I don’t feel like this is done but I’m posting it anyway, SO THERE. This text is by tumblr user huggablekaiju, big thanks to them for letting me use it here!
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Aqua Utopia|海の底で記憶を紡ぐ
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@nuisancevalue
I don’t feel like this is done but I’m posting it anyway, SO THERE. This text is by tumblr user huggablekaiju, big thanks to them for letting me use it here!

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I just thought this set of tweets was really important.
A very important series of tweets.
Incredible important indeed
A cook in a Sikh kitchen cooking curry in an extremely large pot. The Sikh kitchen provides tens of thousands of free meals on a daily basis
Page 145
Butts
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My friend Maya worked on this and she is the best and I love her dearly so go put your (age appropriate) eyeballs on this (NSFW) comic and appreciate how great she is.
AW KELLYYY I LOVE YOU TOOOOO. I MISS YOU BUDDYYYY.
Oh hey, my old roommate can draw. Who knew? (The answer is "lots of people", turns out she's REALLY good at it).
Winter
The Three Signs that Winter Is Coming have finally materialized: 1) I've commenced my annual "how long can I try to grow a beard before the urge to shave becomes overwhelming" experiment 2) Skyrim and Dragon Age are being reinstalled as I type 3) I've suddenly started buying stouts and smoked porters, after months of not caring about alcohol at all
Other minor signs include; wanting to buy a Mjolnir pendant, listening to Finntroll, craving hearty stews and root vegetables, wanting to exercise outdoors, putting off haircuts for far too long, wondering how much it would cost to take up cross-country skiing, wondering how easy it is to brew mead, wondering how easy it is to get into D&D, wanting a log cabin.

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A toast to these great astronomerettes, who didn’t get credit for their work in their lifetime.
Read about Annie Jump Cannon, Henrietta Swan Leavitt, and Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin
The Trouble With Wonder Woman
Wait, this needs this!
Wonder Woman - guess which part of that name is the problem?
Review: War & Space: Recent Combat
First off; I get the "War & Space" part of the title, but "Recent Combat"? That sounds a bit... meaningless? Silly? And the stories within are diverse enough that the combat is not always recent, but sometimes ongoing, anticipated, or off in the background. I get that the publisher, Prime Books is branding a lot of their short fiction collections as "[Noun (s)]: Recent [Verb]", but still, the somewhat unnecessary subtitle almost put me off buying this. I read this a few weeks ago, but I didn't feel like reviewing each story when I rated it on goodreads originally. I say "review", but in some cases these are just a short blurb about each story to help me remember them.
Who's Afraid of Wolf 359? Ken MacLeod
I struggle to think of a story I've read lately with a more unreliable narrator than the nameless POV character immediately identifies themselves to be. This is a fun read, featuring a classic rogue turned (apparently) conqueror, in a setting far enough in the future to feel quite alien, despite an apparent lack of any aliens. MacLeod packs what feels like a lot of story into not a lot of pages. I also enjoyed the concept of "phytobraking", which I'd like to use in conversation, but not in practice.
Surf Suzanne Palmer
A daring, one-woman surgical strike, with some unwitting scientists and a pod of space-whales along for the ride. Although Palmer does a great job of keeping the story of Surf self-contained, and ends it on a satisfying note (even though, technically, there is unfinished business for her protagonist), Surf feels as though it's part of a much larger story. I'd be highly un-surprised if it does turn out to be a prototype for novel. Surf is entertaining, and well paced, and if more of the Surf universe shows up, I'd like to read it. While not bursting with any outrageous new ideas or genre-defying conventions that I can see (there are crewed space fighters, which still feel a bit implausible given what we do with drones already), Surf doesn't feel like a cliche to me either.
Another Life Charles Oberndorf
A man wakes up, missing the chunk of his life between being backed up and dying. He struggles to deal with the consequences of what he did in his other life. If Kurzweil is right, one day we may all face these kinds of problems. An interesting, and occasionally slightly uncomfortable and sordid account of someone picking up the pieces from their first death. The frame narrative of the protagonist telling stories to his aging ex-partner partially serves to add some optimism to what would otherwise be a rather more depressing tale, but also suggests the possibility that immortality might lose it's lustre after a while.
Between Two Dragons Yoon Ha Lee
A "reprogrammer" from the Ministry of Virtuous Thought recounts the story of a hero admiral, who voluntarily submits himself to reprogramming before his political opponents can have it done to him. Enjoyable, painting a picture of a society with political intrigue, paranoia and backstabbing, and of the consequences that has when it keeps competent people from doing their jobs. I can't help but feel this might be inspired by a specific regime.
Scales Alastair Reynolds
I can't quite put my finger on what it is, but Reynolds has a characteristic feel. Scales has a lot of the futility of Haldeman's Forever War, packed into a short form, with Reynold's characteristic mix of ultra high-tech combined with hints of barely human-comprehensible physics as a background setting. [spoiler?/]The war in Scales is fractal and cyclical, and the name plays on that [/spoiler?].
Golubash, or Wine-Blood-War-Elegy Catherynne M. Valente
I've read this in another collection, and it was memorable. Golubash is a story of conflict fought (partially) through tariffs, taxes and production restrictions, told entirely through the medium of a guided tasting of exceptionally rare and illicit wines. This was a fantastically enjoyable storytelling device, and while I suspect actual histories have often been told through wine tastings, I haven't seen it applied to fiction before. As a side effect of Golubash, you may crave wine.
Leave Robert Reed
A man watches, largely helpless, as his best friend's athletically and academically successful young son falls off the rails into drug abuse, before being recruited by a mysterious alien race for the honor of fighting for them. The term of service is 30 years, the conflict is strange, perpetual, and conducted entirely on a planet-sized comet. The conflict itself is fought between hundreds of factions, each against all the rest, for unfathomable reasons. On skimming through Leave a second time, it feels almost as if it were inspired by MMORPG's, or large scale online FPS's- particularly where bright but alienated young men end up abandoning their education to live in another world (and come back with a bag full of trophies which only they value- achievement unlocked?).
Mehra and Jiun Sandra McDonald
A soldier/pilot and the enemy who rescued and resuscitated her are trapped on Europa, unable to communicate with either of their factions- with time they come to know one another. Soldiers of opposing sides befriending each other isn't a new story (Enemy Mine springs to mind), the addition here is a third faction in the form of a symbiotic snake-like race that serves both the Tung and their enemies, in an attempt to guide them to peace. Entertaining, but probably not the strongest of stories in the collection.
Her Husband's Hands Adam-Troy Castro
A wife's husband returns from a Vietnam-like conflict, as nothing but a pair of hands attached to life support discs with his personality encoded into them. As she comes to term with her (and his) loss, and tries to rebuild their lives, Castro explores grief, the impacts of war on veterans and their families, and the effort government puts into playing down these impacts. One might also read into the story a criticism of the (lack of) support given to veterans by the US ( also Canadian, British...) government.
Remembrance Beth Bernobich
Kate, a Quality Assurance lab technician and amateur gardener has to deal with her Private Security Contractor partner leaving for an extended posting to an orbital transfer station. Both sign up to trial a new chip for recording and replaying sensory input, and despite the recordings being screened, use it to communicate while Jess is away. It is hard to write about the themes explored by Remembrance without being spoilerific, so I will sum it up as "good", and add that it depressingly plausible that the USA could be technologically advanced enough to be building bases on Mars, but still backwards enough that only 6 states recognize same-sex marriage.
Palace Resolution Tom Purdom
Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress at one point throws out the suggestion that an absolute monarchy might be the best form of government, if the monarch is competent, responsible and benevolent enough. The TaiPark Combine of Purdom's story seem to have followed that suggestion to an extent, creating a ruling class with "cultivated" personality structures. The story opens with two (of Eleven) Overseers reminiscing over a past conflict between them. Parliamentary Democracy may be the best style of government humanity has tried so far, but clearly has its flaws. Fiction that explores alternative government, societies, and their flaws is always interesting to me, and often ages better than the more hard science/tech-centric sci-fi. Palace Resolution is an enjoyable example of it.
The Observer Kristine Kathryn Rusch
Narrated as a monologue to an unseen Observer, by one personality "the articulate one" in the fragmented mind of a woman turned into a genetically/cybernetically/hormonally "enhanced" soldier. The core of the Observer seems to be the idea of a military turning humans into broken shells of their former selves, taken to an extreme. The Observer is by nature depressing, but interestingly done.
The Long Chase Geoffrey A. Landis
A tiny, self-sufficient mining ship piloted by a post-human uploaded mind makes a break out of a solar system dominated by the "cooperation faction", effectively a hive mind. A pursuit between stars ensues, as the ship's mind contemplates the war, her past as a human, and the changes she has and will make to her mind for survival. Tellingly, this is one of the stories I didn't have to skim through again to remember the details of. Art of War Nancy Kress
A naval officer and art historian is assigned to catalog a cache of art plundered by the alien Teli from human colonies. In studying the Teli's art, and their theft of human art, she learns things about the Teli that even military intelligence seem ignorant of. "The creation of art does not happen in a vacuum. It is linked to culture in complicated, nonlinear ways". Another one of my favorites.
Have You Any Wool Alan DeNiro
Humanity is guided through the stars by Shepherds, and preyed upon by Wolves who feed on tales on myths. All cultures have stories, and the only way to fight the wolves is to tell more stories. Full of allegory, Have You Any Wool was a bit hard to get into at first, but worth it.
Carthago Delenda Est Genevieve Valentine
A technician on Earths embassy ship awakes the latest clone of the human ambassador. The Earth embassy ship is one of many awaiting the arrival of a ship from the planet "Carthage", the source of (apparently) a message of peace. The anticipation of Carthage's arrival created 400 years without war. The history of the mission and the nature of the alien ambassadors are explored from the technicians viewpoint as the first potential cracks in the peace start to appear. Carthago Delenda Est is not a story I got a clear message or theme from, but the premise is interesting, and it was a fun read.
Rats of the System Paul McAuley
A scientist and a sailor (whose misogyny is about as out of date as his job title) try to take readings from a Transcendent AI doing odd things to a star, while avoiding destruction at the hands of Fanatics who worship the AIs as gods. The Transcendent behaves in a suitably opaque and god like manner. The setting and story were good, but the characters felt like they belonged in the last century, not the next one.
The Political Officer Charles Coleman Finlay
The novella length story of the collection. Political officer Nikomedes has to outwit agents of opposing ministries aboard the ship to prevent a crucial piece of SigInt falling into the wrong hands- a faction that would use it for offence rather than defense. The Political Officer has clear roots in the likes of K-19 and the Hunt for Red October. Despite this (and in spite of my skepticism of Stealth in Space), The Political Officer doesn't feel cliched, even when it makes use of some of the cliches of submarine movies. It is tense in the right places, and there is never any feeling that survival or success is assured.
Amid the Words of War Cat Rambo
This one is short and sweet. An arthropod-like alien soldier, captured, released, and disgraced, receives scented hate mail that keeps it alive. Weird and different.
A Soldier of the City David Moles
Another one I've seen elsewhere (Engineering Infinity). The city is a megastructure ruled by AIs or superhumans that style themselves as Gods. The soldier is a servant of one of the gods, trained to fight in a vacuum suit on the city's underside. An attack by an outside faction attempting to free the citizens of the city from their gods leads to a revenge mission that ultimately leaves the soldier living with people he once called enemies. This is another story that feels like it's part of a much larger setting, one with plenty of room for more stories. I would quite like to read them.
Review: Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie
A good space opera, that left me looking forward to the sequels. I felt that the world building was done well- Ann Leckie has managed to create a far future that feels like it has room for (more-or-less) baseline humans and relatable characters, despite world changing technologies like AI, dyson spheres, and the existence of highly altered humans being present in the setting.
Radchaai society, hierarchy and religion, with their not entirely explained obsession with gloves, multiple gods, clientage and houses, is complex in ways that reminds me of the Centauri from Babylon 5 (both vaguely Roman inspired); which I like. Ancillary Justice hints at intrigue and power play, and as much as I enjoy the action in the book, I'd like to see more of the cultural side of things in the sequels.
I felt that the POV character (Breq/One Esk/Justice of Toren) having multiple points of view was handled seamlessly, and the Radchaai's exclusive use of female pronouns (even for characters that are revealed to be considered male in their own culture) didn't take very long to adjust to.
I'm interested as to why the author defaulted to Breq/all Radchaai characters using female pronouns to represent Radchaai rather than coming up with new ones entirely (or using Spivak pronouns), but more interesting was my discovery that even when reading a book full of ambiguously gendered characters, I tended to picture people as looking either "conventionally" male of female(by European/N. American standards). Oddly, I didn't do this for Breq herself.
Any book that isn't a sequel or set in an established universe has to spend some time creating a setting, but for some reason I was more aware of this for the first hundred pages or so of Ancillary Justice than I have been in other books lately. Possibly I felt this way due to the contrast in style with the last Space Opera I read (The Quantum Thief), and because I moved on to Ancillary Justice from a collection of short fiction, but it will be interesting to see if I feel this way on a future re-read. Edit: I've seen some reviewers saying it has a bit of a slow start, so I guess it isn't just me that felt this way. Unlike some reviewers, I didn't feel that I was at risk of putting it down at any point, but I get where they are coming from.
Next up (probably) will be The Fractal Prince, sequel to Hannu Rajaniemi's The Quantum Thief.
What men mean when they talk about their “crazy” ex-girlfriend is often that she was someone who cried a lot, or texted too often, or had an eating disorder, or wanted too much/too little sex, or generally felt anything beyond the realm of emotionally undemanding agreement. That does not make these women crazy. That makes those women human beings, who have flaws, and emotional weak spots. However, deciding that any behavior that he does not like must be insane– well, that does make a man a jerk. And when men do this on a regular basis, remember that, if you are a women, you are not the exception. You are not so cool and fabulous and levelheaded that they will totally get where you are coming from when you show emotions other than “pleasant agreement.” When men say “most women are crazy, but not you, you’re so cool” the subtext is not, “I love you, be the mother to my children.” The subtext is “do not step out of line, here.” If you get close enough to the men who say things like this, eventually, you will do something that they do not find pleasant. They will decide you are crazy, because this is something they have already decided about women in general.
Lady, You Really Aren’t “Crazy” (via sparkamovement)

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If you’re a boy writer, it’s a simple rule: you've gotta get used to the fact that you suck at writing women and that the worst women writer can write a better man than the best male writer can write a good woman. And it’s just the minimum. Because the thing about the sort of heteronormative masculine privilege, whether it’s in Santo Domingo, or the United States, is you grow up your entire life being told that women aren't human beings, and that women have no independent subjectivity. And because you grow up with this, it’s this huge surprise when you go to college and realize that, Oh, women aren't people who does my shit and fucks me. And I think that this a huge challenge for boys, because they want to pretend they can write girls. Every time I'm teaching boys to write, I read their women to them, and I’m like, "Yo, you think this is good writing?"; These motherfuckers attack each other over cliche lines but they won’t attack each other over these toxic representations of women that they have inherited; their sexist shorthand, they think that is observation. They think that their sexist distortions are insight. And if you’re in a writing program and you say to a guy that their characters are sexist, this guy, it's like you said they fucking love Hitler. They will fight tooth and nail because they want to preserve this really vicious sexism in the art because that is what they have been taught. And I think the first step is to admit that you, because of your privilege, have a very distorted sense of women’s subjectivity. And without an enormous amount of assistance, you’re not even going to get a D. I think with male writers the most that you can hope for is a D with an occasional C thrown in. Where the average women writer, when she writes men, she gets a B right off the bat, because they spent their whole life being taught that men have a subjectivity. In fact, part of the whole feminism revolution was saying, "Me too, motherfuckers." So women come with it built in because of the society. It’s the same way when people write about race. If you didn't grow up being a subaltern person in the United States, you might need help writing about race. Motherfuckers are like ‘I got a black boy friend,’ and their shit sounds like Klan Fiction 101. The most toxic formulas in our cultures are not passed down in political practice, they’re passed down in mundane narratives. It’s our fiction where the toxic virus of sexism, racism, homophobia, where it passes from one generation to the next, and the average artist will kill you before they remove those poisons. And if you want to be a good artist, it means writing, really, about the world. And when you write cliches, whether they are sexist, racist, homophobic, classist, that is a fucking cliche. And motherfuckers will kill you for their cliches about x, but they want their cliches about their race, class, queerness. They want it in there because they feel lost without it. So for me, this has always been the great challenge. As a writer, if you’re really trying to write something new, you must figure out, with the help of a community, how can you shed these fucking received formulas. They are received. You didn't come up with them. And why we need fellow artists is because they help us stay on track. They tell you, "You know what? You’re a bit of a fucking homophobe." You can’t write about the world with these simplistic distortions. They are cliches. People know art, always, because they are uncomfortable. Art discomforts. The trangressiveness of art has to deal with confronting people with the real. And sexism is a way to avoid the real, avoiding the reality of women. Homophobia is to avoid the real, the reality of queerness. All these things are the way we hide from encountering the real. But art, art is just about that.
- Junot Diaz speaking at Word Up Bookshop, 2012 (via ofgrammatology)
dysphonograph replied to your photo:I just like having pictures of Dolph Lundgren on…
Huh. He’s more handsome than I remember him being.
Dude Dolph Lundgren is like unreasonably handsome.
Only last night I was raving to my partner about how awesome Dolph Lundgren is.
Don’t mess with Gimli
They picked the right guy to play a Dwarf
Mama Fury on waking up the Avengers.
(Source: Askthederpvengers)
mayonaise is the most boring condiment.
Drawing and Painting, Ontario College of Art & Design
'the state of condiments'
The Casimir effect was discovered by a physicist examining the properties of Mayonnaise. Just sayin'.

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not my photo, i just cropped out the logo in the corner bc it was bothering me haha xo
My Workout For Saturday October 12
I earned 854 points for my workout on Fitocracy!
Push-Up +129 pts
20 reps (+30 pts)
14 reps (+21 pts)
20 reps (+30 pts)
20 reps (+30 pts)
12 reps (+18 pts)
Narrow Arm Push-Up +12 pts
8 reps (+12 pts)
Wide Arm Push-Up +14 pts
5 reps (+7 pts)
5 reps (+7 pts)
Running (treadmill) +64 pts
0:10:00 || 0.93 mi (+64 pts)
Suspension Trainer Fallouts +57 pts
11 reps (+19 pts)
11 reps (+19 pts)
11 reps (+19 pts)
Pistol (Kettlebell) +147 pts
20 lb x 5 reps (+49 pts)
20 lb x 5 reps (+49 pts)
20 lb x 5 reps (+49 pts)
Pull-Up +171 pts
5 reps (+60 pts)
5 reps (+60 pts)
4 reps (+51 pts)
Dumbbell Deadlift +117 pts
30 lb x 5 reps (+39 pts)
30 lb x 5 reps (+39 pts)
30 lb x 5 reps (+39 pts)
One Leg Dumbbell Deadlift
Standing Dumbbell Shoulder Press +141 pts
50 lb x 3 reps (+47 pts)
50 lb x 3 reps (+47 pts)
50 lb x 3 reps (+47 pts)
Stretching +2 pts
0:05:00 (+2 pts)
Think you can beat me, or want to comment?
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