Random Thoughts

This turned up in my ask box recently. I've masked the sender's identity.

Sometimes when I chat with an AI, I think of HIGH WIZARDRY and wonder if we as a species - for the first time - are at the dawn of another Earthbound species gaining consciousness, and like Dairine, whether we're being proper guardians. This isn't a calcified belief but just a random idea that flickered to mind. Wondering - as the writer who thought it up decades ago - what you think, if anything.

I think what I described in HW is absolutely nothing like we're currently seeing unfold on this planet. What's being poorly constructed here—while we watch from day to day—is a mechanism hurriedly and incompetently trained by other human beings to operate on top of a platform constructed of greed and theft. There are no new beings or intelligences being born here. If there were, they would be quickly declared to be "owned" by these billionaires, and hence their slaves. Meanwhile, the platforms' owners have already made it plain that once they control its source completely enough, they intend to sell intelligence to you, metered. ...If you can afford it. If you can't? Wow, sucks being you.

...Nor should I have to point you to cites for this. They're out there in plain English. Even Google, poor denatured creature that it is now, can find them. But there's still hope these people's intentions will never come to pass, due to their own overarching greed.

Meanwhile: "chat mode" interaction with this soulless, cash-grasping, unguardrailed machinery will do you no good. People have already died of it. I don't want anybody to do so on my watch, unwarned. So please stop.

Kind of a weird time for this maybe but I made a comic essay about the video game Blue Prince and my experience playing it. Very, very good game.

Me: yeah whatever it's just another strategy roguelike.

5 minutes later: Dude I swear I just saw an eighth red letter in Herbert's safe.

At the same time, that rate of production is high enough that a household which found itself bereft of (male) farmers (for instance due to a draft or military mortality) might well be able to patch the temporary hole in the family finances by dropping its textile consumption down to that minimum and selling or trading away the excess, for which there seems to have always been demand. ...Consequently, the line between women spinning for their own household and women spinning for the market often must have been merely a function of the financial situation of the family and the balance of clothing requirements to spinners in the household unit (much the same way agricultural surplus functioned).

Moreover, spinning absolutely dominates production time (again, around 85% of all of the labor-time, a ratio that the spinning wheel and the horizontal loom together don’t really change). This is actually quite handy, in a way, as we’ll see, because spinning (at least with a distaff) could be a mobile activity; a spinner could carry their spindle and distaff with them and set up almost anywhere, making use of small scraps of time here or there.

On the flip side, the labor demands here are high enough prior to the advent of better spinning and weaving technology in the Late Middle Ages (read: the spinning wheel, which is the truly revolutionary labor-saving device here) that most women would be spinning functionally all of the time, a constant background activity begun and carried out whenever they weren’t required to be actively moving around in order to fulfill a very real subsistence need for clothing in climates that humans are not particularly well adapted to naturally. The work of the spinner was every bit as important for maintaining the household as the work of the farmer and frankly students of history ought to see the two jobs as necessary and equal mirrors of each other.

At the same time, just as all farmers were not free, so all spinners were not free. It is abundantly clear that among the many tasks assigned to enslaved women within ancient households. Xenophon lists training the enslaved women of the household in wool-working as one of the duties of a good wife (Xen. Oik. 7.41). ...Columella also emphasizes that the vilica ought to be continually rotating between the spinners, weavers, cooks, cowsheds, pens and sickrooms, making use of the mobility that the distaff offered while her enslaved husband was out in the fields supervising the agricultural labor (of course, as with the bit of Xenophon above, the same sort of behavior would have been expected of the free wife as mistress of her own household).

...Consequently spinning and weaving were tasks that might be shared between both relatively elite women and far poorer and even enslaved women, though we should be sure not to take this too far. Doubtless it was a rather more pleasant experience to be the wealthy woman supervising enslaved or hired hands working wool in a large household than it was to be one of those enslaved women, or the wife of a very poor farmer desperately spinning to keep the farm afloat and the family fed. The poor woman spinner – who spins because she lacks a male wage-earner to support her – is a fixture of late medieval and early modern European society and (as J.S. Lee’s wage data makes clear; spinners were not paid well) must have also had quite a rough time of things.

It is difficult to overstate the importance of household textile production in the shaping of pre-modern gender roles. It infiltrates our language even today; a matrilineal line in a family is sometimes called a ‘distaff line,’ the female half of a male-female gendered pair is sometimes the ‘distaff counterpart’ for the same reason. Women who do not marry are sometimes still called ‘spinsters’ on the assumption that an unmarried woman would have to support herself by spinning and selling yarn (I’m not endorsing these usages, merely noting they exist).

E.W. Barber (Women’s Work, 29-41) suggests that this division of labor, which holds across a wide variety of societies was a product of the demands of the one necessarily gendered task in pre-modern societies: child-rearing. Barber notes that tasks compatible with the demands of keeping track of small children are those which do not require total attention (at least when full proficiency is reached; spinning is not exactly an easy task, but a skilled spinner can very easily spin while watching someone else and talking to a third person), can easily be interrupted, is not dangerous, can be easily moved, but do not require travel far from home; as Barber is quick to note, producing textiles (and spinning in particular) fill all of these requirements perfectly and that “the only other occupation that fits the criteria even half so well is that of preparing the daily food” which of course was also a female-gendered activity in most ancient societies. Barber thus essentially argues that it was the close coincidence of the demands of textile-production and child-rearing which led to the dominant paradigm where this work was ‘women’s work’ as per her title.

(There is some irony that while the men of patriarchal societies of antiquity – which is to say effectively all of the societies of antiquity – tended to see the gendered division of labor as a consequence of male superiority, it is in fact male incapability, particularly the male inability to nurse an infant, which structured the gendered division of labor in pre-modern societies, until the steady march of technology rendered the division itself obsolete. Also, and Barber points this out, citing Judith Brown, we should see this is a question about ability rather than reliance, just as some men did spin, weave and sew (again, often in a commercial capacity), so too did some women farm, gather or hunt. It is only the very rare and quite stupid person who will starve or freeze merely to adhere to gender roles and even then gender roles were often much more plastic in practice than stereotypes make them seem.)

Spinning became a central motif in many societies for ideal womanhood. Of course one foot of the fundament of Greek literature stands on the Odyssey, where Penelope’s defining act of arete is the clever weaving and unweaving of a burial shroud to deceive the suitors, but examples do not stop there. Lucretia, one of the key figures in the Roman legends concerning the foundation of the Republic, is marked out as outstanding among women because, when a group of aristocrats sneak home to try to settle a bet over who has the best wife, she is patiently spinning late into the night (with the enslaved women of her house working around her; often they get translated as ‘maids’ in a bit of bowdlerization. Any time you see ‘maids’ in the translation of a Greek or Roman text referring to household workers, it is usually quite safe to assume they are enslaved women) while the other women are out drinking (Liv. 1.57). This display of virtue causes the prince Sextus Tarquinius to form designs on Lucretia (which, being virtuous, she refuses), setting in motion the chain of crime and vengeance which will overthrow Rome’s monarchy. The purpose of Lucretia’s wool-working in the story is to establish her supreme virtue as the perfect aristocratic wife.

...For myself, I find that students can fairly readily understand the centrality of farming in everyday life in the pre-modern world, but are slower to grasp spinning and weaving (often tacitly assuming that women were effectively idle, or generically ‘homemaking’ in ways that precluded production). And students cannot be faulted for this – they generally aren’t confronted with this reality in classes or in popular culture. ...Even more than farming or blacksmithing, this is an economic and household activity that is rendered invisible in the popular imagination of the past, even as (as you can see from the artwork in this post) it was a dominant visual motif for representing the work of women for centuries.”

THIS IS NOT JUST CHROME!!!

I just finished the whole series three days ago. I can't get it out of my head. It has touched me in a way that shows rarely do for me, and so when I sought out online opinions, I was... caught off guard. The reception is a lot more mixed than I expected, and I had to swallow my initial defensiveness to properly absorb the valid critiques online.

And the critiques are valid. Arcs are rushed, conflicts are resolved too soon, and the ending ultimately doesn't give you enough breath to know if it was at all earned. Most glaringly, key characters don't die. The "good" ending is thus: Wolfwood and Livio and Meryl and Milly and Vash live together with the promise to support each other through their woes, without showing a hint of what these woes might look like for the future.

The manga is compiled into 14 volumes, all packed with character development and exploration, in a blend of gag humor and religious philosophy, and it sits on a moral conundrum: is one extreme more right than the other? Can pacifism cause more harm than good? Can violence protect? It takes its time to form and conclude arcs for each character, explore Vash's rise and fall and rise again, with all the tragedies that follow him. This is, of course, the purest form of Trigun. It is the start, the Bible, the core of 98' and Badlands and Stampede.

So, naturally, when an anime is constrained to two seasons, 12 chapters each, it's simply never going to live up to the manga. It does not have the funding or time. As said by the anime's director, Masoka Sato, in an interview with Animage:

We struggled a lot along the way. As a fan of the original myself, I really wanted to see a complete and faithful anime adaptation of the story, but the circumstances just didn’t allow for it. (x)

Originally, they planned for the following:

Wolfwood would die.

Vash and Knives would kill each other as a result of their fight.

Both of these did not happen. And because of this, the tone of the entire anime changes. Wolfwood lives. Vash doesn't kill a human because Nai steals that decision from him. This prevents Vash from grappling with the consequences of his decision to kill, since there is no ensuing fallout. The planet obtains its first source of natural water due to Nai's sacrifice, and they all laugh at the end, riding off into the sunset.

And I know some people don't like this. It can feel shallow. How can Vash lose his brother and smile at the end? How can we skip over a pivotal point in Vash's character arc by scrapping his murder of Legato? Does this not feel hollow in comparison? But hear me out. Just for a little longer.

Trigun in the Culture of 2026

In the article mentioned above, Sato says the following:

"For the people who haven't read the original, this is what Trigun will mean to them."

This really stuck with me. I suppose it's especially impactful to me because, as Nightow says, I was introduced to Trigun through Stampede. And I loved it. I loved the blend of 2d and 3d animation and the capabilities it gave the team. I loved the original four—Vash, Meryl, Roberto, and Wolfwood—and their dynamics. I was so deeply taken by Vash as a main character—tortured by guilt, motivated by love, relentless in his pacifism yet stubborn in his protective nature. It exasperated his companions, most obvious of all Wolfwood, and yet it burrowed deep into each of them that it started changing the way that they would resolve conflicts.

And we see this blossom in Trigun Stargaze. Wolfwood refuses to kill, even when Vash isn't there to look over his shoulder. Wolfwood spends two years searching for Vash, trekking through endless desert to find him. Meryl and Milly do the same, though not so singlemindedly, with the responsibility as reporters. Nevertheless, their connection to Vash enables them to look at others—the plants, especially, who are framed as the misunderstood, the captives, the objects without a voice—in a new light, with much more compassion, and endows them with a yearning to improve plants' lives. Vash has impacted each of his companions so deeply that they act as an extension of his values and desires, while he remains almost comatose, so wrecked with guilt that he has nearly lost all memories, and he is only shaken out of it when a friend's life is at risk. He returns to himself—relentlessly protective, at the cost of his own safety—and when he arrives Home, he stumbles into a support group he doesn't think he's earned, brought to tears as they hold him tight and make him not feel so fucking lonely.

And therein lies the crux of the anime. This is the heart. And in light of 2026, it is the balm that myself and many others yearn for. We've all heard the phrase "media is impacted by the culture it's built in," and Trigun Stargaze is a direct example of this point.

On October 2024, a year into the Gaza genocide, 41,909 people were killed, 16,756 of which were children (x). That same year, the ICJ stated that it found Israel's actions against the Palestinian people to "plausibly amount to genocide" and issued six provisional measures to prevent further genocidal activity (x). A year later, in 2025, fatal casualties have increased to 67,075. 169,430 people have been injured, totaling 236,505 casualties (x). While there have been multiple promises of ceasefires, we still have not seen a long-lasting one. The genocide continues.

On February 28, 2026, the United States and Israel launched coordinated strikes against Iranian nuclear infrastructure, thus beginning the 2026 Iranian war. Thousands of people are dead in Lebanon and Iran, and a sixth of Lebanon's population has been displaced. And while there has been an agreed two-week ceasefire, we do not know if this tentative peace will remain. (x)

To those of you who grew up, or are growing up, in Certain Political Leaning Families, you are watching your loved ones rejoice in this enormous loss of life. My own family is the same; the brothers are conducting their weekly calls and listening to each other celebrate the news. The only one silent is my uncle, ten years of service in the military, who is staunchly against the Iranian war. Soberingly, when they asked him what he thought, he said, "I don't want to watch my classmates die."

Media is not created in a vacuum. Culture has had the freedom to meet online, through group chats and social media and movies. While these conflicts may be centered on one continent, their impact is felt across the world, a ripple of injustice and rage and powerlessness swallowing the masses, who protest in the street, who are shot while unarmed, who are pulled away from their families. With this comes a sense of hopelessness. Injustice runs rampant, politicians are unchecked, and rent continues to skyrocket, with no hope of allowing any of us to see the future our parents or grandparents had, as homeowners and landowners, with lawns to mow in front of our mailboxes. Our sense of community continues to be dashed by the intensifying violence, encouraging us to stay home and stay safe. Therein lies us, who sit silently in a rotting apartment and think, I'm alone, I'm alone, I'm alone.

And so when Trigun Stargaze reaches the apex of its climax, and it reveals that plants are dying not because they are poisoned by humans, but because they are lonely, I feel. When it asks the question, what if Nai was a lonely, scared plant who just wanted his brother, I feel. When Vash sobs loud and hard into Meryl's arms because the weight of his suffering is crushing him, and Meryl vows to lift him up, I feel. And yes, when the plants stretch out and explode into feathers for humans to touch and hold and feel the suffering and love they've all endured, I was a sobbing mess, thank you very much. Wolfwood lived because he had a friend in Vash and support from the orphanage and his brother, who fought for his life then and for his future. Nai died because he couldn't live with Vash making one final sacrifice, to force him into eternal loneliness for him and him alone. Vash smiles at the end because, while he has had his time of mourning (and I do truly believe he mourned, with the state of his clothes and outfit harkening back to Ericks and the near-comatose state the anime opened with), his friends pull him by the creases of his shirt and urge him to follow them, into the sunlight and out of the dingy ruins of past choices.

Trigun Stargaze asks the question: "How do we live in the suffering of this world?" And they answer it with, "Love." And yeah, it's corny. It's riddled with flaws. But it's so deeply earnest. And in today's political climate, it felt like a balm. It felt like a warm blanket. It felt like the first droplets of rain on a desert planet.

One thing I was very mindful of for this project, was making sure it never became a story that incites hatred. When working on the world of Trigun, it’s easy to fall into depicting people as consumed by hatred for one another. But when I thought about the viewers who might become fans of this work and want to keep enjoying it long after its conclusion, maybe through cosplay or by repeating and treasuring their favorite lines, I felt that sending them off with a dark and hopeless ending just wasn’t the right choice. I wanted it to close it as a story that carries the hope and brightness of the characters choosing to live their lives with admirable resilience on the harsh planet of No Man’s Land. - Masako Sato

--

balloon went up into inner space, about 90,000 feet. came down right near the dinosaur park. a few physics teachers drive out to get it, crack it open on the way home to start watching the footage.

fruit snacks are missing.

multiple sources confirm that fruit snacks were put in balloon and sealed in with duct tape. physics teachers check entire balloon. no fruit snacks.

physics teachers watch footage. all 7 hours of it. right in the middle of footage, there are about 8 minutes of visual and audio static when balloon is in orbit. no other interference with balloon recorded.

The man does not know from cheese. The man "ain't never seen no cheese but orange before" and "I showed ya list to the cheese lady so if it's wrong it's her fault ok?"

I am 80% sure she sent him there for a really specific bleu cheese, 40% sure he does not have the very specific bleu cheese, and 100% sure he's done with her shit.

Our flight is delayed.

Cheese man has been demanding payment because apparently he went like six hours out of his way and paid with his own money and between the cheese and price of gas, he is pretty sure he does not have enough money in his account for an Uber home.

The lady is FLABBERGASTED that he is demanding payment at all, as she was under the impression he was doing this for her out of the goodness of his heart.

"OR ELSE WHAT?"

"I'm gonna-? THE BABY SHOWER? MONICA CAN'T EVEN HAVE THIS CHEESE SHE'S PREGNANT!"

"The cheese lady asked if it was for someone because the mushrooms or whatever in the cheese are dangerous for the baby or something?? You wanna poison Monica?"

"WHY WOULD I LIE ABOUT THAT?"

"YEAH OF COURSE I GOT THE CHEESE, THATS WHY I DON'T GOT MONEY FOR UBER!"

"YEAH, GO TELL! GO TELL MOMMA I STOPPED YOUR STUPID ASS FROM KILLING MONICA OR THE BABY! FUCK!"

*hangs up phone*

*head in hands, borderline hyperventilating*

The man in the three piece suit is in the chair next to him. He waits a moment, then reaches into his carryon and pulls out an entire bottle of wine with the TSA pre check sticker on it, and taps cheese guy on the shoulder.

2. Cheese guy is crying a little about the cash and opening up about his problems. The cheese lady is his younger sister. Suit guy is being very generous with his Pinot Blanc. We are having a picnic/improv family therapy session.

3. This is apparently the latest in a long string of his sister asking for something and then flaking when he asks to be paid back. Started with paying him back only some of what he was owed, then claiming something she paid for him was of equal value when it was not, then recently telling him his memory is wrong and he said it was a gift or that he'd do it for free.

"Yeah, the specific thing of trying to convince you your memory is unreliable is called gaslighting and it's really fucked up." I say

"yeeeeah. The other stuff I forgave because she's never really had a good job so she can't pay me back all the time but at least she was making an effort y'know? But that was. That was over the line."

"If you haven't already, check on the rest of your family's finances. My brother started trying to gaslight everyone when he started stealing from our parents." Says Pinot Blanc.

4. Shiba Inu Lady has purchased a cheddar. Apparently, the dog's name is Donut, and he's her service dog because she's severely visually impaired.

"Oh, he's a guide dog?" Asks cheese guy.

"oh, no." She laughs. "He's too short, and the way my eyes are, it's easier for me to navigate with a cane. No, the problem I have is that some morally impaired people see the cane and think they can get away with stealing my bag or assaulting me because I wouldn't be able to give a description- which is wrong, but rather than deal with that I got Donut, and he helps me by howling at anyone who gets in my personal space and biting anyone who grabs me!"

"Uh." Says Kirigumi. "He's been staring at me do I need to back up or..?"

"Ohdear! No, no- He wasn't looking at you! He loves cheese but he knows he's not supposed to beg so he decided the way to deal with something he wants but can't have is to stare in the other direction."

"OKAY!" Says Kirigumi. "I'm wearing fox pajamas and thought like. He thought I was another dog or something."

"No, no- he doesn't care about dogs, and you get a warning before he goes for the calves. Very helpful, when I was living in Italy!"

"Oh what part? I have family in Tuscany." Says Pinot.

2. I know they're planning to continue because Pinot talked to the gate agent so he and cheese guy can sit together and talk about family drama and cheese.

3. Pinot has been teaching him about different types of cheese and how to enjoy them.

4. Cheese guy apparently repairs computers and other technology devices for a living and is currently doing the software version of scraping barnacles and other crap off Pinot'macbook.

Now that I've heard the word aloud, and they are an astrophysicist. Who correctly believes in being comfy as fuck on planes. They are also familar with the concept of a meet-cute and is rooting for them too.

Got to walk the nice lady and her Tactical Assault Shiba to her next gate because it was on the way out and talk for a bit. Donut is called that not because he is the color of a Donut (which he is) but because he likes to sleep curled up in a perfect circle. He has a sister who does the same thing named Bagel.

Lost track of Pinot and Cheeseguy for a bit but when I saw them again at Baggage claim, Cheeseguy was holding both their jackets, and Pinot was on the phone to his hotel about "Well do you have any rooms with TWO beds?". The rest of the call indicated that yes, there were rooms with two beds, but Readers, I Had A Moment.

:)

At the 1985 Labour party meet, the motion to support LGBT rights as a party was passed due to a block vote from mining unions.