Latest Posts by sieveplayer - Page 5

The power of stealing a name.

“Jerboa”

The quaint rodent, the unique and lovable creature. Famous for its amusing and impressive skill at leaping and bouncing. An iconic species of the deserts of North Africa.

The first French nuclear bomb in the Sahara: Named after the jerboa.

France, in its imperial occupation of North and West Africa, used colonial Algeria’s Saharan landscape as the site of its first tests. The very first nuclear bomb unleashed by France, detonated on 13 February 1960, was Gerboise Bleue. The day before the bomb was detonated, French troops visited Algerians living in the test region, giving local residents chain necklaces to be worn. France detonated the bomb. Then French troops went back to collect the necklaces, which were actually measuring devices, meant to detect effects of the bomb. The French troops collected the data. But they didn’t tell the Algerian locals that they had just been poisoned, some of them fatally. They didn’t warn Algerians about the long-term effects of fallout, or what radiation would do to them, as residual poisoning continued to kill for decades. For many years, local people would harvest abandoned metals from testing sites, to refashion into jewelry, shelter, and other items. The French government knew that the remnants were toxic, but still failed to warn residents. After hundreds of thousands died in over 7 years of war, Algeria gained independence from France in 1962. Even afterwards, France detonated another 13 bombs in Algeria. The French government would not pass legislation providing compensation for victims of its nuclear bomb testing until 2010.

“Aldebaran”

The conspicuous orange-hued star Aldebaran. The seasonal arrival of this star, visible in the sky, has auspicious meaning. Especially in Polynesia where the stars, constellations, are sometimes referred to as “the roof of voyaging.” Stars guide oceanic navigation, and also guide food cultivation and harvest. For centuries and for many cultures across many islands across these seas, when the star became visible, would reemerge after an absence, the heliacal rising of Aldebaran in the skies of the tropical South Pacific signaled the beginning of the growing season for breadfruit, a quintessential resource across the Pacific and an iconic staple food. Breadfruit, of pivotal importance to food, sustenance. Aldebaran arrives, food can be cultivated.

Aldebaran brings life.

The first French nuclear bomb in Polynesia: Named Aldebaran.

After Algeria formally gained independence, France brought their weapons to imperial “possessions” in the South Pacific, to so-called “French Polynesia.” In May 1963, about 300 French personnel arrived at Moruroa, where 50,000 cubic meters of coral reef were obliterated to build access channels for the scientific/military infrastructure at what was designed as a testing/study site. Eventually, in the 1960s, over 10,000 French personnel and settlers (including civilian entrepreneurs and real estate developers) arrived in French Polynesia. The first bomb, detonated on 2 July 1966, was Aldebaran. French personnel recorded the environmental effects of radiation poisoning and fallout, but despite the immediate and extreme danger to Indigenous Polynesians, the French government did not declassify the results of those environmental studies until nearly 2010. By 1996, France had test 193 nuclear bombs in Polynesia. No victim officially compensated until after 2010. After the detonation of the bomb Aldebaran, over 400 kilometers away, drinking water at the notable island Mangareva contained 6 times the average amount of radiation; soil contained 50 times more radiation; unwashed garden vegetables contained 666 times more radiation; and, 3 months later, the rain falling on Mangareva contained 11 million times more radiation than the expected amount.

Thunderstorms, carrying poison. People hundreds of kilometers away had to hide from the rain.

Aldebaran brings death.

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The scale of the insult. To appropriate names, important to a culture, to a place, and then to ascribe those same names to the weapons that would then literally rain death upon those same people and landscapes.

PSA for people planning to vote in the OTW election: there's pretty good evidence that the candidate Audrey R. ran for Congress as a Republican just last year. Check ballotpedia for "Audrey Richards". This isn't a person I'd trust with our works.

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Oh dear.

but no yeah lets have the conversation:

"the CEO doesnt want to run that kind of website" Excuse, shouldnt have bought the 'go nuts show nuts whatever' website if thats the case. APPEAL DENIED

"we have to follow the TOS of the appstores we're hosted on" Excuse item one, no you dont, item two, you have since those days implimented infrastructure that would allow pornography and sex work on this platform Without violating TOS of any applicable app store. APPEAL DENIED

"we own the site we get to make the rules" Incorrect, this site has only ever made profit when the users willed it. we collectively own the site as a hive mind and no legal change in ownership will change that. APPEAL DENIED

"we have to keep this website safe for the children who use it" Argument based on fallacy banning pornography and sex workers does not prevent pornography and sex work from occuring on the site, it only forces aforementioned users to hide and avoid labling their content appropriately, which REDUCES the safety for children and sex workers alike instead of increasing it, this has been shown to the point that making this argument at all is tantamount to admiting fascist intent APPEAL DENIED

So what I’ve learned from the past couple months of being really loud about being a bi woman on Tumblr is: A lot of young/new LGBT+ people on this site do not understand that some of the stuff they’re saying comes across to other LGBT+ people as offensive, aggressive, or threatening. And when they actually find out the history and context, a lot of them go, “Oh my god, I’m so sorry, I never meant to say that.”

Like, “queer is a slur”: I get the impression that people saying this are like… oh, how I might react if I heard someone refer to all gay men as “f*gs”. Like, “Oh wow, that’s a super loaded word with a bunch of negative freight behind it, are you really sure you want to put that word on people who are still very raw and would be alarmed, upset, or offended if they heard you call them it, no matter what you intended?”

So they’re really surprised when self-described queers respond with a LOT of hostility to what feels like a well-intentioned reminder that some people might not like it. 

That’s because there’s a history of “political lesbians”, like Sheila Jeffreys, who believe that no matter their sexual orientation, women should cut off all social contact with men, who are fundamentally evil, and only date the “correct” sex, which is other women. Political lesbians claim that relationships between women, especially ones that don’t contain lust, are fundamentally pure, good, and  unproblematic. They therefore regard most of the LGBT community with deep suspicion, because its members are either way too into sex, into the wrong kind of sex, into sex with men, are men themselves, or somehow challenge the very definitions of sex and gender. 

When “queer theory” arrived in the 1980s and 1990s as an organized attempt by many diverse LGBT+ people in academia to sit down and talk about the social oppressions they face, political lesbians like Jeffreys attacked it harshly, publishing articles like “The Queer Disappearance of Lesbians”, arguing that because queer theory said it was okay to be a man or stop being a man or want to have sex with a man, it was fundamentally evil and destructive. And this attitude has echoed through the years; many LGBT+ people have experience being harshly criticized by radical feminists because being anything but a cis “gold star lesbian” (another phrase that gives me war flashbacks) was considered patriarchal, oppressive, and basically evil.

And when those arguments happened, “queer” was a good umbrella to shelter under, even when people didn’t know the intricacies of academic queer theory; people who identified as “queer” were more likely to be accepting and understanding, and “queer” was often the only label or community bisexual and nonbinary people didn’t get chased out of. If someone didn’t disagree that people got to call themselves queer, but didn’t want to be called queer themselves, they could just say “I don’t like being called queer” and that was that. Being “queer” was to being LGBT as being a “feminist” was to being a woman; it was opt-in.

But this history isn’t evident when these interactions happen. We don’t sit down and say, “Okay, so forty years ago there was this woman named Sheila, and…” Instead we queers go POP! like pufferfish, instantly on the defensive, a red haze descending over our vision, and bellow, “DO NOT TELL ME WHAT WORDS I CANNOT USE,” because we cannot find a way to say, “This word is so vital and precious to me, I wouldn’t be alive in the same way if I lost it.” And then the people who just pointed out that this word has a history, JEEZ, way to overreact, go away very confused and off-put, because they were just trying to say.

But I’ve found that once this is explained, a lot of people go, “Oh wow, okay, I did NOT mean to insinuate that, I didn’t realize that I was also saying something with a lot of painful freight to it.”

And that? That gives me hope for the future.

not caring if people think you're stupid is a life hack. recognising that you are kind of stupid is an even bigger life hack. we build entire societies to take care of each other bc we're all kind of stupid. it's fine.

Every person need to be taught disability history

Not the “oh Einstein was probably autistic” or the sanitized Helen Keller story. but this history disabled people have made and has been made for us.

Teach them about Carrie Buck, who was sterilized against her will, sued in 1927, and lost because “Three generations of imbeciles [were] enough.”

Teach them about Judith Heumann and her associates, who in 1977, held the longest sit in a government building for the enactment of 504 protection passed three years earlier.

Teach them about all the Baby Does, newborns in 1980s who were born disabled and who doctors left to die without treatment, who’s deaths lead to the passing of The Baby Doe amendment to the child abuse law in 1984.

Teach them about the deaf students at Gallaudet University, a liberal arts school for the deaf, who in 1988, protested the appointment of yet another hearing president and successfully elected I. King Jordan as their first deaf president.

Teach them about Jim Sinclair, who at the 1993 international Autism Conference stood and said “don’t mourn for us. We are alive. We are real. And we’re here waiting for you.”

Teach about the disability activists who laid down in front of buses for accessible transit in 1978, crawled up the steps of congress in 1990 for the ADA, and fight against police brutality, poverty, restricted access to medical care, and abuse today.

Teach about us.

europeans have types of racism i didn't even know existed

one fun thing about being a teacher in march 2023 is that chess is a literal epidemic among teens. we are starting to have meetings about how we can STOP teenagers from playing too much chess which is like if we were trying to figure out how to stop them from reading for fun. When i was in high school five years ago chess was nerd shit only but now it is transcending every social and language barrier and is absolutely rampant. kids aren’t on their phone texting in class anymore it’s ONLY chess.com. kids are playing chess on their phones while playing chess in real life. this is still better than tiktok because at least the kids are developing an attention span from this

my mental image anytime i see someone leave this comment

Death of a Salesman happens like every day to upper crust Americans but instead of poetic suicides they just join Qanon.

"Metalheart (also known as Depthcore or Trendwhore) is an aesthetic that was prevalent from roughly 1998 to 2004, during the Y2K Era. It was characterized by deformed abstract shapes and futuristic fonts on blurry backgrounds."

x

Human giant robot pilot: *shows up for the fight piloting an incomprehensible biomechanical horror*

Writhing blob of tentacles: *shows up for the fight piloting a giant naked human*

There are many really specific types of worldbuilding I wish we had a name for just so I can search for it more effectively. For instance, when people make alien psychologies for their aliens or come up with alternate human evolutions like what the novel Blindsight does with its vampires. 

Some art and maps of a game I’m running in mothership for my online friends. The premise is that the system was divided between two ideological camps, but sponsored a joint scientific expedition after receiving a mysterious radio broadcast from Kairon at the edge of the system. 

Concept: reverse exposition-bot NPC companion. They know fuck-all, and all of your dialogue options with them consist of the player character explaining stuff to them. The game's lore changes on the fly so that whatever you tell them retroactively becomes correct.

Problem: depicting villains whose villainy lies in having extreme and unreasonable reactions to objectively intolerable bullshit risks framing any objection whatsoever to the bullshit in question as unreasonable, thereby tacitly advocating for the status quo.

Problem problem: villains whose villainy lies in having extreme and unreasonable reactions to objectively intolerable bullshit are also the most relatable.

I think a lot about manufacturing processes because they’re the most impressive things humanity has ever done and injection moulding wacks me out the most. I was looking at the toy keyboard I bought a while back and it got me thinking about how much of what we consider to be the look of The Modern Era is down to injection moulding.

I hold that injection moulding is one of the pillars of modern society and technology. Can you imagine a world where you couldn’t use injection moulding. It’d look completely foreign. Like looking into an alien world. When you consider it you have to conclude that injection moulding has shaped our culture as much as the development of the camera or the invention of the piano or the creation of glassblowing. If archaeologists had to name our culture in the style of the Corded Ware culture or the Funnel Beaker culture, we’d be the Injection Moulded Plastic culture.

Injection moulding is how we get, oh, almost every plastic thing you’ve ever seen. The keys on your keyboard are injection moulded. Your phone case is injection moulded. Unless you’ve got a fancy milled metal laptop like a macbook then your laptop’s chassis is mostly injection moulded plastic. Your lightswitches are injection moulded. Plastic water bottles are injection moulded. Injection moulding is how we can produce extremely similar objects at breakneck pace for almost no money.

Now it’s important to rememeber that injection moulding isn’t cheap, or, well, injection moulding is only cheap for mass production. Every single unique piece of plastic needs a mould, and each mould will cost somewhere around thousands to tens of thousands of dollars EACH, depending on how tight the tolerances are and how complex the geometry is. Look at how many unique plastic pieces there are on that keyboard. Each one represents an investment of like $7000 into making this toy that gets sold for about $20, so there’s no way this would get made unless the company had plans to sell literally hundreds of thousands of these things.

(This mould can spit out one chair every 30 seconds and it probably cost twenty thousand dollars to make)

Once you learn to see injection moulding you can’t unsee it. It’s like learning about kerning, or musical intervals, or disability compliant designs, or the pantone colours, or about how many insulator disks are needed on different voltage power lines. You start to see it everywhere, you realise that everything in your life relies upon our ability to jam plastic through a heated screw and into a mould reliably, hundreds of times per day, all day, every day.

Unless you’re wandering alone in the wilderness (and even then, maybe: check your clothing), look around and see if there’s something injection moulded near you. I can tell you the answer, there definitely is. It’s inescapable.

What would a world without injection moulded parts look like? It’d be weird. Everything we think of as cheap and easy to make is suddenly expensive. Complex curves and slopes like you’d find on a one dollar potato peeler now require hours of work to form. Every budget consumer item would be like those cheap sheet metal PC cases that have drawn blood from everyone who build a PC in them. Everything now has the aesthetics of a Sun 3/280 system:

Heck, even this sheet steel cube has a dozen injection moulded parts visible.

All the chunky plastic housing of the 90′s and 2000′s, all the sleek curves of the 2010′s, all the cheap plastic knick-knacks, the plastic toy horses, the snugly-fitting appliance chassis, the stacking plastic chairs. All these things now cost ten times as much and have to be formed from heavy steel, or milled out of chunks of cast plastic, or replaced with formed sheet metal.

Our culture, artistic sensibilities, and sense of value has been irrevocably shaped by our ability to squeeze liquid plastic into a metal die.

random bitter aspiring authors on "writing advice" blogs: Don't make your main characters super special mary sues. don't make them better than other people or more interesting. your main characters should be boring average guys with the personalities of wood pulp

the Epic of Gilgamesh: Gilgamesh was objectively the best man ever. He was the hottest, sexiest, most gorgeous hunk of pure manly awesomeness that ever lived and he used a sword that weighed 120 pounds.

What does it say, nandi?

Due to a combination of the residual childhood trauma hypervigilance and ADHD selective processing I am constantly on both ends of the spectrum of being aware of things. Did I notice the way someone shifted their arm in a manner that they usually don't, indicating that they may be irate with this situation? Yes. Did I notice that conversation in this room is not drifting towards a subject that these people would naturally talk about next, indicating that they are avoiding the subject? of course. Did I notice that the person who frequently parks here has removed that sticker from their car? Yeah clearly. Did I notice that truck almost hitting me? No.

My brain is the box that Schrödinger's cat is in, and there is no knowing whether I am aware of everything or absolutely nothing of what's going on unless you crack it open and check. Before that, I exist simultaneously in both the states of hyper-awareness and not being aware of jack fucking shit.

my take on the whole “is therapy speak making us selfish” thing is no, it’s not. it’s just giving people who were already selfish some extremely annoying new vocabulary

Mordecai, you gotta stop posting cringe. you're gonna lose subscriber!

reblog if your name isn't Amanda.

2,121,566 people are not Amanda and counting!

We’ll find you Amanda.