteworthy given that's the year valentino did, you know, lose the title). but then they became direct rivals, and. well

of course the "regardless of sincerity" in the quote is pretty pointed lol, like he does clearly see valentino as very two-faced and willing to spin a line regardless of whether it's true or not and also as someone happy to deceive others for his own gains. and his rhetoric has also changed just a wee bit since he published the autobiography on that count, where he more recently does stress how... well, he did learn from how valentino played the media! he learned how to get friendly with journalists! he learned how to play that game, of trying to win the public discourse! he might never have liked it, and he still probably would say like in the autobiography that this "charm" "regardless of sincerity" isn't something that he'll ever be as good at as valentino was. but he did dabble in the dark arts just a touch... I think one of the most interesting tensions of that rivalry is to what extent valentino forced casey out of his comfort zone both on- and off-track and ended up making casey adopt behaviours and attitudes he continued to find reprehensible. casey considers valentino 'selfish' both on- and off-track but to fight him both on- and off-track he became more selfish in turn... very dramatically compelling

anyway, here's casey chatting to fellow aussie jb when he's come to watch the podium celebrations after one of valentino's 2005 wins:

[cosmik-homo]

I do hope its clear that when I say missy2 is enamoured by the idea of bein Better at this Mental Health stuff than the doctor and like actually being surprisingly interested in Taking Care of her and stuff. It is also like. Its still a pain and control thing. Like he v much if he found her havin a nightmare would stand there mesmerized for a Good While befor doin anything. He has not been going under the moniker 'The bdsmerrrr' for 2000 years for nothing.

[rawliverandgoronspice]

the incredibly delicate tension between: we need art to feed us and connect us and make us feel like things have a purpose, and: art is slowly but surely making us more complacent and cowardly

[tomatoluvr69]

**** and ****** and I all got invited to birthday party #1 tonight. Then each of them got invited to an additional birthday party, #2-3. so now I am being made to go party hopping with them. to parties of ppl I’ve only met in passing. and if that weren’t bad enough a friend of ours but mostly theirs is opening for [mid but confusingly well known DJ in our town who thinks playing starships by Nicki Minaj makes her all that even tho *** is better!] tonight and so now we’re gonna try to go to four things. Woeeeee is literally meeeeeeee I want 2 stay home and pirate ebooks and listen to sufjan stevens but unfortunately if I refused to go it’d be a whole big thing even though I literally only ever agreed to go to party #1!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Scream. Ugh whatever I’m going to drink a matcha latte with raspberries and a shot of espresso at 4-5 pm and hopefully I will not pass away </3 Urgh this is fine this is good for me I’m young blah blah blah I have to enjoy this era it’s fleeting whatever blah blah blah I have the rest of my life to drink herbal tea all alone plan my garden and force myself to read a joan Didion book I am not enjoying. Blah blah blah but I don’t have to LIKE IT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Oh AND I have to go fucking secondhand clothes shopping* beforehand this is like when Gabriella and Troy from High School Musical had big game, scholastic decathalon, and callback auditions all at the same time

*it’ll be FINE I guess hdhebfndjjejejdjdj

[lovecoreyippee]

"Evelyn has undiagnosed adhd" like duh. DUH. du-uhhh. The feeling like shes in the worst possible universe with all her potential wasted. Zoning out to imagine other universes. Actually being multitalented. Obviously anyone can relate to this but also a metaphor for adults who've lived their whole lives undiagnosed. And also the everything all at once constantly feeling overwhelmed, your attention constantly being pulled apart.

[pomodoriyum]

jesus christ. good fire mitigation does NOT mean eliminating every green thing near your home, especially if you live in a grassland or semi-arid area, holy fucking shit. like yes. you are reducing the fire load if there's a really hot fire passing thru your area. but you're also drastically increasing the likelihood of fire in the first place by drying out the soil and increasing the ground temperature in the first place. AND you're increasing your energy expenditure on cooling while ALSO REMOVING ORGANISMS THAT REDUCE CO2 CONTENT IN THE ATMOSPHERE AND COOL AIR TEMPS (also a fire reducing tactic. by y'know. cooling things off AND KEEPING THE SOIL MOIST).

like, there are possibly places where removing vegetation near homes is a good idea. parts of california and desert border areas may be good examples of this. but please for the love of fuck if you don't live in a desert don't remove living vegetation that's near your house, unless it's part of a carefully considered brush-clearing operation in like. an urban and urban-interface space. please for the love of fuck have nuance about these things. I KNOW people are running scared because of the horrific fires that have been raging due to hundreds of years of land mismanagement (due to colonialist genocide and exploitative capitalism). but there is a lot of information being spread around like a one-shoe-fits-all-ecosystems, and that's just not fucking true.

[arolesbianism]

Brute: ah yes I have finally gotten Softie to communicate with Queen and Alpha which has already done wonders for basically repairing the former and beginning the repairs for the latter. Maybe I can finally be free from this hell of my own creation and live with my loved ones happily -]

The evil and nefarious Beats:

[gofitnesspro]

Diabetes in Young Adults: Causes and Solutions

Addressing the rise of diabetes in young adults requires comprehensive strategies that promote healthy lifestyle choices, including regular physical activity, balanced nutrition, stress management, and increased awareness of diabetes risk factors. Additionally, early detection through regular screenings and improved access to healthcare can help identify and manage diabetes at an earlier stage,…

[coolcat101s]

.

[philmonjohn]

A Call to the Children of the Global South: The System That Made My Father Disown Me

I didn’t write this living testimony for virality. I wrote it because silence almost killed me. Because truth, even when ignored by algorithms, remembers how to survive. If this resonated with you — even quietly — share it with someone else who’s still trying to name their Fracture. That’s how we outlive the system. - Philmon John, May 2025

THE FRACTURE Several months ago, when I, a South-Asian American man, turned 35, my father disowned me.

He didn’t yell. He didn’t cry. He simply stopped calling me his son.

My father is a Brown, MAGA-aligned conservative Christian pastor, born in Kerala, India, and now living in the United States. His rejection wasn’t provoked by any breach of trust or familial responsibility, but by my coming out as queer and bisexual — and by my deliberate move away from a version of Christianity shaped more by colonial rule than compassion.

I became blasphemy made flesh.

My mother and sister, equally immersed in religious conservatism, followed suit. Most of my extended family — conservative Indian Christians — responded with quiet complicity. I became an exile in my own lineage, cast out from a network that once celebrated me as the Mootha Makkan, the Malayalam term for “eldest son”.

This break didn’t occur in isolation. It was the culmination of years of internal questioning and ideological transformation.

I was raised with warmth and structure, but also under the weight of rigid theology. My parents cycled through different churches in pursuit of doctrinal purity. In that environment, my queerness had no safe harbor. It had to be hidden, managed, controlled — forced into secrecy.

Literal, cherry-popping closets.

Even my childhood discipline was carved straight from scripture — “spare the rod, spoil the child” was not metaphor but mandate. I was hit for defiance, for curiosity, for emotional honesty. Control was synonymous with love. The theology: obedience over empathy. Is it sad I would rather now have had a beating from my father, than his silence?

I would’ve taken the rod — at least it acknowledged me.

Instead, Daddy looks through me.

THE INHERITANCE And I obeyed. For a time, I rose through the ranks of the church. I led worship. I played guitar in the worship band. I wasn’t just a believer — I was a builder of belief, a conductor of chorus, a jester of jubilee and Sunday morning joy — all while masking a private ache I could not yet articulate.

In the last five years, I began methodically deconstructing the ideological scaffolding I had inherited. I examined the mechanisms of theology, patriarchy, and colonial imposition — and the specific burdens placed upon firstborn sons of immigrant families. Who defines our roles? Who benefits from our silence? Why is this happening to me?

These questions consistently pointed toward the dominant global structure: wealthy white patriarchal supremacy. Rooted in European imperialism and sustained by centuries of religious and cultural colonization, this system fractures not only societies but the deeply intimate architecture of family.

What my family experienced is not unlike what the United States of America continues to experience — a slow, painful reckoning with a foundational ideology of white, heteronormative, Christian patriarchal dominance.

My family comes from Kerala, home to one of the oldest Christian communities in the world. But the Christianity I inherited was not indigenous. It was filtered through the moral codes of Portuguese priests and British missionaries and the discipline of Victorian culture. Christ was not presented as a radical Middle Eastern teacher but as a sanitized figure — pale, passive, and Western.

In this theology, Christ is symbolic. Paul is the system. Doctrine exists to reinforce patriarchy, to police desire, to ensure control. When I embraced a theology rooted in love, empathy, and justice — the ethics I believe Jesus actually lived — I was met not with discussion, but dismissal.

To my family, my identity wasn’t authenticity. It was apostasy.

THE RECKONING In 2020, the ground shifted.

I turned the triple decade — 30 — as the COVID-19 pandemic erupted.

Remote work slowed life down, and I had space to think deeply.

That year, the murders of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, and countless others triggered a national and personal reckoning.

I turned to K-LOVE, the Christian radio station I grew up with, hoping to hear words of solidarity, truth, or even mourning. Instead, there was silence. No mention of racial justice. No prayers for the dead. Just songs about personal salvation, void of historical context or social responsibility.

As Geraldine Heng argues in The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages, race was not merely a modern invention void of scientific basis — it was already taking shape in medieval Europe, where Christianity was used to sanctify, encode, and sell racial hierarchies as divine order and social technology.

As Ademọ́la, also known as Ogbeni Demola, once said: “The white man built his heaven on your land and pointed yours to the sky.” That brain-powered perceptive clarity — distilled in a single line �� stays with me every day.

With professional routines interrupted and spiritual ties frayed, I immersed myself in scholarship. I entered what I now see as a period of epistemic reconstruction. I read widely — revolutionaries, poets, sociologists, historians, mathematicians, theologians, cultural critics, and the unflinching truth-tellers who name what empire tries to erase.

I first turned to the voices who now live only in memory: Bhagat Singh, James Baldwin, Frantz Fanon, bell hooks, Octavia Butler, Gloria Anzaldúa, and Vine Deloria Jr. Each carried the weight of revolution, tenderness, and truth — from anti-colonial struggle to queer theory to Indigenous reclamation.

I then reached for the veteran thought leaders still shaping the world, starting with Noam Chomsky, Naomi Klein, Shashi Tharoor, Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, Susan Visvanathan, Geraldine Heng, George Gheverghese Joseph, J. Sakai, Vijay Prashad, Vilna Bashi Treitler, Claire Jean Kim, and Arundhati Roy — voices who dismantle the illusions of empire through history, mathematics, linguistics, and racial theory.

In the present, I absorbed insights from a new generation of public intellectuals and cultural critics: Ta-Nehisi Coates, Jared Yates Sexton, Cathy Park Hong, Ibram X. Kendi, Nikole Hannah-Jones, Heather McGhee, Mehdi Hasan, Adrienne Keene, Keri Leigh Merritt, Vincent Bevins, Sarah Kendzior, Ayesha A. Siddiqi, Wajahat Ali, W. Kamau Bell, Mary Trump, & John Oliver. Together, they form a constellation of clarity — thinkers who gave me language for grief, strategy for resistance, and above all, a framework for empathy rooted in history, not abstraction.

I also turned to the thinkers shaping today’s cultural and political discourse. I dreamt of the world blueprinted by Bhaskar Sunkara in his revolutionary The Socialist Manifesto and plunged into Jacobin’s blistering critiques of capitalism. The Atlantic’s longform journalism kept me tethered to a truth-seeking tradition. The Guardian stood out for its global scale and reach, offering progressive, longform storytelling that speaks to both local injustices and systemic inequalities across the world. And Roman Krznaric’s Empathy: Why It Matters, and How to Get It helped crystallize my core belief:

Be a good human. Practice empathy.

That’s the playbook, America. Practice empathy. Do that — and teach accurate, critically reflective history — and we have the chance to truly become the greatest democracy the world has ever seen.

And this empathy must extend to all — especially to trans people. In India, the Hijra community — trans and intersex folk who have existed visibly for thousands of years — embody a sacred third gender long before the West had language for it. But they are not alone. Across the colonized world, the empire erased a sacred third space: the Muxe of Zapotec culture, the Bakla of the Philippines, the Fa’afafine of Samoa, the Two-Spirit nations of Turtle Island, the Māhū of Hawaiʻi, the Sworn Virgins of the Balkans — each of these communities held space outside Western gender binaries, rooted in care, ceremony, and spirit. Some align with what we today call trans or intersex, while others exist entirely outside Western definitions. Colonization reframed them as deviants.

And still, we must remember this: trans people are not new. Our respect for them must be as ancient as their existence.

THE RESISTANCE As I examined the dynamics of coloniality, racial capitalism, and Western empire, I realized just how deeply imperial power had shaped my family, our values, and our spiritual language. The empire didn’t just occupy land — it rewrote moral codes. It restructured the family.

I learned how Irish, Italian, Greek, Hungarian, and Albanian immigrants were initially excluded from whiteness in America. Over time, many adopted and embraced whiteness as strategic economic and social protection — and in doing so, embraced anti-Blackness and patriarchal hierarchies to maintain their newfound status. Today, many European-hyphenated Americans defend systems that once excluded them.

And over time, some Asian-Americans have followed the very same racial template.

At 33 — the age Jesus is believed to have died — I laid my childhood faith to rest. In its place rose something rooted in clarity, not doctrine.

I didn’t walk away from religion into cynicism or nihilism. I stepped into a humanist, justice-centered worldview. A system grounded in reason, evidence, and above all, empathy. A belief in people over dogma. In community over conformity.

I didn’t lose faith. I redefined it.

I left the pasture of institutional faith, not for chaos, but for an ethical wilderness — a space lacking divine command but filled with moral clarity. A place built on personal responsibility and universal dignity.

This is where I stand today.

To those with similar histories: if your roots trace back to Africa, South Asia, Southeast Asia, Central Asia, East Asia, the Middle East, Latin America, the Caribbean, Oceania, or to Indigenous and marginalized communities within the Global North — you are a Child of the Global South. Even in the Global North, your experience carries the weight of displaced geography, the quiet grief of colonial trauma, and a genealogy forged by the system of empire. Your pain is political. Your silence is inherited. You are not invisible. They buried you without a funeral. They mourned not your death, but your deviation from design. However, we are not dead. We are just no longer theirs.

White supremacy endures by fracturing us. It manufactures tensions between communities of color by design — placing Asian businesses in Black communities without infrastructure and opportunities for BIPOC folk to share and benefit from the economic engine. Central to this strategy is the model minority myth, crafted during the Cold War to present Asian-Americans as obedient, self-reliant, and successful — not to celebrate them, but to invalidate Black resistance and justify structural racism. It’s a myth that fosters anti-Blackness in Asian communities and xenophobia in Black ones, while shielding white supremacy from critique. These divisions are not cultural accidents; they’re colonial blueprints.

And these blueprints stretch across oceans and continents and time.

In colonial South Africa, Mohandas Gandhi — still shaped by British racial hierarchies — distanced Indians from Black Africans, calling them “kaffirs” and demanding separate facilities. In Uganda, the British installed South Asians as a merchant middle class between colonizers and native Africans, breeding distrust. When Idi Amin expelled 80,000 Asians in 1972, it was a violent backlash to a racial hierarchy seeded by empire. These fractures — between Black and Asian, colonized and sub-colonized — are the legacy of white patriarchal supremacy.

Divide, distract, and dominate.

We must resist being weaponized against each other.

Every Asian-American must read Minor Feelings by Cathy Park Hong. Every high schooler in America must read and discuss Jared Yates Sexton.

Study the systems. Name them. Disarm them.

Because unless we become and remain united, the status quo — one that serves wealthy cisgender, heterosexual, white Christian men — will remain intact.

This is A Call to the Children of the Global South. And An Invitation to the Children of the Global North: Stop the infighting. Study and interrogate the systems. Reject the design.

To those in media, publishing, and the arts: postcolonial narratives are not cultural sidebars. They are central to national healing. They preserve memory, restore dignity, and confront whitewashed histories.

If you want work that matters — support art that pushes past trauma into structural critique.

Greenlight truth. Platform memory. Choose courage over comfort.

Postcolonial stories should be the norm — not niche art.

Jordan Peele’s Get Out was a cinematic breakthrough — razor-sharp and genre-defying — in its exposure of white supremacy’s quiet machinery: liberal smiles, performative allyship, and the pacification of dissent through assimilation. The Sunken Place is not just a metaphor for silenced Black consciousness — it’s the empire’s preferred position for the marginalized: visible, exploited, but unheard.

A system that offers the illusion of inclusion, weaponizing identity as control.

Ken Levine’s BioShock Infinite exposed white supremacy through a dystopian, fictional but historically grounded lens - depicting the religious justification of Black enslavement, Indigenous erasure, and genocidal nationalism in a floating, evangelical empire.

David Simon’s The Wire exposed the institutional decay of law enforcement, education, and the legal system - revealing how systemic failure, not individual morality, drives urban collapse.

Jesse Armstrong’s Succession traced the architecture of empire through family - showing how media empires weaponize racism, propaganda, and manufactured outrage to generate profit and secure generational wealth.

Ava DuVernay's Origin unearths caste and race as twin blueprints of white supremacy - linking Dalit oppression in India to the subjugation of Black Americans. Adapted from Isabel Wilkerson's Caste, it dismantles the myth of isolated injustice, revealing a global system meticulously engineered to rank human worth - and the radical act of naming the system.

Ryan Coogler’s Sinners — a revelatory, critically and commercially successful film about Afro-Asian resistance in 1930s Mississippi — exposes the hunger for speculative narratives grounded in historical truth.

Across the Spider-Verse gave us Pavitr Prabhakar - a Brown superhero who wasn't nerdy or celibate, as Western media typically portrayed the South-Asian man, but cool, smart, athletic, with great hair, in love, and proudly anti-colonial. He called out the British for stealing and keeping Indian artifacts… in a Spider-Man movie. That moment was history reclaimed.

A glitch in the wealthy white patriarchal matrix.

Dev Patel’s Monkey Man is a visceral fable of vengeance and resistance, where the brutality of caste, corruption, and religious nationalism collide. Amid this chaos, the film uplifts the Hijra community who stand not only as victims, but as warriors against systemic violence. Their alliance reframes queerness not as deviance, but as defiance — ultimately confronting the machinery of empire with what it fears most: a system-breaking empathy it cannot contain.

The vitriolic backlash from white male gamers and fandoms isn’t about quality — it’s about losing default status in stories. Everyone else has had to empathize with majority white male protagonists for decades. Diverse representation in media isn’t a threat to art — it’s a threat to white supremacy. It’s not just a mirror held up to the globe — it’s a refusal to let one worldview define it.

Hollywood, gaming studios, and the gatekeepers of entertainment — if you want to reclaim artistic integrity and still make money doing it, we need art that remembers, resists, and reclaims — stories that name the machine and short-circuit its lies. The world is ready. So am I.

Today, efforts like Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation, and the Federalist Society are not merely policy shops — they are ideological engines: built to roll back civil rights, impose authoritarian values, and erase uncomfortable truths. They represent a hyper-concentrated form of white supremacy, rooted in unresolved Civil War grievances and the failures of Reconstruction.

Miraculously, or perhaps, blessed with intellectual curiosity and natural empathy, through all of this, my wife — a compassionate, steadfast partner and a Christian woman — has remained by my side. She has witnessed my transformation with both love and complexity. While our bond is rooted in deep respect and shared values, our spiritual landscapes have diverged. Her faith brings her solace; mine has evolved into something more secular, grounded in justice and humanism. We’ve navigated that tension with care — proof that love can stretch across differing beliefs, even as the echoes of religious conditioning still ripple through our lives.

I am proud of her increasing intellectual curiosity and her willingness to accept me for who I am now, even if I wasn’t ready to accept myself when we met.

But our marriage has defied the splintering that white supremacy specifically creates: hyper-capitalist, hyper-individualistic, fractured families and societies.

As Children of the Global South — descendants of peoples who survived enslavement, colonization, and erasure — we carry within us the urgent need for stories that do not turn away from history, but confront it with unflinching truth.

In the pain of losing my family, I found a deeper purpose: to tell this story — and my own — any way I can. A sudden rush of empathy, pity, and love struck me: My parents’ and sister’s rejection was not theirs alone — it was a lingering Fracture left by colonization and global exploitation, tearing apart families across generations. As Children of the Global South, we still carry those wounds.

Make no mistake: white supremacy leaves wounds — because it is the system. And unless it is dismantled, both the Global South and North — and their collective Children — will remain trapped in a dance choreographed by empire — built to divide, exploit, and erase. Any vision of democracy, in America, will remain a fragile illusion — if not an outright mythology — built on a conceptually false foundation: white supremacy itself.

A cruel, heartbreaking legacy of erasure — passed down through empire — indoctrinating God-fearing Brown fathers to erase their godless, queer Brown sons. Preaching shame as scripture. Teaching silence as survival.

I reject that inheritance.

Empathy as praxis is how we reject that inheritance. In a world engineered to divide, it rebuilds connection, disarms supremacy, and charts a path forward. If humanity is to survive — let alone heal — empathy must become our collective discipline.

And perhaps what cut even deeper for my father — beyond my queerness — was that I no longer validated his role as a pastor. In stepping away from the faith he had built his life upon, I wasn’t just rejecting a belief system. I was, in his eyes, nullifying his life’s work. For a man shaped by empire, ordained by colonial Christianity, and burdened with the role of moral gatekeeper, my departure from his manufactured worldview may have landed as personal failure. But it wasn’t. It was never about wanting to hurt him. I love my father. I love my mother. I love my sister. It was never about them — it was about the system that taught them love was conditional, acceptance required obedience, and dissent unforgivable. That kind of pain is real — but its source is systemic. I still want to be Mootha Makkan — not by obedience, but by truth. By love without condition. Not through erasure, but by living fully in the open. Not in their image, but in mine.

Yet, and yes, I also carry the wound — but I also carry the will to heal it.

THE CALL I believe in empathy. I believe in memory. I believe the Children of the Global South are not broken. We are not rejected. We are awakening.

Children of the Global North: join us. We are not your enemies. We are your present and future collaborators, business & creative partners, lovers, and kin. We are building something new — something ancient yet reawakened, a pursuit of empathy, and a reckoning with history that refuses to forget.

If this story resonated with you, kindly share it, spread the word and please comment. I’d love to hear from you. Your voice, your memory, your Fracture — it matters here.

You are not alone. All are welcome.

Thank you so, so much for your time in reading my story.

You can also email me directly: vinesvenus at protonmail.com I'll be writing more on Medium as well: https://medium.com/@vinesvenus/a-call-to-the-children-of-the-global-south-the-system-that-made-my-father-disown-me-fecad6c0b862

[bortalis]

My concepts for the development progress of an Iterators Puppet

-my ideas below

-Feasibility Study  

[1]: First autonomous control module, any instruction to be given must be done manually through physical means (the keys), outputs were shown through the screen. A very primitive system, however, did its job proving the greater machine concept was achievable. While it does look like a lens above the monitor, this was a simple status gauge for benchmarking.

-Prototyping and Development  

[2]: Now with the capability to wirelessly and audibly communicate to receive instructions and inputs. The system was no longer directly integrated into the facility, and resided on the first instance of an iterator's arm. This was considered a feat due to the complications with isolating the control module from the rest of the iterators components, while keeping processing power. A permanent connection/umbilical was needed to sustain life and function though. 

To “talk” back, they were crafted with multidimensional projectors, the mobile arm allowing the angles and variance for this projection. Only later into development were advanced speakers installed for optimized understanding, however the extra computing power required to synthesize proper speech was found to strain the contained module, so this function had rare use in the end.

[3]: At this point there was a change in perspective in the project. What once were machines to simply compute and simulate, were now planned to be the home, caregiver, and providers. The further the project came to fruition the more religious importance was placed upon these “random gods”. From this stance not only did the puppets have to manage and control their facilities, they had to communicate with the people and priests. To represent benevolent beings who will bring their end and salvation. In this process iterators began to take a more humanoid shape, to better reflect their parents. Development was focused on compacting the puppet closer to the size of an ancient for this purpose. This stage was the first to incorporate a cloak/clothing into their design considerations, to further akin themselves in looks. The cloak would hide the iterators' engineered bodies and give a body to their silhouette. 

[4]: As bioengineering and mechanics were rapidly progressing due to the void fluid revolution, this allowed plenty of margin for developing the outer design of the iterator puppets. This prototype was the first to incorporate limbs for the purpose of body language. This was another step in the drive to give a body to their random gods.

-Final Iterations

[5]: First generation iterators had the final redesign of puppet bodies. Far different from their first designs, they are fully humanoid. Their bodies are shaped to be organic and as full of life as they could at the time. Their center of sapience has fully settled within their body, as can be seen as their unconscious use of limbs without the direct intention for communication. This can also see how they manage their work, where many of the functions (which can be done with just an internal request) are operated through physical gestures of their limbs. Their puppet chambers also allow for full comprehensive projection, where many of their working monitors are displayed. It is seen how iterators prefer to utilize their traversal arm to transfer between the current working projection window.

These designs were hardy and nearly self-sufficient, only requiring minimal power from their umbilical to charge. (However was still limited in the terms of internal power production, for this first generation extensive batteries sufficed)

[6]: Later generation not only incorporated advanced bioengineering internally, but externally. While still a hardened shell, their body plates have been incorporated into the organics of the puppet, maintaining the protective requirements while barely leaving a trace of hinges or plates. This “soft” skin had drawbacks, such as reduced durability to the first generations, this was offset by the greatly enhanced repair speeds and capability this type of skin allowed.

Internal power generation was implemented into these late generation models. If the case arose, the Puppet could be disconnected from their umbilical and still be conscious from an undefined period of time. (However this would limit the operating capacity of the puppet when running self sufficiently) This greatly eased maintenance works, as the Puppet could still run the greater facility wirelessly while work was done on the chamber, arm or whatever as needed.

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