Griselda Gimpel

Underappreciated Fave Friday: Show your adoration for a podcast that deserves more listeners or a female character who deserves more love.

Silver can never use an endearment/familiar language (darling, sweetheart, etc) with a Winter because the Rules post-Change are that humans cannot address Winters directly.

The societal power imbalance constrains Silver's language.

But the flip side of that is that Folk who emphasize their society power can't have the warmth/familiarity of being addressed with endearments. And if any of them were to try to initiate familiar language, it would come off as demeaning because it would be unearned familiarity.

Aster gets endearments because Aster has been downplaying their societal power.

But the humans may still not ask Aster - a Spring - a question. It's possible that the day that the humans can ask Aster a question without fear of reprisal is the day Aster stops being a Spring - stops being one of the Folk all together.

Silver can never use an endearment/familiar language (darling, sweetheart, etc) with a Winter because the Rules post-Change are that humans cannot address Winters directly.

The societal power imbalance constrains Silver's language.

But the flip side of that is that Folk who emphasize their society power can't have the warmth/familiarity of being addressed with endearments. And if any of them were to try to initiate familiar language, it would come off as demeaning because it would be unearned familiarity.

Aster gets endearments because Aster has been downplaying their societal power.

But the humans may still not ask Aster - a Spring - a question. It's possible that the day that the humans can ask Aster a question without fear of reprisal is the day Aster stops being a Spring - stops being one of the Folk all together.

I’m imagining someone obtaining a ring that is way too big and it keeps slipping off mid spell or maybe it falls off and gets lost

or someone who obtains a ring that’s way too small and they can only get the ring on halfway. and what if the rings only work if they’re put on halfway or more on someone’s finger and since this person’s is right at halfway, their powers sort of glitch in and out

love changes people

oooo you wanna listen to hymns for the road so bad 🌀🌀🌀

Murderbot describes Preservation as using a “complicated barter system.” The funniest (to me) interpretation of this is just that they use cash and MB has never seen actual for real physical paper/metal cash before (what is currency but complicated barter?). However it’s fun to flex the cultural worldbuilding imagination and say, what if the Preservation economy is structured as a LETS, which is also, conceptually, sort of, a complicated barter system.

LETS stands for Local Exchange Trading System and has been implemented in a few places in recent decades. At its core it’s a different mode of conceptualizing debt.

Basically, the way we treat money now is as a commodity: it is zero-sum Stuff that we hoard and accumulate. You earn it and then you spend it. It’s based on the logic of scarcity. A LETS treats the idea of money as more like debt: you create more by borrowing it from a conceptual pool. You spend it, and then you earn it. It’s based on the logic of abundance.

To my understanding, you “borrow” a certain number of Green Dollars (the LETS monetary system discussed in the specific example I attended a lecture on) from the central tracking system. You can use that to pay for whatever good or service you want. Then, you are obligated to do that many “Green Dollars” worth of goods or services for that person (or someone else, depending) at some point to balance the ledger.

You can’t be denied a “loan” if you’re in the red; that’s not how it works. You declare that you’re using X amount of Green Dollars, there’s no application/denial system. BUT if you have a history of not putting it back into the community, people can stop doing business with you. It’s an economy based on reciprocity and reputation.

Essentially, spending money is not so much spending money, it’s making a promise to put this much value back into the community at some point in the future.

It has only ever been implemented on fairly small and local scales, and usually as a supplement to the “regular” economy; I think to make it work on a planetary scale, there would need to be a central governmental “bank” keeping track (election to the oversight of which is probably a critically important job) as well as designated government-run “sinks” where people can pay to get stuff like food and health care without being expected to return an equivalent amount because what they need is far more than what they can return.

You can get rich by providing a good or service everyone wants, but the currency you’re rich in is basically a promise to pay you back in some form, and then the things that people do for you. People can transfer Green Dollar debt too: if X does a service for Y, then Y does a service for Z, Y can agree to accept the repayment via Z doing a service for X if X has something Z wants more than Y does. The goal is to create networks of inter-reliance where debt is not a bad thing but rather a representation of what we owe to each other and to society.

Local communities may act more like gift economies where “everything comes out in the wash” anyway, and direct trade of items or services can sometimes be expedient, but the LETS and its central bank tracking people’s yet-unpaid debts and repayments is the primary planetary economic system. There are a bunch of committees around this.

Unrelatedly to the LETS thing I imagine Preservation having a “service tax” akin to jury duty where every once in a while you are called up to spend the day washing dishes at the communal free food court or something. Also a looooot of industrial scale food production is done by ag-bots. Also it’s extremely common and kind of culturally expected that most people grow some food themselves, whether it’s a window-box of herbs or a fruit tree they tend or a vegetable garden. Also also surplus food is stored in the government-owned cryo-pods that the Pressy colonists were in—if they can keep a human alive in cryo stasis for 200 years they can keep fruit and vegetables fresh for as long as needed, so if a food crisis ever comes up the government has a stockpile. I think these are important ways that labor and goods get distributed also.

the phrase "Honor Princess Detective is a tour de force" would not leave my brain until i drew this

[ID (copied from alt): A three-panel comic depicting Murderbot, Sofi, and Farai from the Murderbot Diaries in a simplified style.

In the first panel, Sofi excitedly says, "SecUnit!!! The season finale is about to start!!!" while adorning Murderbot's head with a tiara. Murderbot responds on the feed, "Yes, I see it."

In the second panel, Murderbot and Sofi are seen from behind while Farai walks past carrying a basket. She says on the feed, "You don't have to indulge her."

We don't know many details surrounding the other Harbinger rings not possessed by Adam and Amy. We can infer that one person got their ring from the South Korean military and Damian is implied to have been given it by the Catholic Church (unless I misunderstood the exchange he has with Amy in the season finale). Adam got his while on a research trip and Amy was given hers by a billionaire. This got really long, so it's going to be under the read more.

It's Amy's ring that I want to focus on because there is a consistent theme throughout the podcast of colonialism. Most of the Harbinger sites we know of were in colonised areas, including the one in County Leitrim. Look at the list of known Harbinger sites here and just look at how many are places France colonised and yet of the three ring bearers who's identities we know for certain, two of them received their rings from locations they have no connections to.

you will NEVER be able to guess what this post from the official US government consumer product safety commission was in response to (under the cut)