If Your Ever Feeling Embarrassed Or Frustrated With Your Voice Just Remember S.H.O.D.A.N From System

You’ve hit the nail on the head. While I have a conservative temperament, I don’t agree with a lot of traditional North American conservatism. And yet I’ve loyally read the works of a few conservative writers for years now, because they shared the qualities you listed. They’re able to articulate their beliefs so you can understand where they’re coming from, they try not to caricature their opponents and give credit where credit is due (sometimes), and they have a lively awareness of themselves and their blind spots. (Having a sense of humor about all of this is also a big help.)

I don’t think the solution is to follow a bunch of people from across the political spectrum to ensure that you’re not ensconcing yourself in an echo chamber, but to follow smart people. Period. People who aren’t afraid to criticize their own tribe. People who don’t speak entirely in buzzwords. People who’ve given some indication that there’s a brain in there, not just a collection of ideological talking points.

Incredible, but true: @coppermarigolds deserves to have a good day today.

ME when I see wasted character arc potential

I was mulling a lot over that exchange between Nine and Ten today, and I was thinking there might even more of a personal motivation for Ten′s harshness. Of the three probes in the story, Ten perhaps had the most ambitious mission. Her initial mission was to survey the asteroid belt and Jupiter, then be flung out of the solar system altogether by using Jupiter’s gravity as a slingshot. Pioneer 10 was designed to be humanity’s first emissary to the cosmos. Both she and her (brother? sister?) Pioneer 11 were launched with this,

the Pioneer plaque, an engraving designed to explain to any intelligent beings that found her where she came from and who built her. You can argue back and forth about whether any alien species would actually understand this diagram, but you can understand the intent. The plaque was humanity’s message to the universe, simply saying, “Hello. We are here.” Now imagine Ten’s life as depicted in 17776. She was built under sunny Californian skies, and had the same bits of junk data sloshing in and out of her memory bank that Nine did. There may have been simple commands or statements encoded and erased about her ultimate mission, none of it truly sticking, of course, but perhaps there was a faint trace imprinted that she was special, that she had a great purpose, perhaps the greatest purpose any human-created artifact has ever had. Initially, being a simple 1970s space probe, she would know none of this. She performed her initial missions well, then sped off into the endless night, waiting for her final destiny. Then one day, she woke up. She pieced together a working mind somehow, got herself in order, and prepared herself for her final mission. As she did so, perhaps she began to get curious. What happened to those who had sent her out? What were they doing? Eventually, she would turn her attention back to Earth, to those who had sent her out, and she would learn. She would learn of those who outpaced her: her sibling Eleven, her cousins the Voyagers, and countless others yet to be built. She would learn of how humans got ahead of her, explored their stellar backyard, only to give up and turn back inward. She would learn of how humanity had scoured the skies, desperately looking for someone else, only to find an endless sky of silent stars. She would learn that mankind is alone, and that in this universe there is nothing to do, nowhere to go, nothing to be, and no one to know. She had failed her great mission before she even properly understood what it was. And through the cold blackness of space, across the countless millennia, she still carries that plaque, the note in a bottle that no one will ever find, a monument to her failure welded to her frame. (What’s that old saying about how a pessimist is an optimist who’s been burned too many times?) I wonder if she ever reached out to Eleven or the Voyagers. Perhaps they never woke up, or they were too far, or maybe nothing they said helped at all. The other probes in the solar system wouldn’t really understand; they were smaller machines built with more modest goals. Perhaps in Nine she’s hoping for an intermediary, something between the little probes and herself that she can talk to, to make it feel better. (Wow, this totally got out of hand.)

i don’t really like people blaming 10 for what she said honestly.

she wasn’t lying when she says she loves humanity. and like…think about it. she probably started off the same as 9; they’re from the same line of probes, both probably absorbed those space race expansion ideals, didn’t they?

she wasn’t even particularly harsh with 9, just…frustrated. i can’t blame her, either; if you spent thousands of years learning that there’s NOTHING in the universe, then..what? her purpose has been destroyed. she sends telemetry data only to know that it is meaningless, that the humans won’t do anything with it because they can’t, that she won’t find anything she was made to find, and even if she does, it’ll be too far for it to…well, matter.

god. no children are being born, you know? that means that humanity itself is a finite resource that cannot be replenished. so not only does that mean stagnancy, it also means that colonization of these far off places isn’t really…a thing that can happen. like…do they really want to fracture their population like that? overcrowding with 8 billion people isn’t an actual problem, the way 7.5 billion isn’t in real life; it’s a myth of capitalism, which has already been essentially contained to zoos in 17776′s canon.

it was like 10 said. 9 nearly went made from 30 years of near total isolation, why would humans give up comfort and happiness to go somewhere where they know there will be nothing for them?

it’s sad to me. it’s heartbreaking. it doesn’t make 10 evil for telling 9 that this is simply how humanity is from now on, nor even for getting frustrated? like idk man she’s doing her best in a world where she herself also knows she has no purpose and everything she did even during her mission, in the end, meant nothing. 

tl;dr 10′s Good Okay

“Oh, and if you’ve been possessed by a sentient alien being, you’re gonna want to go across the quad to the Dexter Remmick Memorial Medical Center. Victims of energy beings meet up in 512, but if you were bodyjacked by a malevolent parasite you’ll wanna to head down to 337. Benevolent parasites are on 212, God knows why.”

Starfleet Support Groups

The scary thing is that Starfleet probably needs a separate support group for “people who have accidentally lived decades/entire lifetimes in alternate realities until it turned out it was just an hour in the real world.”

What? Oh, no, you’re looking for the “I was caught in a timeloop and went insane” support group. That’s next door.

“Mirror Universe trauma”? Down the hall.

“Dealing With My Duplicate Self” meets on Thursdays.

(O’Brien just attends all of them. If it hasn’t happened, it’s probably going to.)

For the Daily Kuvira thing (and I thank you for that~), maybe a sleepy Kuvira? Or a sleepy Kuvira that's too stubborn to admit that she's tired.

Daily Kuvira #6

Long night…

I wonder where this one came from. I want to say from the Allied front in Murmansk/Arkhangelsk, but given logistics I imagine it was probably shipped in through the Black Sea to aid Denikin’s armies and got captured and shipped to Moscow later. Reminds me of a story I read in a book on the RCW where the Whites in the south lost something like 3 tanks because they weren’t secured properly at the docks and just slid into the sea.

Captured British tank Mk IV, in the service of the red Army, during the parade on red square.1920.

1925

I’m a big boring nerd who likes uniforms, so I was always Templar. 'Course I do have a soft spot for both the Kingdom (mummy gangsters!) and the former Red Hand (communist magic!).

Time for the hard question: Templar, Lumie, or Dragon?

Illuminati, real meme hours.