tant pis, tway

Kloster Lüne, from 1172 to the protestant reformation a Benedictine nunnery, now a Lutheran women's convent.

I really like how the scientology speedrunning trend is developing, in this clip we see that the participants are

Not deterred by the closed door

Working as a group

Protecting their identities

Inflicting material costs to the institution via property destruction

Getting away at the end

Her name was Judy-Lynn del Rey. And she became the most powerful editor in science fiction history.

Born in 1943 with achondroplastic dwarfism, Judy-Lynn grew up devouring science fiction in New York City's public libraries. At a time when the genre was dismissed as pulp fiction for teenage boys, she saw something else entirely: the future of storytelling.

She started at the bottom—an office assistant at Galaxy, the most prestigious science fiction magazine of the 1960s. Within four years, she was managing editor.

Then Ballantine Books came calling.

When she arrived at Ballantine in 1973, science fiction and fantasy were afterthoughts in publishing. Fantasy in particular was considered unsellable—unless you were Tolkien. Judy-Lynn thought that was nonsense.

Her first major move was audacious: she cut ties with one of Ballantine's bestselling authors, John Norman, whose "Gor" novels were popular but notoriously misogynistic. It was a risk. She didn't care.

Then came the gamble that changed everything.

In 1976, someone brought her an opportunity: the novelization rights to an upcoming space movie by a young director named George Lucas. Hollywood thought the film would bomb. Studio executives were skeptical. Most publishers passed.

Judy-Lynn said yes.

The Star Wars novelization sold 4.5 million copies before the movie even premiered.

She would later call herself the "Mama of Star Wars."

In 1977, she launched Del Rey Books—her own imprint, with her husband Lester editing fantasy while she oversaw everything else. Their first original novel was Terry Brooks's The Sword of Shannara. It became a phenomenon.

She didn't stop there.

Remember The Princess Bride? The original 1973 novel had flopped. It was headed for obscurity. Judy-Lynn rescued it, reissuing it in 1977 with a striking gate-fold cover and an aggressive marketing campaign. Without her intervention, there might never have been a movie.

She published the Star Trek Log series. She championed Stephen R. Donaldson's Thomas Covenant trilogy—convincing Ballantine to release all three books on the same day from a completely unknown author. Unprecedented.

She published Anne McCaffrey's The White Dragon—the first science fiction novel ever to hit #1 on the New York Times bestseller list.

And she did all of this while competitors called her imprint "Death-Rey Books"—because she was utterly dominant.

Between 1977 and 1990, Del Rey Books had 65 titles reach bestseller lists. That was more than every other science fiction and fantasy publisher combined.

Arthur C. Clarke called her "the most brilliant editor I ever encountered."

Philip K. Dick went further: "The greatest editor since Maxwell Perkins"—the legendary editor of Hemingway and Fitzgerald.

But here's what burns: the science fiction community never nominated her for a Hugo Award while she was alive. Not once. The men who ran the industry praised her in private and overlooked her in public.

In October 1985, Judy-Lynn suffered a brain hemorrhage. She died four months later, at 42.

Only then did the Hugo committee vote to give her the Best Professional Editor award.

Her husband Lester refused to accept it.

He said Judy-Lynn would have objected—that it was given only because she had just died. That it came too late.

He was right.

Judy-Lynn del Rey transformed science fiction from a niche hobby into a cultural force. She made fantasy into a mainstream publishing category. She bet on Star Wars when no one else would. She saved The Princess Bride from oblivion. She published the first #1 New York Times science fiction bestseller.

She did all of this standing 4'1" tall in an industry run by men who underestimated her at every turn.

The next time you pick up a fantasy novel, or watch a Star Wars movie, or quote The Princess Bride—

Like, the tech industry has been able to do whatever it wants and get away with some of the worst fucking shit imaginable with almost no regulation at all and I don't know how we got here. The internet and AI are being used to facilitate sexual trafficking of children and adults. It is being used to falsify reality, to allow for revenge porn, allow for gambling on the likelihood of a nuclear holocaust, surveil people on an unimaginable level, etc. And we know that if they wanted to regulate this shit, they could because look at how easy it is to shut down images from Gaza, Sudan, etc.

For example, Tesla. It makes cars. But because it's a "tech" company somehow Elon Musk gets to make cars that meet no safety regulations at all. They have doors that will chop your fingers off, they will drive you into other cars, they blow up spontaneously and will auto lock the doors so you can't get out of the fucking car if it's on fire doesn't have to respond to or honor product recalls because their cars blow up (remember the reddit user who has a literal bombed out Tesla sitting in his driveway because it blew up and hasn't been able to get Tesla to respond/replace it for literal years).

Meanwhile, every other car maker has to meet rigorous standards surrounding safety and environmental regulations. They have to undergo extreme testing for airbags, crumple times, child locks, ensuring the trunk won't chop your fingers off by having multiple sensors everywhere, that the brakes fucking work, crash testing dummies, etc. So why does Tesla get to make unsafe vehicles simply because it's considered part of the "tech" industry and not the auto industry? If I was an auto company I would be pissed that Tesla gets to sell its shitty unsafe cars while your cars have to go through 8 million hoops to be approved for sale.

Another example: A lot of AI billionaires want to test psychedelics on people just to fucking see what happens to the point where this administration signed an executive order to expedite this through the FDA. Elon Musk wants to test putting microchips in people's brains for the fuck of it. If actual doctors wanted to do this it would take literal years to get it through ethical board reviews and safety reviews and even then probably would never get there because you have to show what the benefits of studying these things would be and how you would put safe guards in place to ensure no one is being abused and the technology can't be used for harm. So why do these people get to suggest these things and try to do these things in Elon's case with zero fucking oversight simply because they are in the "tech" industry?

I just completed a study on a medical device. This medical device started being tested in humans in 2004. It received FDA approval for postoperative pain control in 2019 after numerous study after study after study showed it reduced opioid use postoperatively. The amount of studies that were done showing its efficacy and safety in order to get FDA approval took FIFTEEN YEARS. The reason I did this study is because there aren't any looking at its use for postoperative pain after c-sections, specifically. And you can't use a medical device for a standard of postoperative pain control in every surgery. You have to show its efficacy for it, hence our study. The IRB approval (and ethical review board to ensure safety and that the study is ethical) for our study took two years and required our team to do a QI initiative followed by a retrospective study to justify why the study was needed despite this medical device being FDA approved for the very purpose we were using it for.

So Elon Musk just...being able to put fucking microchip in monkey brains and recruit people online for one is fucking insane.

Like why is the tech industry somehow this darling that doesn't have to have any fucking regulations at all? And this isn't even getting into the fact that AI is just allowed to build data centers with zero regard whatsoever for the environmental or ecological impacts.

An industry that requires no ethics education, has no regulation, has no oversight whatsoever just gets to do whatever it wants to people and the environment. I genuinely think that part of this is because congress is full of old people who don't understand technology and think the internet is just this nebulous thing that doesn't exist "in real life" so anything connected to it also isn't a tangible thing that can impact our actual lived lives. But I don't think that's the sole reason for all of this. I also think our government has been so ineffectual for literally decades that it hasn't been able to achieve anything that would've led to regulation of the tech industry and now we have an industry that just gets to do whatever the fuck it wants regardless of the impact it has on our lives, the environment, our psychological wellbeing, our privacy and has no ethical obligations guiding what it does.