Transgal City Planner

Hey.

The fascists don’t like NASA.

They don’t want stuff like this to happen.

They want to give NASA’s budget to the already bloated military.

As far as I’m concerned, it’s fine to celebrate a massive peaceful scientific achievement that’s a collaboration between the US and Canada space programs during a time when there’s so much bad news elsewhere.

but DO techbros like nasa? a lot of techbros i see are super into the idea of privatized space travel industry and colonizing mars, the first of which nasa is directly opposed to, and the second which nasa isn't really focused on.

The Artemis Accords are one of the first large-scale civil policies about space and related activities to come about since the Outer Space Treaty in 1967. NASA wants to hold people (at least a little) accountable for the junk they're leaving in our orbit, and not enough people talked about this shit back when it got signed, so I wanna talk about it now

But if these people did go, they would most likely receive this treatment; they are nobodies that think they can just do whatever because they think the North Korean gov't will see them as 'comrades' when the North Korean gov't is only interested if you're famous enough to do propaganda for them.

Also, anyway, North Korea is still closed off to many tourists ever since it shut its borders due to the Covid pandemic. I think only the border town near China (which is more of a downscaled Pyongyang) is only opened

Anyway, Ive also visited South Korea not long ago and it's also a very beautiful place, seriously, rather than the dystopic capitalist hellhole tumblr thought it is

She begins by detailing the history of Ingen as a fledgling bioengineering company, with a lot of biographical information about John Hammond as the charismatic yet shady founder, complete with the anecdote about his genetically engineered dog-sized elephant ("While it may have wowed investors, Babar the elephant did not live very long, and allegedly suffered from numerous health disorders and a generally poor quality of life. Put a pin in that.")

After detailing the covered-up scandals about workplace "accidents" at the park, the youtuber goes into her own trip, which is notably disappointing, not dramatic. It starts well with her seeing the Brachiosaurs, complete with found-footage style reveal of them that hopefully manages to capture some of the majesty of their reveal in the original film, albeit from a very grounded "real person encountering big exotic animals" vibe.

But then we get to the tour of the park itself. The visitor center is half finished, with a big obvious tarp covering the wall from the reception area that hasn't been made yet. the hokey welcoming video is using scratch track music because they haven't sorted out the rights to the licensed music they want. The automated vehicles are buggy as hell - one of them snaps on the youtuber's thumb when she closes the door, bruising it terribly ("That's what you get when you partner with Tesla I guess. Spared no expense, I guess.")

The dilophosaurus is a no show. The T.rex is a no-show, even when they bring out a goat to lure it. ("Why feed it a live goat? I'm pretty sure most zoos don't feed live prey to the large carnivores both for their safety and ours. And a goat's barely more than a mouthful to a T.rex, isn't it? It's like they're not considering the animal welfare at all - put a pin in that.") The triceratops is sick. ("The veterinarian on hand, Gerry Harding, said this was a recurring problem. Apparently there was a plant in their enclosure that's toxic to them, but because the trikes haven't been spotted eating the plant, the park assumed it was alright to include because it's pretty? Anyway, it turned out that the plant's berries, which are also toxic, were being eaten by the trikes, and that's where their digestive problems came from. Spared no expense!")

Many of the other promised rides aren't in operation, and as she looks into it our youtuber protagonist learns that it's due to inability to manage the animal behavior (despite the staff trying to hide that this is the case). The aviary is closed because the cearadatyluses are wildly aggressive. The mosasaur lagoon is closed because they can't find a way for audiences to view the mosasaur up close that's remotely safe. The river ride is closed because the dilophosaurs SPIT VENOM! at people when they pass by. The velociraptors have been moved to an extremely tiny quarantine pen because of their vicious behavior ("Yeah, keeping predators that are built to run at cheetah speed in a tiny pen is going to do so much good for their behavioral issues. Spared no expense!").

On her last day she finally manages to see the Tyrannosaur in its exhibit ("Why did they put it in a paddock filled with thick foliage? It's a nine-ton carnivore, it needs a much more open space! This can't be comfortable for it - hell, I'm halfway convinced the reason it didn't show up the first two days is that it was struggling to find its way through all those goddamn trees!"). She takes note of its odd, toad-like eyes, and its near inability to capture the goat when it stands still, forcing it to roar loudly to make the goat squirm so it can finally eat. The youtuber then recalls a bit of information from the welcome video - "Remember when I said to put a pin on Frog DNA?" - and realizes that the dinosaurs's hybrid nature has severely compromised their basic biological functions, with T.rex, an animal with some of the best binocular vision in the fossil record, being hamstrung by having the vision problems of a toad. "This is a creature that should have eyes as sharp as a hawk's that's now almost functionally blind! Can you imagine how terrifying that must be for it?"

The video then turns into a takedown of Ingen's shoddy genetic engineering work, uncovering a great deal of infomation on the hybridization process and how it's negatively impacted the animals upon creation, and then focuses on how the park exacerbated this by its neglectful approach to protecting their livelihoods, caused by a mixture of stingy over-reliance on automation and a lack of actual experts on staff. "They hype these animals up as miracles of science, and yet they can't be bothered to put even a modicum of effort into considering their basic biological and behavioral needs! Spared no expense my ass!"

And it's still not enough. Your data, those supposedly-secret pieces of your supposedly-private life - that time you bought flowers for your mom, the time you looked up that health thing, hell, even the fucking phone number you used for multi-factor authentication - went up to sale for pennies.

Sent to dubious ad-companies to scrape whatever profit they could.

And it didn't even matter.

There is no online space that doesn't require money. Actual money, not fake ad views-money. Independent forums and Mastodon/Fediverse instances and reddit lookalikes are all put up by people's own money and volunteer time. AO3 and Wikipedia use volunteers and donation drives.

Because it isn't free. It never has been.

If you want something to exist, to continue to exist online, the only way to ensure it will stay is to give it money. Actual money. Exposure and ads just do not work, and have never worked. They sold every bit of your information to try to make it work, spent billions of dollars to bleed the internet dry, and it still hasn't.

Yes, this is a post about tumblr woes. This is also a post about Web 2.0 dying. And also a plea to literally anyone who can afford it:

People don't like hearing the above. And yes, it fucking SUCKS. I don't know a single person who hasn't had a time in their life when they couldn't scrape a dollar together, much less $2, $3, $5, for some online-thing when you need that money for groceries and medicines and bills. I know. I know. For some people that time is now. For some people, it was recently. I know.

I don't have a good answer, save for, if people don't pay for the sites they like, these sites will die. The communities you have will die, you will lose decade-long followers, fics, beloved art and artists. Fandoms will be scattered into the burgeoning mix of fractured, private, more affordable online spaces, then split further. Maybe you’re fine with that outcome. People tend to feel guilty when someone says the only way to keep something around is to pay, then angry, and then swing for "But what about people who can't afford it!" I know.

This isn't about, precisely, you. It is about the singular choice of the entire internet to have decided on an unsustainable model, that have thusly formed beloved online spaces, spaces that are going to no longer be here, probably very soon. And the literal, only means by which to save them, is to give them money. 

Tumblr does not have a path forward outside of actual money, given to them by the people who use their service - we know this because frankly, wildly more successful sites than tumblr also aren’t doing well. I think their only choice is for people to willingly give them money for services-rendered, money to save their little corner of the internet. This might be in buying ad-free, this might be in donation-drives. But that's it! That's it. 

Early on there was this culture of programming, of computer nerds, of people who thought, “information is power, and power belongs to everyone.” that’s in the bedrock of the internet now, it’s in the bedrock of our culture. Information belongs to everyone.

That produces certain expectations. We expect that it’s free to access websites. That information should be available to everyone, for free, on demand. It should be cheap, or free, to see art, to hear music, to watch every movie ever made.

These are expectations that are fundamentally incompatible with a world without universal basic income. With our current capitalist system.

The internet tried to sell us that expectation anyway. They tried to sell OUR data and use that to make the internet profitable. It doesn’t fucking work.

Data storage costs money. Servers cost money. All that stuff up on DeviantArt? On Artstation? All the art that’s uploaded to Tumblr or Twitter? That all costs someone money, somewhere, because that information is on a hard drive, on several hard drives, in an air-conditioned basement somewhere on Earth. And if they don’t think it’s worth their time to keep that hard drive plugged in, they hit the switch and that data goes away.

I would love to give my art away for free. (hell. I do.) I’d love for music to be free. But I cannot survive, as an artist, if I do not receive money for my art. And right now, I make less art per day, per week, per year, than I would if I were paid for it. I don’t like it. I would rather be writing, be drawing, be creating. But I can’t survive

It’s not all bad. This is an opportunity. We, as consumers, finally have some power over the course of the future of technology. In the long term, we could have that dream back. We could have free information. We could have free art, for everyone, all the time. But in a capitalist system, money is the ability to act upon the world. And without that ability, we are not acting upon the world, we are acted upon.

I understand if there’s pushback, if people want art and music and TUMBLR, for free. I agree it SHOULD be free. But it is literally impossible. And if the internet can’t find a way to turn a profit under capitalism, then the internet will end, and the only thing online will be AO3 and Wikipedia. We’ll enter an era where only crowdfunded databases can afford to stay online--and without the economy of scale provided by the rest of the internet, who knows how long that will last?

Great! You’re so fucking RIGHT. And they aren’t, because of powers in a system beyond any single entity here. It fucking sucks! Now what are we going to DO about it? How do we use the tiny bits of power we do have to craft the world to what we want it to be? 

I give Tumblr $5 a month; of course, only since they started offering that option. I use their app for 10~15 hours a week, and have, for a decade (This probably used to be MUCH higher, and likely is, but I have hard numbers here because I can just look at my phone.)

A modern AAA videogame costs about $70. They offer 50-100 hours of entertainment, on average, more if you’re a completionist, less if you’re just playing it through. So, sure, let’s take some easy math: $70, 70 hours, $1/hr for high-quality, crafted entertainment. (Secret, this is a pretty standard ratio for full-price entertainment. Great way to tell if something might be worth paying for.) 

That low-end is just about a full month of tumblr-use for me. Now, I have used, by my extremely rough count, over 653 weeks (since 2011), say 12 hours a week, about 8,000 hours of this site.

If we take our easy math, a ‘fair’ rate of “I like this and I would like it to continue to exist in the future” it might be $8,000 over that time period. Fucking whew. That’s $50 a month! That is a lot, and entirely unsustainable for most people. 

So for me, $5 a month, for the amount of time I spend, have spent on this site? Absolutely fucking worth it. I put that money here because I want it to exist. It’s my way of saying I think something is worth it.

and the only reason he gets caught is because multiface decides to disguise himself as, of all people, CLARK KENT i’m screaming

Children need to be able to leave their parents, but where they go should be up to the child and the options available should give them as much possibility as possible to stay rooted in their own culture and community, to continue to see their friends, to see relatives that they do feel safe with, etc.

The system we currently have is not that. Instead of treating children like the inalienable property of parents, the system treats children like property to be shipped around based on supply and demand, prioritizing the needs of white, rich adults in the imperial core.