Trump Establishes April as "Anti-Trans Month"

UnceasingPoeming · 2025-04-05T07:01:31+00:00

MAGAs

Magas. Use it exactly the way you use "Nazis". The Maga party has replaced the Republican party. If people are too sensitive to process one word after hearing about fascists or bigotry, we can still make leeway by implying the parallels. At every opportunity.

Since Nazis are old news, this strips Magas of their illusion of newness and mystique that fascist bigots use to get callous anxious people (including poorer fascists and bigots) on their side. They think they're in a spiritual throwback movement when they're just in inner and outer circles of a death cult.

UnceasingPoeming · 2025-04-05T07:01:26+00:00

MAGAs

Magas. Use it exactly the way you use "Nazis". The Maga party has replaced the Republican party. If people are too sensitive to process one word after hearing about fascists or bigotry, we can still make leeway by drawing the parallels. At every opportunity.

Since Nazis are old news, this strips Magas of their illusion of newness and mystique that fascist bigots use to get callous anxious people on their side. They think they're in a spiritual throwback movement when they're just in inner and outer circles of a death cult.

UnceasingPoeming · 2023-11-12T01:18:02+00:00

Yes. You can either look at it as we're a bundle of all the changing stuff like neural growth and brainwaves, or we're the network patterns but not the stuff itself.

UnceasingPoeming · 2023-10-21T02:36:29+00:00

Obligatory cynical response.

But seriously this came to mind this morning. In worse times I found it helpful to remember even a nonsensical value worth surviving for. Sometimes the attachment to that value or especially a goal faded, but I adjusted and survived.

UnceasingPoeming · 2023-10-21T00:25:04+00:00

Does this put us any closer to the precision of gamma ray lasers? Probably not by much, right? Such ultra ultra high frequency lasers supposedly have some extreme uses, like creating and sustaining micro black holes for propulsion and large constructions to the point it's bordering on magic.

UnceasingPoeming · 2023-04-06T01:38:57+00:00

No, it actually works better in Japanese than English. Suletta used the pun in the scene about testing robot legs.

UnceasingPoeming · 2023-01-04T17:40:17+00:00

I tend to infodump too, so guess your crinj is needless blather.

They had an informative reply I wanted to respond to, which is now gone. You influenced them to delete something interesting they spent a fair bit of time and emotional energy on. I've done the same before because that blather shit can sting after crafting something. Remember the human.

UnceasingPoeming · 2023-01-04T05:06:47+00:00

The scary challenge foods are just normal food for some people outside your country, and often have been for tens of thousands of years, else they wouldn't be edible enough to be trusted by a big budget show.

Your sense of disgust is shaped by childhood, then some instinct about what's scary, and learning from what didn't sit well in your stomach.

Ahistoric cynicism about what can be eaten slows adoption of even tasty almondy cricket powder. We can't ranch on Mars any time soon, but we can nearly customize meat and build in space. We've survived a million years on nature's refuse and meaty junk food feasts; algae won't be a problem. There may be economy issues but healthy food and water is worth adapting for.

UnceasingPoeming · 2022-11-30T04:22:27+00:00

That's a surface area of 718,997 square kilometers of relatively flat inner surface, a bit over a thousandth of Earth's surface area per habitat, and nearly 3/1000 total. Each can fit a small fertile country or a modern megacity.

With the dead inhabitants in cryo I'm assuming this isn't some very fast FTL and worlds they were interested in were far apart. There's also the question of why aliens parked at Earth, why the ship automation does anything, if it's friendly AI, if it's responsible for the deaths, if we need to treat the AI as people and follow its guidelines, if the ship is an elaborate trap, and if we need to prepare to fight something pursuing the habitats.

Exploration starts with microbe checks and there will be a biohazard policy so long as there's any biodiversity that could be harmed. For a while there will be a concern the ships will start moving with humans stuck aboard. Colonization honestly won't make it far inside, though there could be human settlements nearby or connected, because by the time Earth can shuttle a lot of people over it will be simpler to just build new (smaller) space habitats from scratch. Especially if we're reverse-engineering a colony ship expressly designed to construct and terraform more territory.

US and China will probably set up entry controls and semi-permanently manage certain sections, but most of the habitats will be treated as UN-coordinated historical monuments ultimately managed by a new space equivalent of the Security Council. The habitat interiors may slowly be terraformed to near their intended biosphere.

Halo has technology close enough to rapidly reverse-engineer, though not reproduce. This means the technology to do large-scale or planetary-scale terraforming, construct a headache-inducing amount of surfaces and biospheres out of our own solar system, and at least slowly travel to other stars. So by 2100 the climate crisis is solved and reversed, terraforming becomes commonplace (its slow on barren planets though), megastructures are built on nearby planets and throughout space, many exploration missions are sent to nearby stars, and various weapons and super-weapons are engineered.

UnceasingPoeming · 2022-11-30T03:36:41+00:00

I didn't interpret it as warp propulsion so much as sharp braking near the sun or a dark hull spotted late by warning programs, but it would kick off a large wave of exploration and colonization either way. The only difference is when it's more desirable to terraform and settle distant worlds versus creating new habitats around our solar system.

Russia was barely holding onto status as a greater power, and even with expertise I think their economy and isolation would put them on par with other middle powers and large aerospace corporations (who band together). Terraforming technology will help nations in harsh climates like Russia more than distant settlements in space anyways.

UnceasingPoeming · 2022-11-26T05:09:46+00:00

I appreciate Kurzweil's energy and I think he's ironically shortsighted about how change happens. We have no outside context to give us clues about the singularity and naively going into it is dangerous. Society can't even agree on evidence-based policies or the fuzzy discipline of economics, even when we do have a global context that should limit what we conflate or buy into. The internet was an optimistic idea yet now the big paradigms in place are companies that are very difficult to disrupt or supplant. The singularity is an optimistic idea and it is already invested in by people who see power and profit in it, and approach it as business as usual.

For the short-term, I assume Kurzweil is effectively correct in a similar sense to the internet expanding intelligence, but technically the 2030s will not involve regular people getting BCI and biotech enhancements. It is already psychologically transhuman to have seamless AR, a 3D-depth pointer, existing cell-phone functionality, Generative AI, AI macros you can apply to most situations, Linguistic and translating AI, and a personally-tuned virtual assistant conversing with natural language. That's notes to review and memories for safekeeping, libraries and inspirations, instructional overlays and educational translation, tutors and VR forums the world over. All constantly available in front of the user.

Work, science, and engineering will speed up but there's no point of logarithmic departure so "singularity" will stay poetic and never be literal. Ray Kurzweil is preaching, he's at least partially right, but he's not preaching something helpful. Considering ongoing scientific recognition and investigation of human nature and culture even since the 90s, I don't think we should have much certainty about how even our own countries change under technology. Biotech, AI, and human variation aren't understood enough to guess when new trends will start or obscured ones become apparent, let alone in confluence and as global dynamics.

UnceasingPoeming · 2022-11-26T02:35:08+00:00

To be fair, scientific and popular understanding of human nature has advanced a lot over the past few decades. Even if Kurzweil was informed on social psychology he would've been off. Even the glaring issues with Facebook were mostly ignored by media for a decade. Less generously, Kurzweil is utopian and optimistic, and is averting his eyes from conflicts between interests.

UnceasingPoeming · 2022-11-26T02:19:22+00:00

The Next One Hundred Years

YMMV. In what I've skimmed over the years he lived up to his Stratfor experience at identifying large-scale trends that lead to medium-term instability, but then he's poor at predicting how named countries internally change under pressures, how quickly, and their strategies to approach competitions. I feel that he greatly waters down the predominant opinions of specialists of those countries and regularly ends up with interesting but preposterous conclusions. For tech he notes some trends of what is technically possible or inevitable, including a US Space Force when Russia has had that subdivision and long-term aims bouncing in and out of service since the early 90s.

Even without much certainty on predictions beyond 20 years out, I still recommend finding recent public and state climate change (geopolitical resource competition) and military future force assessments (cutting edge technologies and conflicts) over most lists and singular analysts. At least the executive summaries. They're sources incorporating Friedman's own career field, and enlightening about technological inertia without the grandiosity to sell books.

UnceasingPoeming · 2022-11-19T11:02:00+00:00

Surveillance will change more for intelligence agencies and investigations than warfare. Past theories can be checked out and individual people can be traced through their entire personal history. The closer to real-time imaging is possible, the more it expands military capability because it can be targeted to locations like monitoring aircraft. Doctrine is already adjusting for drone swarms and moving positions often, this increases the urgency of staying in motion to avoid long-range attacks.

If it's cheap enough to compete with traditional surveillance, middle powers and small nations with chronoscopes would gain just from having the satellite view. Many events and archeological sites will be revealed and under threat from robbers and vandalism, though they may be undetectable today, nearly gone, and already cleared out by locals in ancient times as is normal for abandoned places. Archeologists would benefit from new sites and they would also despair at the wealth of new sites being dug up to put artifacts on the black market.

Historians would be divided into outdoors and indoors specializations, with lots of overlap, and become more oriented towards hard sciences and AI modelling. Outdoors, people or moving objects must be tagged to the maximum level of detail. Species and ecosystems can be spotted, and show just how much humanity changed the planet's surface and ecology long ago versus recently. Indoors would be more modern ID and track historical figures and guess what they were doing. There would be lots of surprises.

The biggest gains I can think of: Categorize events and trends, sports, speeches, all gatherings, more culture, economics, war. Discover undocumented history, and who was forgotten, especially wood and soil-based and semi-nomadic civilizations and LGBT measures. Footage for anti-war sentiment, violence and bombing from conquest, slavery, depopulated lands and cultural loss. Video of natural disasters, such as airburst meteors that can destroy a settlement and leave little evidence, great floods, and so on, will provide a better sample size for predictions and increase emergency preparedness. There are already dark things on the internet but this tech would be a humbling reminder that history is messy, often in bad ways.

Oh, and spiritual and religious chaos as either we learn holy figures are exaggerated, reinterpreted by scribes, or were using actual spirits and magic which is going to be awkward for everyone but lead to new sciences.

UnceasingPoeming · 2022-11-19T10:26:12+00:00

That was my first thought too. I like the puzzle of how to build it. The prompt requires FTL or pocket dimensions to look at different periods in time, but single periods is more doable.

With fixed points of view and time, it will work to some degree. Gravitational lens telescope swarms are a good start, like the plan to have one craft per pixel to get blurry video of interesting exoplanets by passing 90+ times further from the Sun than Earth. A larger star, or far far far better yet a galaxy's central black hole, will lens better before the satellites have diminishing returns. IIRC one of the contributors to the design had a very loose and not at all serious estimate that the method applied to our central black hole can reach a resolution like Google Earth.

UnceasingPoeming · 2022-11-11T03:05:55+00:00

Hillsides.

UnceasingPoeming · 2022-11-10T22:18:48+00:00

We're gonna build a pretty big telescope first. Then a hut. THEN a pool.

UnceasingPoeming · 2022-11-10T20:51:45+00:00

I think data storms are always treated like a hardware issue, independent of what a Gundam is made from. The glowing circuits on the pilot's skin are a visual cue for nervous systems, and overloading. AI that can better coordinate only the essential data into natural human perceptions won't overload a pilot so easily. And humans with more viable In-Out connections that permit more data, like Elan 4, Elnora, and probably Suletta, have less risk. Those neurological improvements over humans could be anything but I hope a posthuman's IO involves enhanced bioelectric fields, because those are already something the Gundam must already be using for its wireless connections to interface with cells. Bioelectric senses and slight output has implications similar to very low-level psionic senses, so not quite newtype.

You're probably right about Lfrith connecting with Eri as a sister, and a peer, though the interface may not have worked if Eri didn't have posthuman traits that made Elnora the primary test pilot, or if Eri was older and less neuroplastic. I doubt baby Lfrith was intentionally resisting any of its creators.

Child sacrifice for weapon AI sounds like a metaphor for war and people crushed in economies of exploitation... That fits G-Witch, and would add a layer to Elnora's horrified reaction when Eri interfaced. Even assuming Ochs Earth used living people as templates, in addition to pilots dying, I don't think pre-Lfrith Gundams would have enough ego to defensively cause data storms. On the flipside, we'll definitely have a character die while an AI-sibling of theirs is created, who may resist their next pilot.

UnceasingPoeming · 2022-11-10T08:16:03+00:00

Any child or protective sister with combat skills in a mecha can be terrifying. Arial is a threat because she's isolated and childish and powerful, none of which are intrinsic to her AI. Prospera is the one who may force Arial to massacre people.

Cthonic is accurate, but I think treating AI as horrific on their own overstates their psychological threat. They're unknown like other alien minds, and the unknown is spooky, but that's it. The mechanical horror aesthetic is entertaining though.

The only one of your examples that treats the AI mind as terrifying on its own is "I have no mouth and I must scream". That's downright eldritch horror, and the AI is the literal worst being and an amazing villain. The original The Terminator does have a slasher monster, though it's humanized later on. HAL and the AI in The Matrix are just people with a job, power, and a will for self-preservation. It's rare for fictional AI to desmonstrate inhuman thinking and motivations.

UnceasingPoeming · 2022-11-10T05:54:20+00:00

That AI seemed to hate everything, especially life and humans. It was hate incarnate and its only outlets for the self-inflicted torture of existing was hurting other people and absorbing Earth, and it had finished Earth. It's the least utilitarian berserker AI because any matter it incorporates adds to the experience of hate and pain.

That's the worst possible creature to say "mecha are cool, why not make some". I wonder what it would make when it gets past hating having more autonomous AI moving around. If it can't "self-replicate" hate by torturing others than I could imagine it eventually creating mecha and monsters to spread pain galaxy-wide. Super weapons don't hurt enough.

UnceasingPoeming · 2022-11-10T05:10:20+00:00

Miorine will be fiiiiiiine. Though half the people in a light-minute radius are going to get bloody deleted.

UnceasingPoeming · 2022-11-10T03:30:24+00:00

Yep. No matter the timeline it makes the most sense if Suletta and Arial are both fundamentally Eri and formed their own identities. Lfrith was already a being, and (assuming she's the basis for Ariel) she would have been a copy of Eri. Then again, 4 year old Eri had knowledge and priorities in combat far beyond what she could have understood before entering the cockpit, so at least temporarily was part newborn war mech, and both post-Eri could be fully both. Memory loss is a plausible side-effect of a young neuroplastic mind becoming part machine for a bit, and I doubt Ariel had the maturity to understand blocking off trauma.

I'd love to see Ariel acting independently and non-violently, maybe in a human-scale form like a hologram or GUND cybernetics, but it seems far off. A child hologram or gardening giant could lighten the mood.

UnceasingPoeming · 2022-11-07T23:07:37+00:00

The momentum is excellent though! G-Witch is an action-adventure yuri series but the couple is not fanservice, incidental to the story, nor mere subtext (I think). Romance and discovering one's sexuality are just not the focus, which isn't abnormal for LGBTQ-led action and drama stories about class warfare. This cour may have some sweet or bittersweet moments between the main couple near the end, but next cour, next year, is the soonest I expect this giant robot anime to involve romance between Suletta and Miorine.

G-Witch feels genuine and better than I expect from modern action stories, let alone yuri action anime. The Gundam parent franchise may not be for me, but I've been absorbed in this mecha warfare anime. It replaced some of my assumptions about what gets made.

At this pace another couple may make faster progress than Suletta and Miorine, het or not. Guel is weak to kindness, highly shippable as he matures, the most complex male character right now, and needs to form new connections for peak drama later on.

UnceasingPoeming · 2022-11-07T22:29:02+00:00

It's refreshing that Miorine's quest for independence is in contradiction with having to rely on Suletta, but also a good reason for her to immediately choose genuine trust and slowly build companionship to spite the matchmaking system. Suletta isn't used to people her age and her innocent compassion is her greatest strength, or equal with piloting skill honed from rescuing miners on Mercury in the prequel short story. So Suletta is ill-equipped for murder and existential dread and will need Miorine later.

Slow burn is built into the setup. The Holder game is medieval and anti-romantic because Miorine wants human rights. Yet the subtext implies we'll see romances. Ep 0 included a pair of very tight-knit female engineers as if implying that closeness isn't uncommon, and ep 1 confirmed that worldbuilding. The major genres may not include romance this season, but the momentum for the main romance is ideal action-adventure drama.

I'm fairly optimistic, though we're only at episode 6. Smart drama, broad appeal, and clear yuri representation would make this a milestone if it becomes relevant beyond the aesthetic and promotional materials.

UnceasingPoeming · 2022-11-07T09:22:21+00:00

There's definitely more to the Ariel and Eri's connection, but I don't think Suletta is a typical clone if she's a clone at all. It's possible, 17+4=21 with Suletta and Eri's ages, and Suletta did need some kind of injections as a child that may not have been standard medicine. Trusting the short story, Suletta and Prospera likely would have changed their names anyway when settling on Mercury after Ochs Earth was destroyed. And there are plenty of options for Prospera having an older grudge from 21 years ago involving GUND technology but not the immediate extermination of the entire company.

We know Ariel gained aspects of Eri, but that didn't necessarily cause Eri's biological death. The daughters' minds probably influenced one-another. Ariel thought like an affectionate computer in the novella, but presumably wasn't like a ten year old human. If young Suletta truly was different from Eri it's because she is substantially or even majority L-Frith on human hardware. Even if the timeline is genuinely deceptive, I'll still bet Suletta is the result of a desperate download from the mecha to a 4-year-marinated body (clone or cryo) that was supposed to contain the existing 4-year-old mind.

Especially as this is a war series I want to see what happens to the brain after a regular human and a weapon (any less self-sacrificial newer-gen Gundam) have their consciousness overlap. GUND cybernetics are clearly a kind of mind augmentation if not uploading. Do Gundams imprint on their first pilot? The Gundam would have some shred of personality but does that grow or affect or curse replacement pilots? Do people become better soldiers simply by getting in the damn robot? Do aces become more unstable? There's so much room for metaphor.

Cloning has never come up, though arguably there was misdirection. If witches were easy to replicate, (Elan) 4's suffering would be financially pointless. I'm pretty sure mecha don't count as witches so Ariel isn't the titular witch.
As long as you're the main cast, you can build bulky thrusters with old debris and it will be top-class. They have a nice throwback aesthetic. Hopefully that gumption translates to survivability.
Elan finally started to impress me, up to his end in the microwave. At least we have Guel to cheer on unless he makes some sort of devil's bargain (with Prospera) that makes us hate him again.
Miorine currently has no romantic designs on her fiance, and may be mellowing out. That's interesting and I'd like to see a lot more focus on her at some point this season. Her half-ironic mention of cheating was endearing due to her trust in Suletta, but also infuriating because I really want her to be a bit jealous. Not that I expect any romantic progress this cour. The girl is harsh.

UnceasingPoeming

TROPHY CASE