Scrimshaw Scrawlings

It is a combination of physical prerequisites and cultural phenomenon. Traditionally salarian males need exposure to female pheromones to trigger arousal, and the male-to-female ratios on ancient Sur’kesh came in generational swings. An over abundance of males one season, an over abundance of females the next, chaotically fluctuating and possibly creating hindrances to social progress/cohesion during heavily-male years.

Mating season was a battleground. Females were highly-territorial over their spawn areas and while sons typically spent their time protecting their mothers and younger siblings from threats—mating seasons would be a cause for them to drift away temporarily in search of unrelated females, leaving their matriarchs unprotected. Juvenile females stick close to their mothers until they are old enough to lay eggs, and often mothers would hide them during mating season to keep them out of the crossfire.

The threat was not only from native wildlife but also from rival females (again, territorial, trying to eliminate competition for resources) and overly enthusiastic males.

Because of this background history, advancing salarian civilization became necessarily about the control of their own reproduction and population. Females found ways to mask their pheromones and kept their distance from males during the season, the defense of spawning areas became more complex, and then with technology they became more portable.

Mating became pre-arranged and culturally males had to be invited into the matriarch’s territory before the season started. A male’s right to mate became decided by meetings between matriarchs. This cultural shift also meant that sons were less likely to drift and became not only guards but also a matriarch’s workforce.

Therefore, modern salarians have in themselves fostered a strong sense of duty toward their circles and a mentality that the needs of society should come before the needs of the individual.

Sexual desire as a foreign concept to most of the salarian population is very much intentional and by design, as it allows matriarchs to have more control and makes their collective workforces more efficient. Like an allied network of queen bees surrounded by young queens and worker-drones.

Also, where in ancient times daughters would leave their mother’s territories and strike out on their own once they started laying eggs—modern day salarian daughters now serve the same function that sons once did, as personal attendants and guards.

Unfertilized eggs are now a commodity, to be used as bargaining chips in political and economic negotiations. Males are essentially a servant caste.

In addition, salarian society doesn’t seem the type to be shy about encouraging genetic alteration and has likely further domesticated itself as a result, or posed male sexual desire as something “selfish” or “below their station” or “a personal moral failure”—to the point where I would not be at all surprised if Sur’kesh offers (or once did offer) services to eliminate those pesky urges. (Medical intervention, psychological therapy, or gene therapy—maybe even a notation on their chart that matriarchs should avoid reproduction with this one)

Sur’keshian propaganda likely even posits lack of sexual desire as something that makes salarians “superior” to other species. Males chosen to create daughters may not even actually mate with the matriarch, but rather make a genetic donation in a container (The container given to the male provided with a packet of pheromone to aid the process) that then gets shipped long-distance to the recipient and dumped in the female’s personal spawning tank.

This line of thinking is actually what inspired my salarian OC, who is an intersex male who regularly produces female pheromone and has human-levels of libido. (Also due to genetic tampering, but in his and his many siblings case—for the purpose of the batarian slave trade)

I must admit that a big reason why I haven’t been very creative in a good long while is because I already knew how easy it would be to have your work scraped on AO3 even with the “registered users only/exclude my works from search” options. Because it’s not difficult to make an AO3 account.

I’m glad it’s easy to make an AO3 account, (if AO3 ever requires ID I will toss my computer out a window and become a hermit for the next decade until I teach myself how to build my own damn infrastructure) but, unfortunately, it also means it is easy for scrapers to get in.

Knowing that it is possible to poison your fics via work skins honestly gives me a lot of hope for the future of fandom, even if it’s not currently a perfect solution, because it means we can continue to tweak things until it works effectively. Finding a balance of uploading something that poisons AI datasets while also still being readable on e-readers or in PDF format I think is key.

Naturally, this means we’ll be looking at an ongoing tennis match between anti-AI and pro-AI people coming up with newer ways of trying to outdo each other (Swiper, no swiping!) but that might be just what we (fandom) need to survive as a community until the bubble bursts and actual legal action starts being taken against theft in a major way.

(I am convinced that the reason AI is not being held accountable for massive creative theft is because the US economy is currently “dependent” on the AI industry—and once it stops being dependent on it, copyright law is going to get heavily revised/enforced)

I also think self-hosting/homelabbing is going to become important for fandom as well, in terms of fan-to-fan communication going forward. That is specifically to prevent your messages and shared files from being stored in a corporate server, so you are less likely to be surveilled, be victim to mass data breaches, or have a company using you to sell data.

It might also go a long way toward pulling fandom out of the mainstream again. If I manage to compile all the data on this, I’ll be making some tutorials for those of us (like me) who are less tech-savvy on how to do these kinds of things, because I know that’s a big obstacle and the reason so many people rely on social media in the first place.

Moderating Discord servers and years of dealing with the sanitization of online spaces (therefore, people being afraid to post publicly their interests and hobbies) has taught me that if you want to talk to people about a given topic, you have to create a space for them to gather in the first place.

So the more people know how to create those spaces themselves, how to protect those spaces, how to have more control over their online environments, (less reliance on big tech) the better.

Awhile back I thought “I’ll just start using Linux! Then maybe I can feel safe enough to start creating again!” But the reality is much more complex than that. Switching to Linux is a first step, at this point in time, merely to leave behind corporate giants like windows and apple. In the future Linux could also become one of those corporate giants.

So, right now, it is imperative to take a practical look at how you use tech in general. Because in much the same way that giving people less education or not teaching them to read makes them more vulnerable to being manipulated by politics—being casual-users of tech has allowed (some greedy, bad faith) savvy-users to have a horrific amount of control over our lives—especially in the last 5-10 years or so.

We should know how to do basic repairs on our hardware, so we don’t have to keep buying newer shittier versions of it. We should be able to check programs for malicious code. We should be able to use operating systems that don’t force obsolescence or shove AI down our throats or disallow us from making any alterations to our system. We shouldn’t have to pay for basic privacy, or to get rid of ads, or to store our files, or to be able to use phone data for more than a few days if we decide to listen to some music.

Right now we are in (I believe, possibly) a narrow window of time where we will be able to do things like boot Linux distros onto old computers and teach ourselves HTML and access places like Reddit for free information on the technical know-how of skills without having to pay someone to teach us. Your searches get tracked. Most YouTube “tutorials” are teasers with sponsors attached or a link to someone’s (not free) educational course. Library books may not have the answers you seek for very specific, current-day tech problems.

Laws are changing. They want to force ALL operating systems to use DOB registration or ID verification, including Linux. Valve is poised to make Linux the new “big” OS, but that opens them to the same problems of going mainstream and their userbase (gamers) is crawling with fascists already.

I still urge people to start exchanging emails to keep in touch with each other if we should get an internet “blackout” where we are forced to leave various socmed platforms for our own safety. (Be gay, do crime) Even that is tricky, since a lot of us still use gmail, and because of that “storing things on someone else’s server” issue it’s hard to trust any company right now. (Again, why I think we should do self-hosting)

At the least, an email allows you to say “hey buddy, I’ve moved to this other platform, same username as before :)” without giving too much information. Which brings me to another point, which is that I think it will also be important to try to maintain the same handle, at least for awhile, if you want your friends to be able to find you again. I plan on keeping this one permanently, if I can.