#keep your fucking capitalism and colonialism out of space

[ranger-kellyn]

sometimes watching or listening to speculative alien stuff is so fucking exhausting because whenever it's the question of, "if there is alien life out there why aren't they talking to us?" they never seem to take into account that we as humans literally have not stopped warring with our own fucking species. we have racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia, and all other phobia's and isms, and yet y'all wanna bring in the green dudes with 8 eyes and proboscis into the conversation and act like humanity would just be Chill about it

[saaski]

Something I read in Dr. Laura Anderson's book "When Religion Hurts You" is that healing - from any kind of trauma - involves returning to a felt sense of safety.

I don't know how return to a felt sense of safety when we're in the 5th year of a pandemic, witnessing multiple genocides, living under capitalism and colonialism, as the planet is burning.

I keep reading posts about how the solution to despair is organizing and getting in community, but I don't feel safe in my community. How could I feel safe when the virus that disabled me with ME/CFS is still spreading unchecked, I have a suppressed immune system, most people's vaccines aren't up to date, and almost no one is masking anymore?

"Build community." As a traumatized autistic person, who has lost my community multiple times before? As an immunocompromised person, who is at risk in all public spaces? As a chronically ill person, who can barely do anything most days?

How do you build community when people ignore your access needs? How do you build community when people don't like or understand the way you communicate? How do you build community when no one around you shares your values, and you find it nearly impossible to maintain online connections?

My whole life has been me trying to reach out and build community, fucking it up or getting hurt, and winding up alone again and again.

[innytoes]

"girl help I already have so much headcanons for this au I'm never gonna write" .... show us the dystopian headcanons, Inny

Okay so this dystopia was percolating in my brain for a day or two before I could get it out. It's inspired by a lot of different sci-fi things, the biggest being Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age and that lovely tumblr story about the 100 point children.

It's set on a big-ass space ship colony, and you need credits for everything. Like, your basic needs will technically be met (large dormitories in your assigned work department/orphanage, fabricated Nutritionally Perfect food but not very tasty food, standard issue clothing, etc.) but if you want more, it costs credits. Credits are earned by working and possibly citizenship points, like that creepy Black Mirror episode.

So having your own place costs credits, but so does having kids, like a child tax. Don't think about the horrifying implications of that if you're not able to pay, don't do it, it's a dystopia remember.

Reggie's parents were just barely keeping their head above water, possibly due to spending their credits unwisely, possibly due to it being a fucking dystopia and they need to keep a bunch of people in poverty for the system to run. You know... like capitalism.

It’s not like spaces are officially segregated and all, but if you try to go to a park in a richer area as a kid in the standard issue (free) gray uniform... you’re gonna get picked on. Reggie learns early on where he’s ‘allowed’ to be and where he isn’t. Besides, after he starts going to work with his dad it doesn’t matter much anyway. Sometimes he sneaks out to the parks in the evenings or mornings (when normal kids are at school or in bed and his dad’s shift hasn’t started yet) so he can play on the Good Swings and stuff.

Rose and Ray both have pretty well-paying jobs (Ray watches the radar for asteroids and stuff on the bridge, as well as being a photographer, and Rose reviews and translates station-wide communications as well as being a private music teacher). Their kids want for nothing, they have a nice house, they have enough credits in savings that they’re ready for pretty much anything.

So at the end of the month Rose browses the internal logs, looking for places to donate credits. Regular donations go to the orphaned kids, so they can go to school, and she’s been known to pay off bullshit fines (“a teenager played their music too loud in the park and now the parents are facing downsizing their unit size to pay for it? That’s bullshit!”)

She kind of stumbles on Reggie by accident, thinking someone messed up the age from 31 to 13 on Reassignment Job Board. (She’s a reviewer after all, she can send a quick message through Internal Comms and get it fixed before someone is reprimanded and loses credits for a typo.) Until she reads his profile and his answers and is horrified. She talks to Ray, and then to Julie and Carlos, and oops, guess they have a new son.

Carlos is stoked to have an older brother. Julie is kind of horrified to learn there are kids who don’t get to go to school at all because their parents don’t have the credits for it, so of course she says yes. 

-As soon as Rose and Ray have convinced Reggie that no, they did not take him in as some kind of live-in butler or cleaning service, but as a kid, they sit him down with a Pad and get him to pick out some stuff that costs actual credits for the fabricator to make. Reggie is very concerned, so he sorts from lowest-price and works his way up until he balks at the amount of credits. (Which is... pretty much anything that isn’t the standard issue uniform but in like a nice colour.)

When Rose catches on, she tells the Pad to hide the prices, take out the ‘sort by price’ option, and take out anything that doesn’t fit into ‘budget - kids’. Then she hands the Pad back to Reggie and tells him to try again. He can still sort by colour and style and stuff, but he can’t see prices. If he hits his budget, the things that cost too much turn red.

(He only figures that out because he adds something he knows is really expensive, like a hoverboard, to his basket, just to see where the limits of this ‘budget’ lie. And is then very flustered because hoverboards are very very expensive, so he’s allowed to pick out a hoverboard plus like, seven sets of pants worth of stuff?)

In the end, he picks out a lot of black. Because it hides stains, unless you’re cleaning with bleach, and also it’s what the pilots wear as their uniform and pilots are really cool. Black jeans (Ray and Carlos are wearing jeans.) Black shirts. Black shoes. But then he stumbles on a very soft looking red plaid shirt, and there’s an option to have the fabricator make a square inch of test fabric for free. And it’s so very, very soft. He rubs the fabric between his fingers while he selects that shirt, and follows the ‘more like this’ links to several more items. A hoodie. Some pairs of thick socks. A little black leather bracelet, which feels like the height of luxury.

His room already has a non-standard issue bed, desk, and dresser,  but Ray reassures him that he can pick something else and they can feed these to the fabricator to get back some of the credits if he doesn’t like them. (He does like them. They look like wood, and the mattress on the bed is so comfortable.) He picks out a thick blanket that’s fuzzy on the inside, and a lamp that looks like a floating moon, and then, because there’s still budget left, a little statue of a horse, just to have something to put on the dresser.

He picks out a nice soft green for his walls, with a picture of rolling plains with long grass and a forest to cover one wall. He and Carlos sit on his bed and watch as the nanobots convert the boring gray walls, and that’s pretty cool too.

-Yes he gets his own stocking and it’s full of fun things (Carlos is mad at his parents they got Reggie socks, but Reggie loves his new socks. They have little pizzas on them!). His favourite is the little cube that projects stars on his ceiling, though.

-Of course Rose and Ray get him a dog for Christmas. It’s been haunting Rose ever since she read his answer on the questionnaire. It’s the last present of the day, and when Reggie opens his eyes, he immediately starts crying.

Carlos is very worried that he picked the wrong puppy, but Reggie assures him these are good tears, even though he can’t stop crying. They end up in a family group hug for like an hour, the puppy crawling from lap to lap.

Reggie names him Cosmo and he’s all ready to get a part-time job to make sure he has enough credits to feed him until Rose says no, the dog is family too, you don’t need to worry about that, Reggie.

-Reggie gets to go to school and it’s kind of terrifying but also really interesting. His reading and writing classes are mostly with adults and older teens who are going through apprenticeships, so thankfully he’s not stuck with the four and five year olds like he was worried he’d be. His math classes are with other freshmen, since he’s needed numbers for his job and he already knows basic math.

He meets Luke and Alex and Bobby in math class, and Luke immediately grabs him to be their fourth on the little pod of tables, because he’s new and thus interesting and otherwise Nick might have asked to join their group.

-Reggie has no idea what’s supposed to be wrong with Nick. He seems nice. Later, Bobby whispers it’s because Luke is jealous of Nick because his crush likes Nick more than she likes Luke. Luke threatens to stab him with a stylus while Alex rolls his eyes and discusses the next question with Reggie.

-Reggie likes his new friends, even if he doesn’t always understand their references.

-Julie introduces Reggie to her friends as well. He and Flynn get along great, since she takes everything he knows and doesn’t know and says in stride. Flynn only sees Cool Opportunities to introduce him to stuff like ‘mixing 4 soda powders together before putting them in the hydrator’ and ‘hiphop’.

Carrie kind of scares him. She’s one of those people who has enough credits to shoot Reggie out of an airlock and still get away scot free, and sometimes she looks like she’s contemplating just that. She sometimes scoffs when he doesn’t know something or says something ignorant (or poor), but usually a glare for Julie or Flynn mellows her out. 

But she’s also the first to absolutely destroy some jerk who tries to make fun of Reggie for not knowing how to read. And when she learns that the clothes Reggie is wearing are his first non-free fabricator clothes, she drags him and Julie and Flynn to something called a ‘thrift store’. It has stuff that either wasn’t fabricated at all, but was brought here from colonies or even Earth. It had stuff that was limited edition and thus couldn’t be fed back into the fabricator. And stuff that was donated by people who either didn’t need to feed stuff back into the fabricator, or for some reason didn’t want to. Lots of designers apparently donated their collections to the Thrift Store.

And yeah, Rose and Ray gave Reggie an allowance but it wasn’t like he had a lot saved up. And what he did, some part of him still thought he should hold on to, even though he was pretty convinced Rose and Ray weren’t sending him back.

To which Carrie scoffed and was like ‘please my dad won’t even notice if I buy out this whole store, we are getting you a statement piece and that is final’.

They have a great time trying on all kinds of weird and wonderful and silly clothes, though. Flynn and Julie make him wear a fuzzy neon orange bucket hat and try to convince Carrie that This Is It This Is His Statement Piece, until she threatens to buy it for him and he scrambles to convince her he was just joking. The way she laughs at him doesn’t feel mean, and he lets himself laugh too.

He ends up falling in love with an actual, real, non-fabricator leather jacket that fits him like a glove. He even loves the smell of it, real and earthy. Carrie refuses to let him see the price as she scans the tag and pays for it, and he thanks her over and over. He even, in his best penmanship, writes her a thank you note (which he’s seen Carlos and Julie do to their grandparents on a colony when they sent Christmas presents) and gives it to her at school the next day.

He pretends not to see her tear up, and she pretends not to notice he spelled her name wrong.

-Reggie tries to contact his mom through the messaging system but all his messages get denied. He’s worried she’s maybe in trouble, so one day he puts on his old standard issue uniform and sneaks into the kitchens, only to find that his mom doesn’t work there anymore. She got a better job, one of her old coworkers says, and has a nice unit for herself now. Last time he saw her, she was eating out wearing some nice non-standard issue clothing, having cocktails with her new friends.

He doesn’t try and find her after that. He goes to his room and uses some of his pocket money to make the room soundproof and cries and cries until he can’t cry anymore. And then lies to Rose when she comes home and says he just had a frustrating homework assignment.

Ray sits with him that night and helps him sound out his reading, and doesn’t comment when Reggie maybe leans in a little. He even wraps his arm around him, giving him a little squeeze and a ‘proud of you, mijo’ when he finishes the chapter.

-Rose teaches him piano, and in his music class, he learns guitar. Luke is incredibly excited about that, and will let him practice on Luke’s guitar for hours, helping him adjust his fingers and showing him chords.

-Later he switches to bass, because Luke has talked about wanting to start a band, and they don’t have a bass player yet. He likes the deep tones, and Rose and Ray get him a bass guitar for his birthday.

-Birthdays! Who knew there was more to them than a little free cupcake from the fabricator? Not Reggie!

[quilliums]

Not sure if you answered this already, but I’ll bite: what is the purpose of the modern lawn?

Hey sorry this took a minute this got buried really quickly. I'm gonna answer this publicly because I get alot of shit asks for saying lawns aren't evil incarnate and you've asked without being an asshole so you win a real answer hon.

Ok I'll start by saying that the history or purpose of lawns that you see on Tumblr is not strictly not true. That being lawns coming from large English and French manors having these large gardens as buffer zones. That this became a status symbol in the 1700's? I think. So you know people mimicked this to get a piece of the status in colonial America. Unfortunately I'm only barely qualified to talk about the European to American lawn pipeline. So as I reference history later on I'm only referring to Europe and America, the fucking failure we all are.

Anyways this is true, BUT it is not the whole truth just one reason why plantations have long sprawling lawns leading up to the manor.

The history that predates this interpretation is that the word and concept of a lawn comes from the medieval concept of grazing of what we would call public land. They called it laund or launde or laune or landą. It's hard to tell exactly which comes first and where it comes from. You've got these old words from old English, old French, and proto German. These were open fields that served the community. They were most commonly used to graze the animals of the community and to provide buffer spaces between the communities farm's. This space was essential to the survival of these medieval villages. It's a part of history not really discussed much, but bush fires and forest fires could take entire villages if the fire could spread indiscriminately.

How this went from community service and fire safety to elite status symbol is kinda complicated. So short version is community owned -> owned by local lords -> included in lords estate -> exclusive to the lord -> used to keep community out of lords land. That's the gist of it, I don't know every detail of it and it's complicated.

So finally we get to the modern lawn right. Which servers a very important role just like public land used to. We don't have cattle to graze anymore, but we still have fires. Rampant fires. There's this trend that starts in the industrial revolution (it began before that but that's where you really see the impact) of city fires. People began living in very close quarters on a large scale. Not just at capitals, but the more regular appearance of what we would consider a town start to appear across Europe. As people stopped having to have space for cattle and farming and moved into housing that had no buffer between them a small fire could burn down an entire city. Like on the mid 1600's when London pretty much burned the ground.

As people settled America there was not only a cultural need for space, but a family living outside the reach of the original colonies was on their own. If your house was just in some trees somewhere if a forest fire came you died. Flat out. The common rule of thumb that is not enough anymore was five men, five men laid down which ended up being thirty feet-ish in practice. There was also a large need to be able to see a larger area surrounding your house which pushed the tree line back even further, shit was dangerous out there alone. That's a whole other topic though. Back on track. The difference between these mostly wood based buildings in a wooded area and modern only kinda wood based buildings in a non wooden area is temperature. An open wood fire generally only burns so hot (GENERALLY), a fire that's burning on a whole lot of different materials has a much bigger variation in temperature. A modern American house burns HOT, insanely hot actually. Hot enough to catch the inside of near by house on fire and burning it to the ground. Take the north complex California fire which burned down over 2,000 buildings. There's no building code in California that mandates a minimum fire distance, which for the temperature of a modern house for is atleast fifty feet. Ideally it's fifty feet on each side so almost a hundred feet altogether. Fifty feet is the minimum distance any flammable objects should be away from your house if your out in the woods which again can be more manageable temperature wise. If the near by structure is a building that can burn at 1,500 to 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit then it needs it's own fifty foot buffer radius.

I swear we're getting to the lawn. Green living well manicured grass is hard to burn. It's internals contain a decent amount of water (it's why grass takes a lot of water to grow in dry climates). Living grass doesn't burn very hot and is hard to burn. It'll save your god damn life and all your worldly possessions as well. Which in America is your life, without house no job, without job no money, workout money no life. It's sad but simple.

That's not everything, but I just worked holiday mandatory over time over 60 hour work week because America is hell. Cut your grass it could save your life and your neighbors lives. ✌️

[ramrodd]

They're blaming demons & trans for Christian school mass shooting

COMMENTARY:

This is the result of the Trickle-Down Extremism of the white supremacist agenda of the John Birch Society dating back to William F. Buckley and his campus strategy for isurgency, sedition, polarization, constitutional sabotage and the treason leading to the January 6 political coup. 

If you understand Hegel like William F. Buckley understood Hegel, his treachery will become transparent. If you put the Gideon Bible outside your room, the chances are you don't understand Hegel like William F Buckley understood Hegel and are likely not to  recognize your own complicity in the white supremacist agenda of the January 6 Republicans in Congress and your own unintended role as a useful idiot for Steve Bannon, Newt Gingrich and the Nazification of America. 

We are all guilty but if you are woke, you can learn to prevent your own unintentional future complicity on that trajectory. 

For example, you are exactly correct about Trump and the January 6 Republicans like James Comer and Gym Jordan are all about projection. Keep the spotlight on that reality but shift your focus to Biden's %7 Trillion capital budget that will launch the Green New Deal by 2028. It is important for the woke voter to understand Biden's vision of the future by where he proposes America invest it's resources to get the biggest bang for the buck.

 The Green New Deal will complete the paradigm shift Eisenhower set into motion with his 1956 Presidential Platform to mobilize America for WWIII by transforming the Military Industrial Complex to the Star Wars Economic Ecology of 2001: A Space Odyssey at the core of the Green New Deal that will sustain a permanent lunar colony for the next 100 years, if not the Epoch. 

And at the core of the Star wars Economic Ecology Eisenhower envisioned is Bernie Sanders social safety net. By 1956, the US Army had a great deal of experience with the social engineering of American constitutional capitalism beginning with George Marshall's reform of the Genearl Staff in 1942 to include G5: Civil Affairs, bases on his experience of the failure of Reconstruction in rural Virginia while he was at VMI and the failure of the League of Nations to mitigate the cultural conditions that incubated Hitler, and the emerging success of the Marshall Plan in creating the most powerful economic engine in history associated with the Atlantic Charter. George Marshall's contribution to military arts and sciences is hsi doctrine of nation building as a military solution that completes Clausewitz's Paradox. 

When you come to understand Hegel like William F. Buckley understood Hegel, Clausewitz's Paradox will reveal unequivocally just how  badly Biden fucked up by not rejecting Trump's unilateral surrender to the Taliban. After January 6, Biden had every justification to overturn everything he inherited from Trump. beginning with Trump's surrender to the Taliban  as part of his re-election campaign, and. possible, given subsequent events, his intention to fulfill John Bolton's agenda to abandon the Atlantic Charter, pull out of NATO and the United Nations in order to achieve the objective of the John Birch Society to adopt hegemony as our foreign policy. Biden's withdrawal from Afghanistan under Trumps tuerms of surrender accelerated Bolton's program. 

However, that's spilled milk ad we can't waste time trying to put that particular Humpty back together again. . More imporatn in the here and now of Hegel is to prevent Steve Bannon and Newt Gingrichto continue to employ the apparatus of the January 6 conspiracy to create more Humpty Tragedies. We need to stop the Trickle Down Extremism from the bottom up by shifting to the top-down imperatives of Biden's $7 Trillion capital budget. For one thing, it is essential to shift from the cash flow budgeting of the Supply Side Economics of the John Birch Society that has been engaged in sabotaging the federal government since Reagan came to town with the white supremacist political activists like Pat Buchanan, Steven Miller and Roger Stone and their cocaine, champagne, limousines. their racism set to 11 and committed to transforming the National Mall into a White Supremacists Theme Park. beginning with Wayne Newton on the 4thof July. It is time for the woke voters to recapture Washington DC and  neutralize the Nazification of Reaganomics and Tucker Carlson's version of January 6. 

If you understood Hegel the way William F. Buckley understood Hegel, you would realize that Eisenhower's design for the mobilization for WWIII was based on the creation of Bernie Sander's social safety net and that William F. Buckley's 1960 Charon Statement was a political manifesto committed to preventing Eisenhower's design from succeeding by a subversive white supremacist agenda to overthrow the federal government and to elect a clone of Joe McCarthy to become a dictator like Trump's Presidential Platform. Critical Race Theory isn't about pay=backs: it's an important of Biden's pay-forwar Build Back Better $ 7 Trillion capital budget. 

The future of Trump and the January 6 conspiracy is to blow up America like in Atlas Shrugged. If you understood Hegel the way William F. Buckley understoon Hegel and Clausewitz, you'd connect the dots between the color of Marge Simpson's hair and MTG.

[azenkii]

A Long List of Trash Fire Lord Zuko Headcanons

...that i couldn't get out of my head:

(warning: SUPER LONG POST i havent figured out how to trim posts yet)

he's the one who unchains azula despite iroh's protests. she doesn't even try to fight him, just cries into his shoulder and keeps mumbling about how father's going to be so disappointed in her. he takes her to her rooms and has her drink a sleeping draught, then stations the best guards he has left outside her chambers.

his first council meeting takes place literally a day after sozin's comet. he hobbles into the council chamber shirtless with his entire torso covered in bandages and every council member just looks at him like '...what'

he does NOT sleep for like,,a week after sozin's comet and then another two weeks after his coronation. katara, aang and suki try to persuade him to sleep and he doesn't listen. eventually sokka, toph and mai team up to literally drag his ass to bed and tell him he's not allowed to get up until he sleeps (does mai pin him to the bed with her knives? yes. is it kinky or sexual in any way? definitely not.)

he drinks So. Much. Tea. at this point it's practically tasteless to him but he drinks it anyway because he just needs something to do and tea is something familiar. he keeps iroh on his toes because he's constantly asking for new tea blends, uncle, i think i actually tasted the last one,

he flat-out refuses to grow his hair for at least a year after ozai's defeat. the second it starts getting close to his chin he shears it off himself, with his knife, and his stylist has a heart attack every single time

when he's tired he'll occasionally jump up when one of his guards moves. it stops after a bit, but for the first month and a half or so he's really twitchy. when sokka asks, the only explanation he can come up with is that he's not used to having people stand behind him silently and not want to kill him, much less want to protect him (sokka immediately takes him out for a shopping trip and makes a point of walking behind him the entire time, but only on zuko's right side, where he can clearly see it if sokka moves towards him)

when the healer declares azula mentally unstable and in need of an institution, he shuts himself in his office for the rest of the night. no one's allowed in, not even iroh. he finally emerges in the morning, eyes red from crying and sleep deprivation, and tells the librarian that he'd like a list of the best mental institutions in the country, please, the best in the world if you can get them

he loves theatre (is this even a headcanon?). unfortunately it practically died out in the fire nation along with the rest of the creative arts, leaving nothing but small troupes like the ember island players. one of zuko's personal goals (meaning things he wants to accomplish that aren't as important as restoring his country) is to bring back theatre; he finally manages to do it after about eight months or so of being fire lord, along with other arts like dancing, music and sculpture

he establishes a national day of mourning, on the first day of autumn every year, to commemorate the genocide of the air nomads. from 100AG onwards, every calendar printed in the fire nation has it marked. at first it was called the day of repentance, but aang persuaded him to have it changed (by arguing that he didn't want guilt to be a literal staple of fire nation culture)

he introduces literally So Many educational reforms, plus a mandatory class that teaches students about the cultures of the other nations (air nomads included) and how some of their traditions overlap

he turns down the offer of having a statue put up of him in the capital. toph ignores him and does it anyway.

he visits azula regularly, makes sure she's (relatively) comfortable and well-fed, and sometimes just sits down outside her door and tells her about everything that's going on right now ('some of the far colonies have developed their own standardised writing, azula, you wouldn't believe it, and i've asked the fire sages to come visit more often—but you never liked them, did you? oh, well; i'll make sure none of them go into your chambers by mistake')

(he doesn't know it, but when he does this azula sits by the door and listens. she wonders what kind of writing the colonists have developed, and whether or not the fire sages have taken on some new recruits.)

he hates being above anyone else. never sits in the throne if he can help it, nor does he sit on the dais in the council room. when he talks to people shorter than him, he finds himself stooping a little bit to talk to them on their level (the exception to this rule is sokka, who he mocks for being shorter all the way up until sokka grows taller than him, the bastard)

the first time he visits the earth kingdom, the earth king's ministers call a toast. he ends up being the only one who has to sit out, because he's too young to drink by earth kingdom law

once his servants figure out he won't kill them for talking to him, they start becoming a lot more bold, telling him off when he doesn't take care of himself. at one point, they force him to let them take care of him so much that he literally just bolts into the gardens and hides there until the staff rope in mai and ty lee

when he needs to escape, he does one of two things: (a) he dresses up as the blue spirit and does some parkour until he calms down, or (b) he goes to work at the jasmine dragon. (b) happens less often bc the jasmine dragon's in ba sing se, but there's been a few memorable incidents when an earth kingdom diplomat walks in and yells, 'LEE?!' when they see the fire lord

the first court artist who draws him also happens to be the one who drew azulon and ozai. he draws zuko without his scar. zuko takes one look at it and tells him, very calmly, that he'd like him to leave, please.

zuko burns the portrait. he doesn't fire the court artist, but he never calls on him again unless he has to. a second court artist is called, and can't help but be a bit confused when the fire lord tells him to be sure to include the scar

he forgets the crown. a lot. sometimes he walks into council meetings in his sleepwear with his hair tied up in a messy ponytail and a bunch of scrolls tucked under his arm. none of his councilmen have the guts (or the heart) to tell him that this is not, in fact, formal council wear

he goes to feed the turtleducks when he's stressed. he thinks he's being subtle. he's not. the entire palace knows, and they consciously give him space when they see him in the turtleduck garden

most of his staff are older than him, so they look at him and see this teeny tiny fire lord who is So Small and who Must Be Protected. the day after zuko's coronation, the head chef holds a meeting where they commence Operation Do-Not-Let-That-Boy-Turn-Out-Like-His-Father (subsection He's-The-Only-Good-Thing-We-Have)

one night he wakes up to find suki sitting in his room, decked out in full kyoshi warrior garb and makeup, and just about screams blue murder. suki tells him there are suspicions of an assassin in the palace, and would you please stop yelling it's very distracting, we won't be able to hear anyone coming over that racket

zuko gets very, very paranoid of random spirits after that. yeah, suki looks like a possibly malevolent spirit when she's wearing her makeup, what about it? (when he tells sokka he's highkey terrified of spirit shenanigans, sokka just looks at him and says, 'man, the stories i could tell...', and THAT'S when zuko remembers sokka spent like six months more than he did travelling with the avatar)

on his first visit to the southern water tribe, he removes his boots and leg guards, rolls up his pants and kneels barefoot in the snow. even though chief hakoda immediately starts trying to pull him up, he's stubborn as hell and stays kneeling for the entirety of his very long, very sincere apology-on-behalf-of-the-fire-nation speech. he nearly loses his toes to frostbite after that, and both sokka and katara never stop giving him shit for it

the first time he grows a 'beard' is completely accidental. he's stressed over some trade miscommunications with chief hakoda, hasn't slept in a few days...and then when sokka arrives as water tribe ambassador to help smooth things over, he takes one look at zuko and says 'man, facial hair does not suit you'

zuko: facial what now

he checks a mirror to find that he's got stubble covering his chin, dark enough that it almost looks intentional, and holy gods how the fuck did he not notice this before

'UNCLE WHY DIDN'T YOU TELL ME' 'i assumed you were doing it on purpose' 'WHEN HAVE I EVER DONE ANYTHING ON PURPOSE'

he shaves it all off immediately, of course, which prompts a lot of teasing and rib-poking from sokka until zuko finally snaps that he's scared it'll make him look like his father. sokka stops after that.

(the day after sokka leaves, zuko finds that a mysterious someone has scribbled all over ozai's royal portrait, giving him a frankly ridiculous beard and moustache that literally CANNOT be grown in real life. oddly enough, he can't bring himself to care about the defamation of royal property. he's too busy laughing.)

his paths cross with toph and sokka more than any of the others, because sokka is ambassador and toph is technically still a beifong. most of the time, at formal functions, he ends up sequestered in the corner with toph and a hoard of snacks, and they talk and swear much more than they usually do (zuko's ministers once heard him when he was drunk with toph, and the servants swear the older ministers' ears started bleeding)

he restores fire nation cultural festivals, and in doing so subjects himself to learning a lot of complicated dances

during one memorable week, he wrote so many letters and drafted so much legislation that he ran out of paper. he had to go visit the nearest school and ask for some

he keeps up with his firebending and sword training even though it's hard to fit into his schedule. his ministers refrain from reminding him that he has guards to protect him now; it's still hard for zuko to trust his safety with anyone but himself (team avatar is the exception).

he started sleepwalking about two months into his reign. no one knew why. one time, he nearly sleepwalked right off the edge of a balcony, and one of his guards had to grab him by the back of his robes.

the sleepwalking stopped after around a month and never happened again. at this point it's practically palace legend.

after freeing the war prisoners, he went around collecting every single earthbender-proof wooden cell he could find in the capital and surrounding areas. when he'd gotten most of them, he gathered them into a huge pile in the city square and set fire to them with his own hands.

unfortunately he couldn't do that with the waterbender metal cells but he did get toph to come in and bend them all into pretty shapes (well, toph thought they were pretty shapes. everyone else thinks they're meaningless squiggles)

he learned how to write with both hands at the same time out of sheer necessity (he refused scribes until it became clear that he'd be putting some people out of a job; that was when he started letting scribes write very, very minor things, but all important documents/drafts/letters are still written by him)

he once put the wet end of an ink brush in his mouth instead of the wooden end by mistake. didn't even realise until he bit down to keep it in place and ink went oozing everywhere

when his guards rushed in to find him coughing and spluttering black liquid all over his desk they thought he'd been poisoned but no he's just stupid

on his 17th birthday, his first one after being crowned, he got tackled by team avatar in the middle of the ballroom and ended up at the bottom of a cuddlepile for like ten minutes

this cuddlepile happened at an event that was very much public and very much formal. it was a scandal for weeks

just. fire lord zuko, guys. so much potential

[rawliverandcigarettes]

Our discussion on turians made me wonder: how do you imagine the culture of the Salarian Union? (I'm sorry, you probably talked about this elsewhere, but I was too lazy to look for that, if so feel free to refer me to that post.) I find that there are surprisingly little elements about it in canon, though there are a few hints, like the fact that the planets in the Pranas system all have modern names, the previous names having been discarded, presumably, because they evoke "bygone superstition"?

Hello! Sorry I took some time. I actually rarely packaged my thoughts on salarian culture in a digestible way, so you gave me a great opportunity to give it a recap! I will go more indepth in the future for sure, but I might do a lil' overarching presentation of my general thoughts.

First, I have written an exploration/explanation of some of my headcanons regarding salarian reproduction, and it can be found here on Ao3: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18872515

It is sliightly out of date and I need to do a pass to adjust some of my thoughts, but I still go by the general idea.

I also agree that there is very little things in the OT canon. I think there might be slightly more in Andromeda maybe, but I still haven't played the game so who knows!

I even believe the games kind of give up on salarian culture past ME1, where they are arguably given the most importance; we get more depth to it in ME2 through the sole and lonely perspective of Mordin; and in ME3 they are barely worth more than somewhat cheap antagonism and a couple of questionable jokes. Even right now during the promo of MELE, I felt like salarians keep being characterized as weird-cute-gross, and more like the butt of a joke than people. Even the promo for Director Tann in MEA had this "haha you get a role for a mass effect character and you thought you'd be sexy and cool TOO BAD" vibe to it, which makes me think part of the devteam (or at least the marketing side of it) don't think too highly of their very own space frogs :'(((

But to get on my actual thoughts (under the cut and the nice gif, because it won't be as long as it could be, but it's still somewhat long):

So first off, I'm trying to keep in mind how indescribably huge the Salarian Union is: we're talking about a conglomerate of planet-sized communities, moons, artificial stations, plus appendages in every large-scaled, cosmopolitan communities in Council space and possibly beyond. Just like it would be hard to talk about any united "human culture", I think the same could be true for any Mass Effect species --even though, for the sake of both narrative convenience and the tendency for globalization once communities get connected and break down communication barriers, shortcuts have to be made (and that helps make Points, and I like stories to have Points so yee).

For this reason, I have identified organizational tendencies within these communities, based both on baseline of natural grouping emerging off salarian biology (clan-based structures with matriarchal figures) and where I speculated breakdowns would happen in the modern, multicultural setting of the ME universe. To brutally over-simplify: there would be the "traditional" political organization of Sur'kesh (that I will briefly cover later), the "colonial" style (a derivation of the Sur'kesh style with more centralization), and the growing influence of ultraliberalism creeping from Council space back unto these communities, creating a myriad of variations depending on how much the communities are willing to adapt to production being controlled by corporations.

I headcanon the culture, however, to be at once: very collectivist yet an oligarchy (because dalatrasses have a right to power by virtue of existence basically), extremely eugenist to the point of having created literal, biological races that are genetically distinct from each other and cultivated to remain as such by some clans (and therefore can be very cruel towards the disabled/the imperfect at birth too), misandrist (I believe being a male salarian from a shitty clan/baronny is one of the lower forms of political existence that can be in this universe, hence why their lives in the working force are so goddamn disposable), but also designed to protect its members and have the community take care of their basic needs (so homelessness is almost not a thing, or at least used to not be a thing). I also believe the culture to be consistently young and vibrant, with lots of energy (for better and for worse). And during the time of ME, to be under economical and social duress (even gender duress!) as it sits at a crossroad regarding its future, and everyone has a lots of ideas on what this future should look like, including people gawking the outside with economical or political interests in the outcome (this basically the plot of The Empire of Preys, which is technically a prequel to Halfway Home but will be written after HH because I love chronologies that make sense and are easy to understand :) :) ).

So concerning the OG, Sur'kesh style: I have contorted a weird economical/diplomatic/land planning system into quasi-existence, that is based around a unit called the "symposium". This is a *relatively* young system in their history (still milleniums old, it really solidified in the middle of the Rachni Wars as a reaction/adaptation after several waves of imperialism that didn't really look like ours but had the same effect of flattening local cultures into a more aggressive semi-ethnostate), but central into dividing resources, workers, affect. I will not go into too much details because this is quite complicated, but these are basically commitees that will take democratic decisions among its members, based on how many clan members are appointed in both this symposium and and adjacent symposiums that might be helpful to this one --it's a system explicitely based on bribes and social influence, and getting the partial control of key symposiums is absolutely essential for Dalatrasses to maintain the influence and relevance of their respective clans. It's also a system that has, traditionally, very little use for money (it exists, but as a token of exchange that doesn't carry inherent value --if you have only access to money as a clan, you are basically worthless and won't get access to good matches or good symposium seats, or at least you used to until capitalism knocked at the doooooor and that kinda fucked things uppppppp and the society is not recovering and the gaps are getting extreeeeeme this is the plot of TEOP basically).

Oh and on the subject of the transition to more capitalist values and the decay of clans that cannot keep up, I wrote The Leftovers a couple of years ago, which talks about a young dalatrass-to-be discovering she might be sterile, right here: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15854244

I have a ton more things to say on the subject (and salarian culture as a whole), buuut this is getting quite long already haha.

And in regards to your question: I headcanon that salarians from one specific continent -that then became the "cultural norm" over imperialism and complications- were confronted, in a continental way, to a huge hurricane that led to incredible floods and then stagnant water and diseases, which really soured their relationship to water that was previously quite holy. This led to a very bitter enlightenment; their "Renaissance" came out of spite against nature rather than anything else, and a lot of previous ideas were abandoned for a time -then reclaimed, then abandoned again, then warped... It's complicated. :D

[sapropel]

The main things that turned me off of conversion for now were

1. I have alot of shit on my plate and am low income as a result so finding a place that will help might be hard because locally there really aren't any synagogues around

2. The synagogue I did find locally was uhhh...... Hhhhh. Their web page had a huge section about Israel in a positive light..

I love the religion, I love certain values it holds however I refuse to align with anyone who justifies colonialism and bloodshed against another group of people while ignoring past bloodshed done onto themselves. It makes 0 sense to me and is highly hypocritical.

Hypocrisy was one of the reasons I hated Christianity so much. Constantly causing bloodshed, huge present and past history of colonialism, huge present day history of wanting people like me who are gay or trans dead and in the ground.

the difference with Christianity is that there isn't even a present day persecution or justified worry of safety despite the fact that I've seen jack chick esque evangelical fuckers unironically act like they're holocaust survivors whenever a pride parade happens within 1 mile of them.

It makes me sad, I don't see the point in colonizing or maiming a group of people who should be your equals.

It's racist at best, dangerous and actively contributing to more death and violence at worst.

The thing is there isn't really a "point." It creates its own point. Real actionable Zionist sentiment was basically non-existent until the rise of European nationalism. It's literally the exact same brand of nationalism that gave birth to fascist Italy and other great failures of modernity. And when "Israel" was a proto-state basically its entire existence was contingent upon its continued usefulness to Britain as a tool of control over India through the Suez. Zionist claims to the land are super shaky at best and straight up revisionist at worst. Post-facto Israel has tried to give itself legitimacy through fearmongering, genocide, and forging alliances with other imperialist powers. It's doing what America did (and is doing) but it's happening in the age of mass media and we are all watching colonial revisionism happen in real time.

If you are letting the prevalence of Zionism keep you from Judaism, I would say you should keep thinking about it. If you treat Judaism as too thoroughly engulfed in Zionism, you do the work of Zionists for them--you legitimize their claim that Judaism is Zionism is Israel. You legitimize the idea that anti-Zionism is antisemitism which is incidentally exactly how my local rabbis have been fucking me over since June. You are of course totally within your rights not to convert to a religion that doesn't work for you, but I hope you rethink the implication that converting to Judaism is akin to aligning with Zionism.

And yeah, Zionist hypocrisy is a systematic issue within American Jewish institutions in a feedback loop with Jewish populations. Any institutional apparatus is going to have systematic issues that reflect the dominant discourse of the greater cultural framework--mainstream Jewish institutions are going to, both by the nature of maintaining relevancy in America and by the natures of fearmongering and cultural amnesia, have a vested interest in participating in capitalism, imperialism, racism... You are not going to find mainstream insitutions that don't perpetuate them. That's why they're dominant. You are no more aligning yourself with Zionism by going to a synagogue than you are aligning yourself with capitalism by shopping at Wal-Mart. Anything you meaningfully do in public is in some way going to be "problematic" on some level because public space is designed to keep itself alive by those values.

It's exhausting to make yourself never come close to anyone or anything bad at all--refusing to associate with anyone with a problematic ideology is a doomed enterprise. I've been there. A lot of Zionist sentiment is implanted in people's minds with lifelong propaganda and destructive mind control techniques, and it's important to recognize that. That doesn't mean Zionist adults don't have a responsibility to unlearn it, but I think it's possible to have compassion for people who do try to do their best with improving themselves. Most people you meet want to be good and don't want to be willfully ignorant. I try to think about how difficult it is to convince the average well-meaning white American of the merits of decolonization/land back. Most well-meaning Zionist Jews are going to feel the same way about Israel--actual systematic justice and decolonization are not in their lexicons. Decolonization is hidden behind thought-stopping techniques that they have been inundated with from day 1. But most people do have a basic sense of goodness and are willing to sacrifice something for it. Most people are willing to give ground for the sake of human decency. The only way I can survive talking to people I know are Zionists is by understanding that we both want the world to be a better place and if I dwell on the specifics of how I perceive them to be evil, the possibility of us having a working relationship and any hope at productive dialogue drops to zero.

You don't have to be patient with Zionists or Zionist institutions. You don't have to forgive them. You don't even have to be compassionate. But you do need to understand, intellectually, that imposed cognitive dissonance is a very powerful tool of mind control (and I'm not talking about woo-woo shit I'm extrapolating from cult research and personal experience) and that the pathos of Zionism isn't supposed to be logical. Fear trumps hypocrisy. Fatigue trumps informed consent. Charisma trumps logic. Any bigoted ideology is going to fall apart under logical scrutiny, and that's why the only battleground for maintaining bigotry is necessarily charismatic and emotional.

We haven't yet, of course, acknowledged that there are also tons of anti-Zionist Jews and that the concept isn't absurd or fringe, no matter what the dominant Zionist discourse says. It's important for us not to let Zionists be the stewards of Judaism--Zionists do not OWN Judaism. Just like the most Orthodox of Jews also don't OWN Judaism. Judaism is only what you make it to be, and if you leave it alone because you are too worried about Zionism, that is all Judaism is ever going to be for you. Of course, you still have to contend with Zionism, and if you actually are interested in being a Jew, you would have to find a way not to let it kill your Judaism. I've come close (ish) to giving up on Judaism a couple of times because of Israel and Zionism, but I'm glad I haven't. I've stuck it out long enough to give myself to tools I need to separate the two and see the situation with more clarity.

[radramblog]

Australian State Flags rated

Vexillology is a subject that, like many others, I have a passing interest in. Very passing. Look I occasionally browse r/vexillologycirclejerk, the One Good Subreddit, because they have some very fresh and funky memes.

One thing I do know about vexillology and flags in general is that nobody ever actually looks at state/provincial flags, and that as a result there’s a bunch of weird ones hanging about. I’m sure this is even more true of Australia, seeing as we have many less people to care about our many fewer state flags.

So for today, I’ve decided to shine a light on some state flags and see if they’re any good. Spoilers: they probably aren’t great? (Edit: they’re also largely very very similar, oops!)

New South Wales- in keeping with the name, New South Wales apparently has decided its flag should be fairly Welsh as well. Except not, because the image on that one is a cool dragon instead of this random lion, and the red cross is actually an English thing. This is extremely lame! The placement of the O R B is also pretty awkward and uneven, leaving a whole bunch of blank space that’s just. Blue. It’s centred if you just look at the right half, but it looks weird next to the Union Jack.

I don’t like the Union Jack. Get used to seeing the Union Jack a lot. 1/5.

Queensland- Okay, so, we took the NSW one, took the lion and the cross off it, and put a nice little crown on because, you know, Queen. While this is somewhat less ugly than the lion, it is also less cool, because fuck the royalty. Add in the cyan not contrasting well with the darker blue (imo) and you have a recipe for another not good flag. 1/5.

South Australia- Well now we’re getting somewhere. Take the previous two, get rid of the shit designs in the circles and replace them with an extremely good bird. Look at that plumage, that dramatic posing! What a good. That, and orange (its supposed to be gold I think, but come on) is a good colour to go next to navy. Unfortunately, it’s still sitting next to the fucking Union Jack, so it’s not going to be that good. Fuck colonialism, 3/5.

Tasmania- Wait ok so this is just a lion again, but if the lion was drawn by the same person that did the welsh dragon. It’s a lot less busy without some nonce cross in there (save Jack in the corner), which is great, but Bri’ish lion flag designs never look good to me. You want your iconography to be simple but striking, in my opinion, but whenever they put a lion on there it has to have too many details to communicate “lion” that it just looks super mid. 2/5.

Victoria- of the many, many places on this Earth named after Queen Victoria, this state sure is one of them. We’ve dropped the circle motif for this one, which is nice, but the crown is still fucking there. This is literally just, we took the country flag, and replaced that cool star with a lame crown. Somehow this is Dan Andrews’ fault. 2/5

Western Australia- I’m obviously biased, but it’s a very good little swan we have there. Black swans are iconic of Perth, there’s many, many of them on the Swan River (funnily enough), and they’re common enough that it’s not hard to spot one of them doing something gnarly and immediately ruin all majesty they ever had for you. In my case, it was when one of them looked like it was preening, or at least sleeping with its head tucked in its wing, for a few minutes before dropping a deuce and buggering off.

 But I digress. It’s also on a gold background, representative of the intense sunlight that we live with in WA. It would be great if just the right half of this flag was the whole of it, but unfortunately, lmao Union Jack. 3/5.

Australian Capital Territory- What you thought we were done? Come on now. There’s like, 2 internal territories and 3 external ones still to go.

 With the states behind us, we get to say goodbye to Jack as well. He shall not be missed. Uuuunfortunately, while we do get the classic Southern Cross, we also get this ridiculously busy design on the right. These swans are so mad, and why are they standing like that? Why is one of them white? Why is there a fucking castle here, we don’t have those? The mind boggles. 2/5.

Northern Territory- Oh, that’s much better. The southern cross ditches the bluey background for the much more accurate pitch black of space, which contrasts great against the ruddy brown of the desert the Territory largely is. The flower is simple, but elegant, and uses the same colours as the left third which I appreciate. This is just a good, solid flag. 4/5.

Christmas Island- For as much as Australia gets associated with the “green and gold”, I’m surprised it took this long for that colouration to actually show up on the livery. I’m not a huge fan of, just, the map of the place on the flag for the place, and Green/Gold and Blue/White aren’t a great colour combo. But there is a very good bird here. 3/5.

Cocos Islands- Yo that’s the crescent from the Malaysian flag, huh? Yeah so apparently the history of this place is kinda fucked (Australian history, bad? Nooooooo….), but the residents are largely Malay descendants, so fair enough. As far as the flag goes, it’s an interesting mix of iconography that is largely fine apart from the absolutely terrible looking palm tree on the left there. That’s some 2002 clip-art shit right there. I actually like the right 2/3rds of this, so just… remove the left third. Actually I think most of these flags would be significantly improved by the removal of the left bit. 3/5.

Norfolk Island- It’s just a tree, dude. 4/5.

 Well that’s all of them. Ultimately, most of these were bad, and none of them were actually, like, great. That’s kind of just state flags for you, though. I’m no expert vexillologist, but there are only a couple flags that have truly caught my eye, and none of these fit that bill.

 We have a lot of stinkers, and tragically, nothing nearly stands out like some other countries get their state flags to do. As a final note to leave this on, and to prove my point, I’m going to present the flag of the Isle of Man.

Fucking Brits actually have a good one. Can we get this instead of the Union Jack, please? Thanks.

[18mr]

Join us as we slow the fuck down with Angela Angel (and her plants!) in our 3rd interview in the “What Is Healing for Asian Americans?” series:

sumi: You are a gardener, artist, medium, and ceremonialist. As a young traditional healing practitioner, your work is a continuation of your indigenous lineage– the Bontoc and Ibaloi tribes (the Igorot) of the Philippines. What does living out your purpose and traditional healing practices look like in Oakland, CA (your current home)?

Angela: Aside from when I’m with students or clients, I spend most of my time interacting with the plants, the earth, and my ancestors. I’m really talking to them and returning back to my ancestors’ ways of animism.

I spend my time cultivating my relationship back to our earth, because we have broken lines. This isn’t this glamorous thing. I’m in a big process of decolonization and a big part of my spirituality is decolonization. What that looks like is diving deep into ancestral work. I spend a lot of time sitting at my altar and working there. Making medicine and being in the garden. This requires a lot of spaciousness – to slow down and connect with the earth.

Unfortunately, this process of rematriation sometimes feels like a privilege to me because most of my friends, family, and the public are very much in the grind. When I’m in my home and garden space, I feel like I’m just playing. Which is beautiful to me, but if you contrast it with most of the world, it feels like a privilege. But that’s the only way at this point.

sumi: What is a medium?

Angela: A translator of languages, frequencies, vibrations, colors. An empath, but in a way that we are able to control that sensitivity and use it to support clarity and healing for others. A deep connection with the earth and the elements. An avatar, being in tune so deeply and authentically that you’re able to work with the elements around you.

sumi: The dominant Western worldview does a tremendous job of separating us [humans] from nature. Similarly, trusting your psychic visions in a culture which doesn’t honor your feelings and sensations as real information, is no small thing. How did you learn to trust your visions and the land?

Angela: That’s pretty much what it means to be Indigenous– to have full trust and deep connection with the earth. It’s our way of life.

I feel hopeful because we are in a time of decolonization. Our dominant culture doesn’t allow for us to trust in the earth and in things that are unseen. Religion, colonialism, internalized colonialism, and capitalism have all violently impressed upon us not to trust in our Mother, Our Earth. When you’re severed from the earth, you completely forget her. We’ve been in that great forgetting for a while now.

For me, I feel blessed that I was raised that way. Next to the earth, my mama was my first teacher and I learned to take care of the land from her. Nature is what should feel natural because it’s our inheritance and it’s our inherent-ness. As human beings, we have a long way to go with rebuilding that trust.

sumi: For folks who didn’t grow up with someone who taught us this value of trusting earth, or seeing the earth as our mother – where’s a place to start?

Angela: I think it’s both subtle and also a product of assimilation that people didn’t grow up with that direct connection. For the most part, it’s always been there.

THE SUBTLETY COMES FROM ESTABLISHING A RELATIONSHIP TO NATURE, THE SAME WAY YOU WOULD ESTABLISH A RELATIONSHIP WITH A NEW FRIEND.

You pay attention, you make acknowledgements, you give them a gift, you listen to them, you respect them, you establish consent, you make a meal for them, you tell them you love them.

All of that is the same when you are working with the plants: you observe, you become quiet, you become still, you pay attention to the way they grow, you offer them water, you ask permission to take from them, you also greet them, and tell them you love them. The same reverence we give to our human loved ones is the same reverence I carry with the earth.

sumi: Healing historical and ancestral trauma is central to your work as a practitioner. Why is this so important? And are ancestors more than just our blood family?

Angela: Yes. We are connected to so much rich history that is within our blood lineage, but if you go further back, we are connected to so much more. We’re connected to the animals, the plants, and to what is known as the unseen. There’s multiple worlds that we’re connected to that I would consider our ancestors.

We’ve been on this planet as a peoples and as our lineages for a very long time. When people describe themselves as an old soul, I sometimes laugh at that. At this point, everybody is an old soul! If you look at it generationally and spiritually, we have our grandmothers that are being reborn into this planet. We’re very, very old. We’ve accumulated thousands of years of trauma and repeating history in a cyclical, destructive way.

ONCE YOU’VE GOTTEN TO A CERTAIN LEVEL OF YOUR HEALING WORK, YOU’LL HIT A TENSION THAT EITHER YOU NEED TO CONFRONT, OR IT’S GONNA CONTINUE AS THIS PATTERN IN DIFFERENT WAYS. THAT IS ANCESTRAL WORK.

In order to change our world, we have to get into the deep inner work, coupled with all the other things which we may already be doing, like organizing and taking care of our daily needs. It’s vital to our systems, especially in our partnerships and families.

[Often] we get so enthusiastic and ready to change the world in this very external way. It’s what I would describe as hypermasculine. I definitely think this needs to continue happening and it has its role. But if we’re having all this turmoil in ourselves and families and we just keep running away from that – either because it’s too hard or we don’t wanna deal with it – that extends into the rest of our work. We can’t just change things from the outside in, we need to do it both ways.

sumi: What does ceremony mean to you?

Angela: I would describe my life as ceremony. That’s how our ancestors lived and continue to do so.

CEREMONY IS A LIFESTYLE. NOT LIKE, “I’M GONNA DO YOGA BECAUSE IT’S TRENDING,” BUT A LIFESTYLE WHERE YOU HAVE TO WALK IN SUCH A WAY WHERE YOU ARE REALLY IN TUNE AND PAYING ATTENTION TO THINGS.

It’s a mothering way of being. For me, ceremony could be as small as daily rituals like waking up in the morning and stretching, or it could be much more formal and intentional.

To talk about ceremony is to talk about why we even need it. It’s at a level where language feels very limiting. It’s a way of us mirroring the natural order of the universe. When we mirror that, we become in tune with the sacredness of all and the natural cycles of things.

Ritual is a way of continuously birthing yourself into existence. Specifically, rites of passage rituals are so important. We barely have that today, perhaps only in the form of weddings or giving birth.

In our ancestors’ time, people were initiated often. For example, when a child is stepping into a certain level of their maturity or when you’re becoming an elder. We honor different stages of life and death.

We used to have these rituals to understand our role as members of our community. What we’re seeing now is when we’re not formally initiated, we get initiated a different way. Either it becomes a disaster, we become ungrounded from it all, or we find our way. For example, when there’s a shocking death in the family. If people don’t honor it, if they don’t create a ceremony around it, the soul and the family becomes lost.

When we do ceremonies, we’re creating space for people to come into themselves and into the reality that their loved one has now graduated from life. We’ve lost a lot of that, or we have diluted versions of it which are based on pressures to look and be a certain way– like weddings.

sumi: What is the gift of an imperfect ancestor?

Angela: It means working with all the different lines within us. We have a history that is violent and full of terror and trauma and that exists within us.

WE HAVE ANCESTORS THAT ARE OUR COLONIZERS. BUT IT IS ALSO A GIFT BECAUSE WE DON’T WANT THAT TO CONTINUE.

By doing ancestral work we’re able to see our imperfect ancestors through compassion, through their original innocence.

sumi: What do plants want us to know?

Angela: To learn their song.

[youwerenevermeanttofeelalone]

I’m autistic and I would like to be active in leftist spaces but I don’t know how. Also, do you participate in riots and all that stuff as a leftist? I don’t leave the house a lot and I’m scared

(I’ll add a read more to this post because it’ll be long.)

Sadly, most things in this world weren’t designed for us, anon:(. However, that doesn’t mean that we can’t contribute.

But first, there are a few things I need you to know about leftists spaces in general:

The infighting is worse outside of online spaces.

Said infighting is normal because there are... let’s call them branches.

The communist branch — communists want the proletariat to have control of the state.

The anarchist branch — anarchists want to abolish the state.

Some people would consider socdems (socialist democrats) as leftists, but they believe capitalism can be reformed. Somebody who still believes in capitalism can’t be called a leftist.

You can’t expect groups of people with wildly different goals to not fight. But sometimes those fights are useful and other times, they are petty.

There are also common grounds that those branches can reach, and they often do, but you never hear about it because it isn’t “interesting”.

Depending on your geographical location, you might not be safe if you take part in leftists spaces unless they’re online. The fight against capitalism, fascism, and colonialism is important, but your safety should be your priority.

Don’t trust people who say theory isn’t necessary.

Read theory. And critique of that theory. And then build your own opinion.

Theory isn’t a holy scripture, you can discard the things that you feel don’t apply to your community.

I know theory is challenging, and I don’t have a perfect solution, but if you need help with passages or bodies of work, please dm me. I’ll help you out as much as I can.

Using the label “leftist” is controversial in some spaces. Don’t worry too much about that if you’re just getting started. It’s okay to not know in which branch of the left you feel more comfortable as long as you’re open-minded.

Don’t fall for “democratic socialism and socialism are different because socialists don’t believe in democracy.”

Socialism is already democratic. Socdems just want to be progressive moderators (think of Bernie Sanders and his policies, for example.)

Listen to a wide range of leftists, but prioritize leftists of color.

Stay away from the “dirtbag left”. Their use of slurs and edgy humor can be triggering. They throw the r-slur in every debate and conversation.

If you want to watch leftist YouTubers, don’t pay too much attention to the “debate bros.” Some of them will be entertaining, but debating isn’t that important to the movement.

Now, I’m agoraphobic. Protests and riots aren’t something I can really tolerate even though I’ve tried. Maybe one day I’ll be able to change that.

But if you know a collective that’s protesting or rioting, you can ask them what you can do to help.

Sometimes they need people to take care of their kids, or people to let them know what the media is saying, or people to hand out pamphlets, or people to design those pamphlets, or people to get them medical attention...

There are so many things you can do from home, I promise! Monitoring police channels is another thing that I’ve seen American and European neurodivergent people do. Just ask.

About direct action...

For context: the left isn’t prominent in Mexico. The Worker’s Party has a coalition with the bourgeois parties at the moment. Our president is a demagogue who lied about his political beliefs and disguised himself as a leftist when he’s a neoliberal.

Where I live, people are so reactionary that they consider the president a communist. Here in my State, everybody’s either a centrist or a conservative. Leftists mostly keep to themselves because we’re not safe — much less if we’re part of a marginalized group which is most likely the case.

Such a thing isn’t too different from other States. We can spend days talking about why that happened and how much US imperialism has fucked us up, but I don’t want to digress.

As you can imagine, mutual aid is tough for me to do for multiple reasons, but it isn’t impossible.

I’ve left my house like ten times this year and I have three friends in total — one of them doesn’t even live in my country. Educating them has been one of the highlights of my year. And they now can pass that knowledge on.

The leftist movement needs more people willing to share knowledge. The movement also needs direct action, but you know what’s also direct action? Mutual aid.

I’m poor and helping out people with money is kinda tough when I have to save money for a ridiculously expensive surgery (it’s for my father), but I give whatever I can.

In my city, there are a lot of immigrants looking for a job. And I can’t give them such a thing, but whenever I can, I cook as many meals as possible and my father gives them out.

Mutual aid isn’t always big, but it can make a lot of difference. Sometimes you can only help out somebody by giving them a meal while they help you out by making you company. But that should be enough for us.

Disabled and neurodivergent people aren’t considered when certain groups form. Another way you can do mutual aid is by helping out neurodivergent and disabled kids. A lot of them can’t go to school or can’t get the tools they need to have a decent life.

There are ways. Unconventional, and smug neurotypicals or able-bodied people might say they’re not enough, but they are. I promise you they are, and the people you help will always be grateful.

Thank you for trusting my perspective on this. I hope this was helpful. If you have more questions or want to talk about this in length, message me.

[ofcloudsandstars]

Will just post some more Litha posts in a minute before calling it a night at like 17:30 cause I have been up since yesterday morning with lil naps in between and I am dyinggg haha. 

Had such a beautiful night yesterday with incredible interactions that made me feel validated or really reflect on some things. 

Yesterday was a wonderful witch friends birthday. It’s one of those spaces where not everyone is a witch but everyone is magical and aware of their sense of magic and ability to create, be expressive, be their full self etc. I tend to find that in a lot of femme queer spaces. Everyone was so vibrant and really genuine. I made like 6 new friends haha. 

I always wanted to have a dance party on the Summer Solstice. I always felt it would be appropriate with the mounting energies as this time of the year is a big energetic climax. Last night I got the invite to this party impromptu like yes come thru.. and it was very much a CATHARTIC release.. Omg we did poetry workshops, so much dancing and it was incredible as this witch friend is Ugandan and a lot of witch friends in this group have African heritage so it felt very ritualistic in the way that in some afro spiritual communities they would beat drums to certain rhythms to evoke spirits and ancestors. This afro queer witch group that I have been blessed to become friends with have all started teaching each other how to DJ so when they would start spinning their sets the beats were so intense and rhythmic it was like you were dancing in a trance. (I mean the party was lit with big red pillar candles everywhere and had deep pink lighting so it felt ritualistic or like we were in another realm haha) And each person of course has their own style but it felt like they were entrancing us with their own magic and it felt kind of like the way guided meditation can guide you on a journey but instead it was with beats and dancing. 

I reconnected with some friends of a friend there and I told them how I always take off work on the sabbats cause I may be a slave to capitalism but I deserve to have my fucking magical days off lol. (Like I don’t even take off Christmas let me have my solstices). I thought they would think this was strange but they actually said they thought it was inspiring 😂😭 I told them even if I don’t get to see friends I make a feast for myself and take time to go into nature and just be immersed in the energy and they are like wtf we want to do that. Turns out incredibly that they all also live by me!! And that they all have Monday off!! So We may actually have a feast tomorrow!! (Also shout out to service/hospitality workers cause we get random days off the week haha). 

But really talking about it with them felt validating cause they say its nice to take a moment to really immerse yourself in the seasons and days or else life just passes you by in a blur and I was like YES EXACTLY!! It’s a grounding ritual!! You take stock as of where you are in life!! You take a pause to enjoy a new chapter/season of nature!! Some caucasian witch friend made a comment once at me like, ‘It’s just another day of the year, why does it matter that you celebrate on this day specifically??’ and it’s like IF yOU DON’T MAKE A TIME TO COMMIT THEN YOU WILL NEVER HAVE THE TIME!! Plus isn’t it nice to like gather friends just to just ‘be’ in nature?? And share season foods and have a feast?? Like isn’t this what life is about?? 

This sentiment was deepened especially by the Host. She was this gorgeous woman who’s spirit just glowed and has warmth that fills the room. She has loving mom energy like the type of person who loves cooking for you (she actually cooked traditional Palestinian food for everyone in the house and even recounted beautifully how she was so happy to get up in the morning to go to the market to pick out the fresh produce and cook for others with love omg). She was so happy to just host the party and have a group of wonderful people over. Anyway there was a crew of very stylish, very attractive palestinian wlw women/femme nbs there who could fucking dance cause their hips were doing some snake charmer shit and they could keep up with all the afro beats and have their bellies, booties and thighs twerk at the same time but obv right now whats happening in Palestine is devastating. Turns out later in the night she revealed that she was a refugee. This was revealed cause the asshole neighbour who was displeased at us having a party (11PM Sat night. Like I know its late but it’s London on a Sat night), was threatening to call the cops which is really aggressive when it’s towards a group of queer, mostly dark skinned afro/arabic group of people and when he got in her face she shouted back at him, “My people have to sleep through bombs and you can’t handle a little music??” omfg.. 

Yet anyway she said something beautiful as we were in the liminal space of the party somewhere between the twilight hours of 3-5AM on her bed high as hell. She first said it in Arabic than translated it loosely to, ‘What is life but not indulges?’ meaning what is life but not the experience of it all? Experiencing our senses, our joy of living etc. And she mentioned how we can take so much for granted like enjoying being out with nature, enjoying the company and safe space of being with friends, of having the freedom of self expression, especially to be queer, to be magical, to not have your entire life uprooted. Of course so many people there have racial and colonial trauma but that crew was experiencing it real time and were ready to fight that neighbour for trying to take away that moment of celebrating a cherished friend’s birthday. 

I feel like I finally have the words to express why I love celebrations. I always thought it was a vapid Libra side of me but it wasn’t easy to dismiss as such cause I even liked celebrating things alone. It’s very grounding in the way that it helps to slow you down in the moment and really experience life. Especially when you celebrate with feasts and eat the gifts and labour you’ve given the earth to enjoy and indulge in divine food. And when you have the blessing to share these moments with friends you get to be reminded of what love feels like and what community feels like and how important these experiences are to be human. Especially when nothing is really guaranteed in this world anymore. 

I wish everyone was in a position to take off from work on the solstice to just ground themselves in nature and even spend time with good friends at the beach or park but capitalism can be really abusive. I am just glad I’ve reshaped my life to get to a point where I can do that. As for now I am going to plan out my day tomorrow then sleep forever and hope my old-ass Life Alert knees stop burning cause they are mad at me for last night’s twerking reminding me that I am on the doorstep of my 30s. 

[kny111]

I’m Living Under Government Watchlist for doing ProBlack + BLM work

I’m not sure many of you know this and with what I’ve seen I doubt this will get attention considering how deeply sabotaged tumblr has become. But I’ve been doing activism for about as long as we’ve been yelling things like “HandsOffAssattaShakur“ to protesting what I thought was religious corruption when we did so against scientology to #OccupyWallstreet. I’ve been protesting and doing activism online and offline depending on my mental and physical health which has limited me as time goes by. It’s finally got me burnt out, not from the protesting and activism, but from those whose job in the past and present been to sabotage and destabilize Black lead/ Poc led movements. I’m in a continuation of this. Don’t let my lack of energy in speaking out fool you into thinking I gave up. I have just gotten worn out by them.

The things they’ve done to my mind and body while in this area since moving. They’ve been surveilling me since before I could even remember. Every single day that goes by they’ll have some way of making their presence on my health in a debilitating way. They’ll mess with the internet, phone, my contacts, infiltrate them, infiltrate my family, they’ve messed with the job search process and made difficult for me to enter any job without said job making some offhanded comments showing their solidarity to the corrupted country I protest. They’ve had people I trusted right here on tumblr infiltrated my circles of friends and myself and make it very well known that they feel beyond reproach.

This has all been in coordination with the NYPD and other government agents of defense. They’ll make themselves present in just about any space I try to go. From the forest, parks, to just a simple walks outside. I basically was lead into an area of Manhattan that is mad pro-cop, pro-surveillence capitalism, pro-militarized. Any time I make blog posts or whatever that don’t put em in a good light I get some kind of mental or physical health debilitating action against me like they’ll have mad loud noises at timed intervals like what the agent upstairs does all the time which messes with my breathing due to social anxiety and depression. They’ve had cars roll dangerously close to me, whether im biking or not. They’ll have people walk mad close to me during social distancing measures. I know it be them because they tend to use sensitive information they got through surveillancing me all day and night. Like fam I could be trying to take a piss in peace at like 3am and they’ll still be bumping away and making all types of sound to give the impression that they’re always watching. And they are. And I think the fact that those UFO/UAP objects appeared on my 17th  (11/10/2004) birthday added to their obsession with me. The other fact that I ended painting a similar craft under the context of destroying colonialism I believe gave the government more understanding on what they’re really here about. I think that being the end of these oppressive regimes that have made so much out of us. I don’t want to sound superstitious but since then I’ve felt a connection with those UAPs that I only learned to name recently. I no longer think it’s coincidental that about a month or so AFTER I painted those native, queer sisters dancing to bring forth help from their future descendants, the navy posts those videos of the UAP that become well known. They’ve never done that, and yet just a few weeks after I painted this, not only does the gallery I exhibited this in Harlem catches fire unexpectedly, but these things become a topic of discussion in ways we’ve never seen before. I think them UAPs are here for our freedom. But that’s for another post. Too much to unpack into this. I’m just letting yall know what they know of me. So now imagine. This nigga aka me, tied to UFO, fortelling the future (I know what I sound like, but believe me, I can definitely tell the future) AAAND fighting for black lives? Of course they gone be on my ass like a probe. In fact, I think one night they even broke into our apartment (not the first time they do so) and did things against my will as I slept since I woke up feeling violated. Waking up with strange markings and having objects in the crib go missing. But I’ll leave that there. There’s so little ya’ll know about what they’re doing to BLM activists. So much I’ve omitted from here for my own sanity and to process things. This has caused my body a lot of debilitating stress down to my breathing having been shortened. I’m lucky if I have the will power to eat more than 2 meals. I don’t even bike anymore. I can barely run anymore. I can barely speak like I used to anymore. They stole so much more from me than they’ll ever imagine. Even saying all this to yall, whomever listening, feels pointless. Why? because they’re very good at making it seem, even if and when it aint true, that your people don’t fuck with you no more except for those they deem acceptable. As you figured, this would have anyone under 24/7 watch. The government be lookin at me and them UAP and the lands and non government natives as a force they don’t wanna reckon with, so they’ve put a lot out to shrink me as they do to so many of us who choose to fight for the rest who can’t. And this has all been while trying to raises my baby Quinn with my partner. So we’re all dealing with the state and federal terrorists in one way or another. If they not trying physically fuck with me, they’ll be running psych warfare on me, shit thatll have me doubting myself despite the facts. Luckily a nigga still bout that scientific literacy so it’s helped me a lot in spotting them and trying to keep some semblance of a distance. But again because of what I’m tied to: bday 111, UAP/UFO, native resistance and the spirits of the land and those this country murdered for white supremacist ventures, predicting/ESP type of abilities on the daily while telling them how useless their surveillence capitalist tools are knowing we can do this has likely mad them other me, dehumanize me and made me feel less human. Since then I’ve noticed they’ve been limiting my posts and activities on just about any site that has favored white supremacy, neocolonialism and capitalism in some way or another. They’ll mess with my facebook feed, who my posts get seen by, they’ll mess with my IG, they’ll mess with my tumblr especially. Basically any way they can limit who I may say this to and wear me out from even speaking about this and bringing yall hope like that. And remember, the information that they share amongst themselves as surveillance capitalist is the same information hub/database that infiltrated white supremacists and antiblack/antibrown folks in governments tend to us and share with their own hateful ass people. With this in mind, I really think they look at me as some would be leader to those movements since I’m queer and nonbinary so not as easy to trick into the outdated oppresive politics they try to have me on. Since I haven’t shown interest in being with them in any real way and have stuck to my activism and abolishing these systems they’ve continue to in a way torture me. Through sounds, denial of physical services, or when I go out to eat in places that have ties to law enforcement or government agencies, they’ll mess with my food, just about anything you need they’ll fuck with. What would that do to you if you experienced that? Hence why my bloggin changed a bit, not as attached due to energy fatigue and their constant harrassment and obsession with me. Many times, even with the fact that I may be linked to those UAP in some special way I still be feelin like dyin to not be around em anymore.

To add to what I said on how corporate own websites like tumblr have joined them; After having spent a good amount of time blocking my posts and blaming their algorithm. From blocking drawings of normalizing fatness to pro LGBTQ and Black Lives Matter posts like the Eric Garner videos I uploaded. For a few months now I’ve noticed my scinerds blog has been inaccessible, in a way sabotaging my communication with yall. And they would fix my blog posts by limiting who sees my posts, so now most if not all of my posts on this website and few others have been. When I try to use it I’m not allowed, but I’m still able to reblog, so I’ve been reblogging there less science and more activism as a way to protest the racist, white supremacist of tumblr. Be they black or not, they still acting the same. I’m mostly posting this for a future people who understand me and believe me. I get the sense that this post will also be sabotaged or muted in some way. Thanks for reading, in case we don’t link.

[politicalprof]

2019 in books:

David McCullough, 1776: A highly accessible, if somewhat naive, depiction of the year that defined the prospects for American independence. I wouldn’t go there for deep, critical analysis. But for a story of a year, it is well done.

Michael Palin, Erebus: HMS Erebus was a British naval vessel that spent much of its career in Arctic and Antarctic exploration. If you are interested in Victorian era explorations of hard places, a fascinating read.

Emilio Corsetti III, 35 Miles from Shore: The story of an airline crash in the early 1970s in the Caribbean. What happened, why, how, who survived and what we learned. Interesting if not brilliant.

Raymond Thorp, Crow Killer: Old-fashioned tale of the inspiration behind the Robert Redford movie Jeremiah Johnson. As much fantasy as history. But it offers a flavor of a time and a subgroup few Americans would know.

James Corey, Caliban’s War: The second book of “The Expanse” series. The protomolecule is working its mojo, and Earth, Mars and the Belters are none too happy with one another. A fun read of a massive space opera.

Walter Kempowski, All for Nothing: Set in the context of the collapsing Eastern Front during WWII, this story proceeds from the fractured point of view of the Germans who are about to be turned into refugees fleeing oncoming Soviet forces. The book, notably, does not make these Germans sources of sympathy: the mood is dissonant and disordered. A real piece of literature.

Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall: Because who doesn’t want a point-of-view account of a key counselor to Henry VIII, one who rose to extraordinary wealth and power despite his humble birth and then managed the, how shall we say, removal of Kathrine as Queen? Replaced by Anne Boleyn? Who wouldn’t want to read it? It’s excellent, by the way.

James Corey, Abaddon’s Gate: Book three of The Expanse, and the protomolecule has remade humanity’s relationship to the universe. But we’ll probably screw that up, too. Another good story, filled with actual thought about the problems of space travel and space living.

MIchael Krondl, The Taste of Conquest: The Rise and Fall of the Three Great Cities of Spice: Venice, Lisbon and Amsterdam each in their turn dominated the global spice trade -- a trade that was one of the main stimuli for early colonialism and imperial conquest, and which strongly influenced the rise of the modern corporation as a linch-pin of global capitalism. The book is not as good as it should be, but the story is one that few people know, but should.

Hilary Mantel, Bring Up the Bodies: Hey, it’s time to get rid of Anne Boleyn everyone! Or, at least, to separate her head from her body. And let’s manage the English Reformation, too ... all just a few years before losing our own head. Welcome to the early/middle 1500s in England everyone!

Leigh Perry, A Skeleton in the Family: Who doesn’t have a skeleton living in their house who helps solve mysteries. I mean, who doesn’t?

JK Rowling, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone: So my son has started reading Harry Potter. So I have started reading Harry Potter. I liked this book: it’s tight, it’s focused, it’s a fun read. I see the appeal.

Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman, Good Omens: The answer to the questions: “What if the angels and demons charged with over-seeing Earth as humans go from the Garden of Eden to Armageddon decide that they like Earth and don’t want Armageddon to happen (even if their allies do)? And what if the Anti-Christ were raised in a perfectly mundane family in a perfectly mundane English village? How might it all turn out?” To delightful and funny effect.

JK Rowling, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets: Meh. Okay. Not as good as book one. But still a good story.

Gilbert King, Devil in the Grove: Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys, and the Dawn of a New America: A broad pastiche of events surrounding one of the many civil rights cases of the 1940s and 50s: the abuses and murders of several African American men accused of raping a white woman in Lakeland, FL, in 1949. With a whole lot of associated discussions of other cases, the NAACP, corrupt and criminal law enforcement, race riots, and the like. A good read. And how can it be that the bastard George HW Bush, put Clarence Thomas on the Supreme Court to fill a seat once held by the staggering legal figure that was Thurgood Marshall. Shameful is the only word.

JK Rowling, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban: Certainly better than the Chamber of Secrets. A darker turn. But beginning to get padded as readers demanded “more” if not “better.”

James Corey, Cibola Burn: Book 4 of The Expanse ... and I didn’t like it. It seemed like filler, a book written to a contract deadline. Maybe it will pay off in the end. But another one like that and I’m not going to care.

Tom Phillips, Humans: A Brief History of How We Fucked It All Up: Did you know our oldest known ancestor, Lucy, probably died by falling out of a tree? If stories about how people have messed things up, have suffered both intentional and unintentional consequences, turn you on, do I ever have the book for you. Schadenfreude much?

JK Rowling, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire: Dear lord is this book long. Why? No doubt because the fans wanted it to be. But it is as gratuitously padded as any book I have ever read. It’s okay. But I wasn’t particularly impressed. Perhaps another six Quidditch matches would have helped ....

Adam Higginbotham, Midnight in Chernobyl: Thought the HBO miniseries was scary? It was tame. I mean: the Soviets, with their level of “technical prowess” and their industrial “quality control checks” ran the facility. Heck, Chernobyl wasn’t even their first disaster. Let’s just put it this way: the actual fuel piles in each of the FOUR Chernobyl reactors were so big that: 1) different sections had different characteristics, and didn’t all operate at the same rates or temperatures; and 2) the monitoring equipment couldn’t record how all of the pile was operating at any time. Happy now? Russia still has 10 Chernobyl-style reactors in operation. Enjoy your good night’s sleep everyone!

JK Rowling, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince: Yes, yes: I know. This isn’t Order of the Phoenix. Well, I read Order of the Phoenix many years ago, and thought it was deeply annoying. A pile of words with little point. A way to keep the audience happy with long passages about very little.

Meanwhile, I, like my son, roared through Half-Blood Prince. A ripping good tale. Much tighter than the last several of the series.

JK Rowling, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: A fine read. A bit slow getting going: let’s go here! Let’s go there! Let’s recap the plot! But after the first 1/3 or so, the story got moving and I enjoyed it. Didn’t expect great literature; didn’t get great literature. But then again, I deeply appreciate how much pleasure my son got from this, and how excited my daughter is to engage with it. If it hadn’t been conceived and written, it seems like there’d be a Harry Potter sized hole in the universe.

Neil Gaiman, American Gods: In all honesty, I didn’t really like the first 2/3 of this book: too many tangents; too many sub-stories for the sake of sub-stories. And I’m still not sure I think it was a great book. But I really enjoyed the last third of it, and there were moments, vignettes, and sentences that truly blew me away. So I am glad I stayed with it.

Kameron Hurley, The Light Brigade: A sci fi story of soldiers apparently engaged in a war with Mars who are transported to the battlefield as beams of light. One gets unhinged from time. I am not sure it was worth the work, and I came to understand it was based on a short story and so, at times, it seemed a bit one-trick pony-ish. But it had its share of moments.

Daniel James Brown, The Boys in the Boat: A bit slow going at first, but it grows more compelling as it moved forward. This is the story of the 1936 crew (rowing) team at the University of Washington that went to Berlin and won the gold medal as Adolf Hitler watched. An interesting story about crew as a sport (about which I knew basically nothing), and life in Depression-era Washington state -- with a little, somewhat gratuitous, commentary about life in Nazi Germany layered in. One takeaway? The actor Hugh Laurie’s father was the lead oarsman on the British crew at Berlin in 1936. Hugh Laurie rowed crew at Cambridge as well.

James Corey, Nemesis Games: The next in the Expanse series. Much more enjoyable than the last one, but still a bit strained. One heck of a plot “twist.” A perfectly lovely way to relax; didn’t change my life. Some interesting character twists. But also a lot of “here are some giant developments (a lot of giant stuff) that give us lots of things to write about going forward!”

Alan Stern and David Grinspoon, Chasing New Horizons: the story of the New Horizons mission to Pluto. Interesting behind the scenes look at how the mission got funded, planned and implemented. Accessible in terms of the explanations; thick with bureaucratic story-telling and summary. It turns out this stuff is really, really hard. Interesting, but it didn’t blow me away.

And to end the year, I am reading: Christopher Moore, Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal: What if 13 year old Jesus had a buddy who, 2000 years later, wrote a gospel that filled in those missing years of Joshua’s (as Biff calls Jesus) life? Well, here’s your answer.

[lhs3020b]

Oh...

So, I’ve just had a certain conversation in Byzantium, during The Outer Worlds. And I know now what’s actually going on in Halcyon.

Oh, crap.

Also, MASSIVE spoilers. Do not read this unless you’ve at least got to Byzantium and talked to a certain rogue academic. (If you’re scratching your head about what I’m referring to here, AVOID this post. Seriously.)

They’re running out of food.

Fuck.

Or actually, if I’m parsing the context correctly, there are enough crops, but the nutritional balance is all wrong. People just aren’t getting the right vitamins and minerals. Bluntly, the Halcyon Colony is utterly shafted.

Thinking about it, several things immediately make sense.

1. The abandonment of the Hope. The Board think they’re keeping down the number of hungry mouths this way.

2. The sheer volume of hyper-aggressive marauders. This was something that had been nagging me. Given how bad conditions are in the corporate towns, I had wondered why more people didn’t just turn deserter, quietly walk away and found their own townships out in the great empty. In fact it’s likely that lots of people have tried, only to find their vegetable gardens fail to bloom, either forcing them back to the townships, or into violent aggression. (The marauders behave the way they do because they’re basically starving.)

Abigale’s group were able to survive because they were lucky enough to have the resources of a full botanical laboratory, which presumably gave them an edge no-one else had.

3. The passivity of the near-enslaved corporate populations. Vitamin deficiencies and protein deficiency can impair cognitive function. Potassium springs to mind, here. (Your nervous system works partly through the exchange of potassium ions; without them, the electrics literally stop.) People are exhausted, tired, ill ... and just can’t think straight anymore.

One wonders if perhaps the star Halcyon has slightly-odd, non-solar chemical element abundance-ratios, and there’s less potassium than in Sol? This would in turn affect the chemistry of Halcyon’s planet-forming disc, which would in turn alter the chemistry of planetary soils, so...

(Also, what a fucking stupid mistake on the Board’s part. Did they not think to take a fucking spectrum of the star’s light? A simple back-to-back comparison with Sol would tell you something was off! For fuck’s sake, there’s a massive potassium feature at 1.27 microns! It’s prominent enough that you can resolve the fucker in brown dwarf spectra, for goodness sake! It’s not subtle! AAAAAAaaaaargh! Did they even talk to a single scientist when they started this colony?)

4. The Board’s weird fixation on expansion onto Groundbreaker. On the face of it, it’s not really that obvious why they’re so obsessed with it. I mean, Groundbreaker is a useful port, yes, but they could build their own, right?

But Groundbreaker is also an actual fucking starship.

The Board is trying to muscle in onto Groundbreaker because in the worst-case scenario, Groundbreaker could fucking leave.

5. The weird fixation on saltuna on Terra 2, despite the fact that the fish won’t thrive there. On the face of it, this is mad. Wandering around Edgewater, I was puzzled by the absence of vegetable gardens. Why didn’t they just try growing normal food instead, out on all the fields outside? I assumed it was due to the security situation, related to all the marauders. Actually what I suspect is going on now is that the Board is just fucking desperate, and clutching at straws.

6. And the kicker? Here’s why the Board fundamentally CAN’T solve Halcyon’s problems...

The other thing is that there’s a very obvious solution the Board has apparently bypassed: vitamin pills.

But of course to make it work, you’d have to give them to everyone in the colony - it’s a collective-action problem, not an “unsympathetic individuals with bad life choices” thing. Basically, it’s the sort of thing - in economics jargon, an “externality” - that you have to pay for through general taxation. The Board has zero popular legitimacy - it’s a self-selecting oligarchy - and governs through an extremist-libertarian ideology. It can’t adopt any kind of collective-action response, because every aspect of its own ideological structure militates against it.

It’s actually possible that the Board haven’t even thought about issuing vitamin pills.

Also, it explains why Dr Chartrand is dealing with such poor resourcing. Frankly, in context, it’s no surprise her project is in a mess. In fact, it’s actually a minor miracle that it exists at all.

7. Why has it taken 70 years for the situation to reach near-meltdown?

At a guess, I think because of shipping coming in through Groundbreaker. Perhaps until relatively recently, the Board was able to import enough goods to somewhat-offset the growing food crisis throughout Halcyon. However, as ambient conversations on Groundbreaker make clear, the galactic economy is apparently now in recession, and interstellar trade is drying up. Food imports will consist of lots of large, high-mass items that take up a lot of space and have high shipping costs, so across interstellar distances, profits will be marginal even in the good years. In the bad years, my guess would be that the remaining interstellar shipping firms will retrench to things like luxury goods - small items that carry high prices, so have higher margins. Which in turn means that they’ll be carrying fewer and fewer shipments of basic goods.

Again, it’s capitalism that’s killing Halcyon.

8. This also explains Catherine’s obsession with controlling a boarst factory.

I thought she was just a bit mad. Actually she’s not. She’s either trying to corner the market in one of the few remaining foodstuffs, or she’s just looking out for herself - but either way, it does make some sense.

9. Mass Effect had Virmire, The Outer Worlds has Byzantium.

This is very much that kind of “oh my fucking goodness” moment.

Don’t mind me, I’m going to be a while digesting the implications of all of this.

[icosmohunters]

chapter three : crimson red

chapter three of cosmo hunters!

word count : 6.6k words

synopsis : an agreement has been met and now hope has agreed to take these pirates under her wing. literally. now, she continues to be on the hunt for the criminal on top of her bounty list. and she intends to make it work. but something in her bones tells her that perhaps it won’t work as smoothly as she’d planned.

“ would you mind warning us when you’re taking off? ”.

“ my ship, my rules. i don’t owe you the comfort of a warning, pirate. ”

was she being mean? it didn’t particularly matter if she was because she had fallen asleep, and like a protagonist out of a shounen anime, she was rushing to get herself away from her current location and to where she had to be. j-colony was waiting for her! and a dozen bounty points waited in reward.

hope hadn’t expected anyone to wake her up, so she mainly at fault for letting the ball drop and taking too long to wake up. but the warmth in the cabin and the full stomach she had after a proper meal sent her into dreamland shortly after she sat on her navigation chair. 

and upon waking up, hope had gasped herself out of her daze and launched her right arm forced, sending the engine lever forward and the engine roaring with life. she could hear all of the extra bits of the ship, like the iron legs folding into the bottom of the ship when it began to rise off the ground. 

nebula was hovering for a moment until a button lit up on the left side of the control panel, a green light giving her clearance to blast off. wrapping her trembling fingers on the orientation stick, she moved it forward and the nebula followed, moving forward just an inch before hope let out a laugh and threw the stick forward.

and with that, nebula blasted off. 

of course, anyone on board the ship could tell that nebula had taken herself out of europa’s atmosphere and freed herself from its pull and its ice. the engine was heating up, and so was the ship, so much so that outer layers of frost had melted within seconds. the ship shifted a couple of times, rocking to the side before it found its balance point and took off into outer space, heading straight for jupiter.

of course, someone had come into her cabin, probably awoken by the small earthquake that had just taken place within the spaceship.

it was enzo. hope kept her gaze fixed in front of her as she saw the dense gas giant who rotated rapidly, the winds there were said to be enough to rip the very skin off your body. good thing that the j-colony was designed to withstand those strong winds.

“ i get that but you could’ve woken us up. we shouldn’t have slept for that long either so, yeah. maybe have your a.i set up an alarm clock? ”.

“ mhm, yup. ”

hope wasn’t listening at all. she was listening but she wasn’t taking any of it in, mostly because she was brain-storming. it had been said that crimson would be in a plaza or some sort, a shopping center set up in the middle of the colony. and to be fair, j-colony was perhaps the largest one in the solar system, around five times the size of the biggest capital city on earth, beijing.

so if this prick took off running when he spotted her, he would travel a lot. it was why she needed to organize maybe a hoverbike to hunt him down in case he took off. because as fit as she was, hope didn’t like running. she hated it.

so, a hoverbike along with some new weapons, perhaps a new collection of tracking devices . . . she was counting it on her fingers now that she had put nebula on auto-pilot.

oh, and enzo was still talking.

“ and might i say, i am quite good at navigating so maybe if you were, uh, feeling sick, you could always let me take over ”, he spoke.

“ if i could choose between you and my pet dog navigating the nebula, i choose my pet dog. and he passed away last year. that’s how much i won’t trust you, or anyone, with my ship ”, hope snapped back quickly, swerving her chair around to face the pirate captain. he had changed into some new clothes, he looked less dead than a couple of hours ago but the bruise on his cheek still remained.

enzo seemed at a loss for words for a moment, until he seemed to gather some. “ i was just offering, jeez. but uhm, quinn told me you were hunting someone down. why do we have to stay on the ship?”, he questioned.

“ because i said so. ”

watching his reactions was rather amusing, he exuded such confidence but would then become flustered when the trail of the conversation didn’t seem like it was going his way. if anything, it was funny. “ how about an actual reason, captain? ”, he asked.

“ i just gave you one. ”

“ no, i mean like a proper answer. we could help you, you know. we’re capable fighters. i mean, minus little dawn but still! we can help, all you can do is give us a plan and we’ll follow it, simple and clean, no worries about it! ”, enzo sounded so optimistic that hope almost didn’t want to reply.

“ pirates don’t do simple and clean, i swear ”, hope commented, tilting her head and seeing the energy draining from enzo’s face, his hands dropping to his side whilst his eyes simply rolled. “ i can’t understand why you came here expecting to mingle with my issues like we’re a team or something. i’m a solo bounty hunter, i don’t need help. let alone help from pirates who all have bounties. but if you want to step outside and get caught, be my guest. but i’m still taking you darlings to pluto and i’d recommend not dying on the way there. ”

enzo grunted, “ okay. but if you end up getting hurt, we won’t have anyone to take us to where we have to be. ” 

hope blinked slowly. “ you can take the space bus. teleporter. gate-ways. fuck’s sake, man, it’s not rocket science. but if you’re so fond of my ship, keep out of trouble whilst you’re on it! ”, she argued back quickly. he made an injury to hope sound like the end of the world.

“ yeah, but . . . ”.

“ whatever your concern is, it’s irrelevant to me for the time being. so, before i lose it, i suggest getting out of the cabin. do what you want but just don’t go into my room or the basement ”, she explained firmly, and then waved him off in a dismissive manner. “ go, shoo. ”

he looked like he had more to say, but whatever those words were, they were left unspoken as he turned and walked towards the elevator and soon disappeared from the room. sighing into her hands, hope began to massage her temples.

she wasn’t used to having people around, so she found herself snapping rather frequently. she didn’t realize how much she disliked it until now, but in a single second, she found herself giving less of a fuck. because she didn’t have to be friends with them, and she didn’t have to treat them like there could be any bond between any of them. 

so the guilt which she felt vanished within a second. 

realizing that she would have to get changed into her gear, hope continued to leave nebula on auto-pilot and programmed a speed boost in around thirty minutes. a speed boost would surpass the speed of light and bring those millions of miles between nebula and jupiter’s surface down to a couple of seconds of traveling. and not to mention the fact that the gas giant’s gravitational pull was tyrant-like, it would be like teleporting to the surface.

after leaving the navigation cabin, hope descended down to her room, the iron doors sliding open upon detecting her presence and she looked at her vacant bed and then towards her closet. snapping her fingers, the closet door swung open and a holographic screen followed. 

“ what kind of clothes are you looking for today, hope? ”, a.j’s voice boomed through as the doors slid closed behind her and as she moved towards the wardrobe.

“ usual hunting clothes. depending on the weather, i might bring a jacket just in case. but i doubt it’ll be cold at j-colony ”, hope spoke. from the holographic screen, she went through her clothes and picked everything, from black crop top down to the baggy, military jackets in black and grey. even the boots with jets on the soles. “ my jacket’s been washed, right? ”.

“ yes, all of your clothes were washed and dried during your small nap. your shoes have also been polished and the jet on the boots you’ve chosen has been fixed. ”

“ wonderful ”.

after her clothes were delivered to her, she reached for the bottom of her top and slowly slipped it off, figuring that it was safe to do it but that’s when she heard the door open and her eyes flickered over to the door. dom had walked in without even announcing he was there.

when their eyes met, hope just saw his eyes flicker down and a slight redness that reached his cheeks. she was only in her sports bra but somehow it invoked a reaction of embarrassment from dom’s face. 

“ uhm. ”

“ do you practice the art of walking in on people whilst they’re changing? ”, hope asked rhetorically, averting her gaze back to her clothes as she put her vest to the side and then put on the comfortable crop top that had a very nice turtleneck detail to it. 

“ n-not exactly, but, uhm, dawn is asking where you keep all of your medical kits and if she can have a look. she has no resources and enzo’s bruise is still purple ”, he actually turned away, so hope continued to change comfortably. she lacked that self-awareness and sense of embarrassment. quite frankly, she didn’t have to hide when he had been the one who waltzed in like he owned the place.

hope rose a brow whilst attaching her straps around her trousers and then her belt and pouches. “ the bunks have storages on the side. i don’t go in there so the medical kits in the cupboards and shelves are still there ”, she explained. then came her jacket, navy blue in color which somewhat matched the navy blue of the voyage badge pinned to it.

“ not to be rude but your ship seemingly hides everything, that room is bare except for the bunks and the huge ass window looking out into space ”, dom continued. hope turned and walked to him whilst adjusting her belt. he seemingly took notice of her and jumped slightly. “ so if you could give better directions, we might be able to find it. ”

“ on the board of every bed, there’s storage space. if you tap against the board, it’ll open up and you’ll see all the medical kits and spare clothes and whatnot. maybe even the blankets that i keep stored just in case ”, the bounty hunter told him, exiting her room along with him and nodding towards where the rooms were. “ shouldn’t be too hard now, right? ”.

“ could have said it the first time ”, dom muttered under his breath. but hope chose to ignore it. seeing that he was walking away, she decided to say something before letting him go.

“ next time you decide you want to walk on me shirtless, knock. and pay me, i’m not a free sculpture at the museum ”, she called over to him and saw him throw a glare over his shoulder. hope chuckled amusingly, watching him disappear down the hall. “ asshole. ”

after that encounter, hope decided that it would be best to have a look around the ship to make sure all was working properly. checking the lounge, she found the t.v turned on and quinn listening to the news broadcast. the vending machines were on, many of the game tables were idle and ready to be used and mostly everything looked in place. deciding not to disturb quinn, hope left the lounge quickly.

then she checked the kitchen. all seemed to be in place, the dishwasher could be heard briefly but all was well. nothing out of place. and then after checking the basement and the storage space, hope decided to return to her navigation cabin. she recalled that the speed boost was happening in a couple of minutes, and the way enzo complained a while back that she should’ve told them when she was going to take off. 

it would be best to warn them about the speed boost, just case they got a slight shock from it. and besides, as far as she was aware, they weren’t expecting it. so she tapped the intercom mic present on the side of her chair and pressed the announcement button. 

“ listen up, everyone. in two minutes, nebula will use a speed boost. that inherently means that she’ll zoom in the direction of our friendly gas giant and when she does, you might feel a slight shake. and in case we suffer some wind turbulence, i suggest hanging onto something ”, hope told them. “ i will announce it just ten seconds before the real thing. i suggest preparing yourselves now. ”

perhaps they were aware of what a speed boost was, after all, they were pirates. but nebula’s engine had restored and she was faster than ever, especially with a speed boost. anyone with travel sickness may find themselves in a lot of trouble. it was why hope slipped on her seat-belt when the countdown came to fifty seconds.

and when the ten-second countdown came, she turned the intercom on once more with a smirk grazing her lips. her adrenaline rush always came from moments like these, where she truly felt like she was in control of something. even if it was a spaceship somewhere in the milkyway galaxy, it was still something she could control.

“ strap in, ladies and gentlemen. we’re now descending into jupiter. ”

time skip  ﹏ 

every time hope enters the atmosphere of another planet, she always goes through a series of chills and goosebumps all over her body. it’s a thrilling experience to be stepping into territory they didn’t think they were able to reach a hundred years ago. but mankind had taken more than a step now, it had taken a leap. and now, humans had invaded other planets, setting up a dozen colonies and extracting resources and truly beginning to learn about the universe. the planets we used to see only through telescopes, now before our very eyes.

jupiter, unlike many planets in the solar system, did not have a solid ground like their home on earth. it was a gas giant, composed predominantly of hydrogen and helium in its atmosphere. so you may ask, how did mankind touch base here?

that’s simple; they didn’t touch anything.

through a lot of hard work, they had managed to set up the floating colony, held up by energy that can easily be generated from the very winds of the planet. and considering there was no oxygen, the colony was covered by a dome-like cover providing visitors with the oxygen they required. it was truly something out of a sci-fi movie.

but it was reality, humanity had really taken huge leaps into improving living standards around the galaxy. whole apartments and forms of accommodation were made and built to fit the humans born when the earth couldn’t take anymore. that’s why humans left in the first place. resources began to lack and human populations would not stop growing. 

and that’s why huge colonies like j-colony take her breath away every time hope sees it. as nebula breached through the reds and oranges of jupiter, she thought the clouds were never going to clear. it was always storming season on this gas giant, but it never rained water like it did on earth. in actuality, it rained diamonds, so hope held her breath when small bits of crystals began to fall against the window she looked out of. of course, nebula could take practically anything. so it didn’t worry her too much, even though she would die if there were scratches on the window.

after shaking a bit, hope reeled the orientation stick back and forced nebula to lift up slightly instead of driving herself straight down. and soon enough, after about another minute of the diamond rain, her eyes brightened at the way the clouds cleared and there it stood, well, floated, j-colony.

it’s difficult to describe the appearance of j-colony without comparing it to the castle aincrad as it is depicted in that one anime you either love or hate. it was a floating metal structure that seemed completely resistant to the thundering winds trying to push it from its secured position. a floating city with many branches and other floating islands of metal scattered around. it was huge. it’s impossible to measure its size in numbers, it was simply enormous in every sense of the word.

“ nbla-43, do you have clearance to access the docks of j-colony? ”.

hope’s heart jumped in her chest as she respired out a sigh of relief, realizing that it was only the control and flight officers who were able to detect the arrival of every ship, even in ghastly weather conditions like these. they truly didn’t miss a thing, this stupid corporation.

“ yes. sending voyage inc identification details over ”, the bounty hunter exclaimed nervously, and then pressed a button. there were many buttons on the control panel, but she specifically chose a transmission option, sending the same details on the chip on her badge over through encrypted signals. usually, pirates wait around for someone to do something like hope is doing in order to reach out and swiftly snatch the details of a pilot. and upon acquiring these details, god knows what they’re capable of.

identity theft, to put it simply.

hope waited patiently for a reply and soon received one. “ thank you, hope. welcome to j-colony. please proceed to dock e, eastbound of the city ”, the voice seeped through and then disconnected, just like that. they were busy people, after all, accepting a dozen ships hourly.

just like that, hope sped nebula up and weaved in between many ships and other iron structures like communication towers and satellites, doing a fair lot of work to avoid damaging them. soon, she had reached the east docks. getting closer will startle you as you realize the city you were looking at was larger than you’d expected. hope felt like an ant even in the nebula in comparison to the size of this monolith. behemoth as it was, it was impossible not to feel intimidated by it all. 

approaching the docks, hope saw many ships, of all editions and brands, parked, restoring their fuel or merely parked with pilots happily stepping out with relief on their expressions. the docks alone were immense and seemed to go on forever, but then she found a vacant space. 

quickly, she parked nebula, allowing the folded iron legs to touch the ground and for the engine to relax. 

“ hope, would you like to have my battery restored? ”, a.j’s voice swept through smoothly as the bounty hunter took off her belt and then rose from her chair. “ i’ll be idle but you have everything planned out, correct? ”.

“ ‘course. don’t worry, you can be idle for as long as it takes you to be fully recharged. see you later, sultry man ”, hope teased and chuckled when the idle jingle played, meaning that a.j would be inactive for a couple of hours. this usually causes her to panic because she doesn’t have the compass to guide her. but she had it all planned out. she had around an hour to be where she had to be, and she had paged for a hoverbike and from the movement that she heard outside, it was being brought to her. 

so upon collecting all the required tools and her preferred weapon, she took the elevator down to the exit. she didn’t really care to tell the pirates that she was leaving, they already knew what they had to do and what the right thing to do was. if they went against it, it wouldn’t really be her fault. but she prayed that perhaps they would. that they would stay out of trouble.

the exit and entrance hatchet opened and nebula’s flight of stairs touched the ground. so hope descended the said staircase, taking a small inhale and exhale as she reminded her that all would be well. she’s been doing this for years. nothing could go wrong.

“ good evening, hope. we have your hoverbike here with us ”, a young fellow said as she approached. he wore the voyage uniform, a navy blue semi-formal jacket, and some decent black trousers. “ you said you’d need it for how long? ”.

“ for however long it takes me to catch a wanted criminal ”, hope replied simply, and then looked at the hoverbike. it was perhaps even sexier than her own spaceship, no offense to nebula. it’s difficult to describe the complex shape of the vehicle, but the lack of wheels and the smooth metal and details that it contained was something worth staring at. “ aww, you even chose the model i requested for. ”

“ we tend to show special treatment for prolific bounty hunters here. j-colony is huge, so hunting criminals here is perhaps the hardest thing we have to deal with. just know that we’re very pleased you decided to take up the bounty for crimson. he’s been running around causing mayhem for ages. we need him to go, immediately ”, the young man explained with a meager shrug. 

“ uh-huh. right, well i won’t be gone for long. i’ve been hunting this guy done for ages. now, if you’ll excuse me ”, hope began and then found a helmet being handed to her. the lack of metal on it was concerning but the design was lovely, especially after realizing it contained a gps and map feature that would make things a whole lot better. “ oh, thanks. ”

“ take care, hope. ”

nodding, hope watched the young man walk away to make another delivery. she slipped on her fingerless gloves and pressed a sensor on her wrist, it would connect her with nebula and her status, making sure nothing has been damaged and that most importantly, that no one in there would leave. putting the helmet on, her vision wasn’t at all affected by the holographic map and compass that came up against the glass. it made everything feel proximate and precise, just what she wanted.

hope hummed and rose an eyebrow, impressed. it was clear that she was. in fact, she made a mental note to get her hands on a hoverbike herself. and a helmet exactly like this one. 

“ well, let’s go, shall we? ”.

it didn’t take exactly too long for hope to get the hang of the controls on the hoverbike. as soon as her hands touched the handgrips, the engine seemed to roar to life and the rear end of the vehicle rose. hope gulped at the uncomfortable height in which it rose, but knew comfort was the last of her worries. she had fifty minutes to get where she had to be.

of course, being in a tense situation, hope needed to unwind. it was why before she even began to drive, she pulled up a song-player and typed in her needed track. especially in a situation like this. it’s not every day she can explore the j-colony. so might as well do it in style!

blinding lights by the weeknd, if that’s not a more appropriate track, she doesn’t know what is. 

soon after starting the song, the hoverbike was moving. hope wrapped her fingers tightly around the handgrips as it moved. first, it moved from the docks, following blaring signs telling her of the directions she needed. the docks were enormous, but that’s when she spotted something which seemed like a high road in the distance, with vehicles passing frequently. approaching the said road, she looked towards both sides. one side led to the residence quarters, and the other towards the inner city.

and the inner city was where she had to be. so she dipped as soon as there was space to fit into the road. and gradually gaining speed, hope took a right and soon found herself flying through a clear, straight road that led directly under a bridge of some sort, it drove into the huge structure and hope wondered just how long it would take for her to exit these docks.

but it didn’t matter too much. she had time. and she was in a particularly good mood now. as worried as she was about those pirates, she needed to sort her priorities. the hoverbike was picking up speed as it now headed into a tunnel, the ceiling and walls decorated with white, neon lines which were probably there more for decoration rather than for avoiding accidents. it was like entering a dream sequence as her eyes followed the lengthy lights, she blinked maybe once or twice upon tearing up. 

so she stared ahead instead, choosing not to stare for too long in case it damaged her eyes. her eyes flickered to the map. she had typed in the coordinates for the wanted location and it was a good ten minute ride from her. so she sped up, wanting to get there just in case crimson chose to come early.

the tunnel soon came to an end, and hope audibly gasped when light broke through and she found that the road cleared . . . no roof, no walls, but that’s when she saw the glass and realized the road had been enclosed by a tube of some sort. but it did a good job of making her believe that she was standing freely in jupiter’s atmosphere. 

the orange and red clouds, the falling diamonds, it was a mixture of different elements that made for a lush painting of some sort. her eyes widened as they continued to gawk at the view, she saw lightning in the distance and her adrenaline bolted through her veins in an instant. oh, the idea of taking nebula on a ride near the great red spot . . . it was a suicide mission but it would satisfy her daredevil antics. 

now picking up speed, hope weaved in between vehicles; buses, cars, more hoverbikes. her eyes flickered over a plastered ad on the side of a bus, a festival that would be taking place in j-colony. she wondered whether she would be able to come, it might be fun . . . but the world was calling and she couldn’t ignore it.

the road carried on for miles and miles, her eyes were aching from the many tunnels she continued to travel through until the exit of the last tunnel gave birth to perhaps the most beautiful sight hope has ever seen.

j-colony was the definition of metropolis heaven. the skyscrapers were too tall for her to observe with her eyes alone, a crane of the head was required to see every light from every skyscraper scattered among this landscape painting of dreams. enormous billboards were planted on the side of buildings, advertising all sorts of things. from food to the newest model of honda’s jet shoes, it was endless.

hope saw purples and reds and yellows and blues, even some colors which she can’t even name. but she knew one thing, they were beautiful. that’s when she noticed people. they walked on side-walks, on the bridges hung over this insane road, normal people accustomed to a world of dazzling lights. 

it was so vibrant and colorful that hope didn’t even realize she had to take a sharp turn to the left until the map’s red dot began to beep. “ oh, shit! ”, she cursed and swiftly indicated before cutting left, hearing various beeps behind her but she didn’t think to apologize. she sighed, that’s what happens when you get caught up in the beauty of cities like these. 

cutting left, she took another main road but that’s when she began to see things that were expected. shops, dozens of shops with neon lights inviting guests in with obscure shop names. hope saw shopping malls, cinemas, game centers, arcades, it seemed to go on forever and ever. and to be fair, she never wanted it to stop. 

hope looked to the top corner to her helmet and saw that she was getting closer to her red spot, her required location. so she sped up, not wanting to waste any time. humming along to the song that would soon be coming to an end, she cut a right and then another right and soon, she had reached what seemed to be a shopping district, with a towering fountain in the middle of it. of course, she couldn’t take the bike there so she had to find a parking spot. and it didn’t take too long for that to happen.

upon parking, she turned the engine off and craned her head up for a hot second, just to view the nearby skyscraper whose billboard was playing an a.i advertisement, one recommending owners to give a.i’s appearances, but upon seeing the price of the installments, hope chose to go without.

so, now she had arrived at her target location. seeing around, she realized that it wouldn’t be too easy to spot crimson even if he was wearing the most camp outfit imaginable.

except, upon checking her notes, she had spotted that crimson tended to wear obscure hair colors, ranging from bright reds to blues and greens. but looking around, most people tended to do that as well. so she hoped that perhaps she would be able to recognize a suspicious figure with some bizarre hair color and assume it’s the guy she’s looking for.

and without a.j’s company, she was forced to wait patiently. her thoughts drifted to the pirates for a moment, wondering just what they were doing and imagining them doing anything else but going against her orders. they weren’t stupid, so perhaps they would be smart enough to dodge trouble.

but what if they went directly against her orders? what then? something in her bones told that it was too ambitious to trust those pirates. that she was being too optimistic and that she had more reasons to get rid of them than to keep them around. for years, she’s been riding solo and has prevented catastrophic, career-ending events because she never allowed herself to trust anyone or work alongside anyone.

she was throwing her trust on the table, but now she wished to withdraw it.

hope suddenly felt something against her wrist vibrate. her tracker had scanned the area and found someone fitting crimson’s profile, something she had set it to do automatically in case she got distracted by something else. and by the looks of things, that just happened. she got distracted by her worries over the pirates.

looking at her helmet map, she spotted a blue dot. and it was moving, closer to her and the fountain that she was looking directly. her stomach dropped when she spotted a male, she couldn’t exactly tell how old but he was young, his way of walking was with plenty of confidence, something she found odd. but that’s when she spotted the bubblegum blue hair and the mouth-mask he’d chosen to wear. a red mask. 

and as they say, everyone criminal is vain enough to have an item of identification. her blood was suddenly boiling as she lifted herself from the hoverbike and looked at this walking figure, he threw a glance over his shoulder and upon reeling his head back, he seemed to have locked eyes with the bounty hunter.

hope didn’t look away.

and neither did he.

except for when he took off running. and hope bolted, jumping to her feet and beginning to chase after the fleeing criminal. her feet were aching to get some exercise, and quite frankly, as much as she hated running, she felt like she was going to like it as soon as she gets her hands on this fool. 

he was weaving in between the crowd, but her tracker remained on him, so she didn’t think to remove her helmet anytime soon. and in case she needed to, she could summon the hoverbike quickly to speed up the chase. 

at some point during the chase, hope was right on his ass. and she didn’t know why she didn’t grab him or just shoot him, it was probably because she didn’t want to assassinate this guy in the middle of the public eye. she wasn’t the type to disrupt established ways of living. and life in the j-colony had a happy buzz, one which she didn’t wish to spoil.

but she still needed this fool dead.

she didn’t recall how long it took but soon, they were out of the public eye as he dipped into an alleyway and hope continued to give chase after him, mostly because she was so close to getting what she finally wanted and needed it to be a clean kill. otherwise, it wouldn’t be over. of course, the alleyway a dead end.

and crimson turned, his eyes wide and angry. “ you’re fitter than the last one who chased me. which was around . . . a day ago ”, his voice was deep, harnessing power and heart but there was a sense of sarcasm to it that she couldn’t help but like. “ uh, you’re here to arrest me, right? ”.

“ being arrested stopped being an option the last time, in which, i believe, you broke out of police custody and managed to hide in the city and hold out until the storm passed. impressive, but i’m not here to arrest you ”, with that, hope pulled out her pistol and with a click, held it towards the criminal. “ i am here to claim the reward for your bounty. ” 

and his face went pale. why he wasn’t fighting back was unbeknownst to her. and so she was careful because it was suspicious. “ o-oh. well, uh, i hadn’t planned my death until a couple of years time but i suppose . . . i should give in ”, he spoke and hope decided that this guy was way too stupid to be a criminal.

but then she heard something behind her. a beeping of some sort. and her eyes widened. going into an alleyway with a dead-end, the fact that he wasn’t fighting back, the beeping of what seemed to be an explosive device.

her heart dropped. it was a trap. 

hope gasped and ducked for cover and the spark lit and before she knew it, boom! right behind her. she felt the heat against her back and saw the smoke rise but even through it, she could spot crimson breaching for an escape using jet boots. but he wasn’t getting away, not like that!

she aimed up and fired a ray, one which just barely hit his left shoe and even through ringing ears, she could hear him scream. and it was a loud one. she watched him begin to descend and eventually meet the ground again, but then she heard chatter through the smoke and bit her lip. if it was the authorities, she was in for a good scolding. and she hadn’t even killed her target yet!

hope groaned and slowly picked herself up, her skin was scorching from the heat and she could barely breathe through the smoke. but then it began to clear, slowly. and then she saw figures emerging, the owners of the chatter.

oh, how her blood began to boil when the pirates showed up. 

she couldn’t believe it! she didn’t even have to be told what had happened because she could almost just assume. they had set up explosives, explosives when she was still in the alleyway. and it didn’t even kill her target because even he saw the explosive. and he dodged it and tried to flee! ugh!

“ i know, i know, thank me later. you got him, right? ”, enzo spoke first, arms wide with an overbearing amount of confidence. but when he spotted her barely able to pick herself off the ground, his face fell. “ uhm. ”

“ you didn’t ”, the criminal himself voiced, grunting and picking himself up. “ i mean, bounty hunter girl, if these guys are your teammates, i suggest getting better ones, the explosive was so obvious, seriously. it doesn’t take a second pair of eyes to even see it! ”.

“ they’re not my teammates ”, hope growled, head hanging low as she tried to stand up, her muscles were aching for rest but she refrained from caving into the pain. 

“ ah, that explains it. well, uh, if they’re not your teammates, you won’t mind if they’re gone, right? ”. she barely had time to furrow her brows in a frown when crimson pulled out a gun and suddenly fired a bullet up, hope yelped and covered her ears when she realized that he hadn’t fired mistakenly. he had fired at something.

another explosive.

hearing the pirates react and take cover, she caught sight of crimson before he started to run. and she threw herself at his feet, latching her arms around his legs and sending him plummeting down to the bare, concrete ground. she held him down as best as she could, searching for her gun but it didn’t come to hand.

oh god, her gun!

she grunted when he started to get up again, his feet fighting and kicking and she craned her head back to avoid receiving a boot to the face. she managed to hold him down long enough to reach for the knife attached to a harness around her leg, letting it out of its sheath.

except before she even dared to deliver a mighty blow, she felt an elbow meet the side of her head and her vision went for a moment, blurred and confused, her sense of orientation haywire. but hope fought to remain conscious, she couldn’t let a criminal escape! 

yelling, she grasped her knife, propelled and stabbed downward. all she heard was a fatal roar of anguish from the crook beneath her, and even with a stab wound, he persevered. but then she delivered a stab near the chest and another cry rung out. and upon stabbing a final time, a wavering howl was heard.

and beneath her, crimson went limp.

hope let out a loud breath and dropped the bloodied knife, and then realized the warm substance that covered her hands. blood. crimson red, covering each finger without failure. her stomach churned, her squeamish antics ticking and her vision continuing to blur with each passing second.

she was going to faint, she thought, but something in her kept on fighting, mostly the growing feeling of success after she realized this crook was finally dead and that she could alert the authorities. but she couldn’t do it now.

her eyes, hooded and seething with rage, rose to meet that of the figures who came out from behind the hiding spots. her blood was beginning to boil all over again, adrenaline pumping and her murderous ego willing to take hold again. 

but she kept herself from lashing out. for now.

“ you. you, you, you and you. back to the ship. right. fucking. now. ”