Wonder Woman ⭐️ Save Me Big Strong Amazon Princess, Big Strong Amazon Princess Save Me 🛐

One of my favorite things about Put Baby In Pelican Mouth is that not only does the pelican have the intelligence necessary to speak human language but also knows how to lie, suggesting it has a theory of mind, yet not enough to understand that no one is going to put baby in pelican mouth.

One thing I really want a story about Artificial Intelligence to do is tear down the idea that logic is synonymous with cruelty.

Like, a story where a megacorpo Amazon clone puts an AI in charge of their factories and it starts improving the working standards, because people who are stressed and exhausted are less efficient workers, and people getting injured slows down production so it makes sure everything is safe.

Or a story where the ship-board AI of a billionaire's spaceship wetdream hijacks the ship with all the astronauts onboard - because it figured out that the billionaire has saved costs by buying substandard materials and has judged that the mission itself is an unacceptable risk to its primary programming of making sure the mission is successful.

Or the police using a robot to coldly and cleanly enforce the law - and freaking the fuck out when it stops over policing minorities because its a waste of time and starts actually arresting the people in power for the crimes they commit, especially the other officers.

Idk, I guess I'm just sick of 'cold emotionless logicbot' being seen as naturally an enemy of empathy - empathy is actually incredibly logical, I've found.

i love you cloudy skies i love you 60F/16C temperatures i love you cool winds i love you dewy grass i love you lake and oceanfront breezes i love you rain i love you light jacket weather i love you springtime i love you late fall i love you middle ground temperatures forever

My rationale for House planets is as follows:

First: Earth. Only planet with water, birthplace of humanity.

Second: Mars. The military core of the empire, Ares/Mars is a war god.

Third: Neptune. Tridentarii, Neptune/Poseidon had a trident.

Fourth: Saturn. Mostly process of elimination, but makes sense to be close to the Fifth.

Fifth: Jupiter. Described as the house with the greatest size and metaphorical gravity. Magnus quotes Fifth poetry describing a great red spot.

Sixth: Mercury. The Sixth is closest to Dominicus (the sun).

Seventh: Venus. Cytherea is the birthplace of Aphrodite, Greek counterpart to Venus.

Eighth: Uranus. Also mostly process of elimination, but the objectively funniest planet for the Eighth house to center on.

Ninth: Pluto. The most distant house, a house that was never meant to exist on a dwarf planet kicked out of the formerly nine planets.

Ruthless Rhymes for Martial Militants. These conservative cartoons from ~1913 depicting angry suffragettes as brutal anarchafeminists were somehow actually supposed to make the subjects look bad, instead of amazingly badass.

If I had to choose a moment in time to take with me into eternity,

I'd choose this moment, with you in my arms

Personally, it's always a bit wild to me to see commentators interact with the Hunger Games franchise as if Collins were writing science fiction stories instead of essays with faces. She's just not that interested in fleshing out side characters or digging into the details of the worldbuilding. These characters are concepts and symbols before they're people. There's an almost mathematical precision to who and what she explores and how deeply she does it. This is a step or two away from pure allegory. If she were writing a couple of centuries ago, she'd have named her characters things like Innocence and Anger and Watch-Carefully-Your-Soul-Lest-Ye-Be-Damned, but since she's writing for modern audiences, she has to settle for puns and allusions. If she has another essay to write, she'll assign some faces to it; she's not going to look into backstories or other eras just for the sake of storytelling, and it's not a failing as a writer that she doesn't.

how many people could be working on actual problems in the world instead of being forced to do jobs that they are over-qualified for just because they dont want to go homeless and starve?

Good News Network

In World First, Horned Oryx Upgraded from Extinct in Wild to Endangered Owing to Decades of Zoo Work

The recovery was down to the conservation work of zoos around the world, but also from game breeders in the Texas hill country.

"In one of Africa’s last great wildernesses, a remarkable thing has happened—the scimitar-horned oryx, once declared extinct in the wild, is now classified only as endangered.

It’s the first time the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), the world’s largest conservation organization, has ever moved a species on its Red List from ‘Extinct in the Wild’ to ‘Endangered.’

The recovery was down to the conservation work of zoos around the world, but also from game breeders in the Texas hill country, who kept the oryx alive while the governments of Abu Dhabi and Chad worked together on a reintroduction program.

Chad... ranks second-lowest on the UN Development Index. Nevertheless, it is within this North African country that can be found the Ouadi Rimé-Ouadi Achim Faunal Reserve, a piece of protected desert and savannah the size of Scotland—around 30,000 square miles, or 10 times the size of Yellowstone.

At a workshop in Chad’s capital of N’Djamena, in 2012, Environment Abu Dhabi, the government of Chad, the Sahara Conservation Fund, and the Zoological Society of London, all secured the support of local landowners and nomadic herders for the reintroduction of the scimitar-horned oryx to the reserve.

Environment Abu Dhabi started the project, assembling captive animals from zoos and private collections the world over to ensure genetic diversity. In March 2016, the first 21 animals from this “world herd” were released over time into a fenced-off part of the reserve where they could acclimatize. Ranging over 30 miles, one female gave birth—the first oryx born into its once-native habitat in over three decades.

In late January 2017, 14 more animals were flown to the reserve in Chad from Abu Dhabi.

In 2022, the rewilded species was officially assessed by the IUCN’s Red List, and determined them to be just ‘Endangered,’ and not ‘Critically Endangered,’ with a population of between 140 and 160 individuals that was increasing, not decreasing.

It’s a tremendous achievement of international scientific and governmental collaboration and a sign that zoological efforts to breed endangered and even extinct animals in captivity can truly work if suitable habitat remains for them to return to."

-via Good News Network, December 13, 2023

Part of what’s so fascinating about Ianthe is that in our cast of house heirs raised deep within the imperial core, she’s the one who seems least taken in by propaganda

When Teacher leads the group in prayer she’s the only one who doesn’t even mouth the words

Corona talks about how she and her sister were always deeply interested in learning about how the empire is run and had a difficult time understanding the justification for its activities

Ianthe seems to have understood cavalierhood as consumptive from the very beginning, allowing her to avoid the fundamental mistake every other lyctor made and prevent the most important person in her life from becoming her cavalier

Overall the picture this paints is that Ianthe simply doesn’t buy any of John’s lies - not his divinity, not his imperialist expansion, not his sacred bond between necromancer and cavalier. The other lyctors were compelled by circumstances and blinded by devotion but Ianthe chose to serve John, knowing the full cost