Deep Thought

"What if a small group of religious extremists, persecuted in their own country, moved to an inhospitable uninhabited island and had to rebuild society there?" - But the Americas and Australia weren't inhospitable and were full of Native nations, why are you perpetuating the idea of Terra Nullius and manifest destiny? - Yes, that's because this isn't a metaphor for the British invading other countries, it's a metaphor for finding out how much of a person's religious practise is rooted in worldly concerns, vs how much they will really stymie themselves for the sake of God.

"What if 1/100 children born was a werewolf?" - But queer people are no danger to straight people, and disabled people don't have predictable patterns to their illnesses, and most people who have uncontrollable rages really CAN control them and are just lying, and no minority group has superpowers... - Yes, but that's all immaterial, because I wanted to talk about a load of other metaphors about the passage of time and responsibility and the relationship between humans and wildlife.

I think it particularly comes up the moment an author includes any sort of marginalisation/oppression for their fictional/fantasy world. I've lost count of the times now where I've seen people read a book on, say, the terrible oppression of the Gwyllion, and immediately gone "Oh, so the Gwyllion are a metaphor for the real world X people, either deliberately or accidentally through the author's inherent racism. This is therefore super problematic because the Gwyllion are also described as Y, which means the author is also saying that about X people."

There will always be real world parallels when discussing oppression. Always. But that's because oppression is oppression - precise details may vary, but it follows the same pathways the world over, and that will naturally be copied into fiction as well. This does not mean the author is intentionally telling the exact allegory that you've projected onto it. If that's how you read everything, then yeah, everything becomes super problematic, but also, why are you reading any fiction that isn't solely about real world historical events? It's clearly not for you

And, you know, obviously there are works that are racist/misogynistic/etc, including deliberately so. But I really don't like the way people have started going "I have spotted a PROBLEMATIC ALLEGORY here, I'm ever so smart" and acting like they're the cleverest little critic that ever lived. You have to meet a work on its own terms. Lovecraft was a big ole racist, sure. Someone who has written a book about the oppression of magic users in their fantasy world, however, is rarely writing a story about how queerness lurks in family lines and must be controlled; they are way more commonly writing a story about a world with magic that they then wanted to take seriously, and while there might well be elements of queerness there, those magic users are not a 1:1 replacement.

Sometimes these lines are blurry! But we're going way too far to one end of that spectrum

The post that got me thinking about this yesterday was someone talking about how they'd love to write a vampire story exploring vampirism as a disability (dependence on a substance to manage the condition, blindness/weakness in daytime, can't enter buildings without accommodation, etc). But, they said, they can't, because they don't want to be making the point that disabled people are parasites, and vampires are generally considered parasitic.

And like. What an incredible shame. That we'll lose that, because they're already afraid of the "I have spotted a PROBLEMATIC ALLEGORY" crowd. That would be a great story for exploring disability themes, OR just a great new take on vampires, and either of those things would be so good to read. But there would be so many people who would jump in with "So you think disabled people are draining the life force of the ableds around them?", never stopping to actually think "Vampires are not a 1:1 stand in for real world disability because they are fictional and do not exist."

.

.

crossposting from bsky - glad I stopped using spotify when I did and that I unlinked it from my discord, but still

This was the crossword puzzle in the New York Times yesterday. 

Tausig’s crossword is a so-called Schrödinger puzzle, named for the physicist’s hypothetical cat that is at once both alive and dead. In a Schrödinger puzzle, select squares have more than one correct letter answer: They exist in two states at once. “Black Halloween animal,” for example, could be both BAT or CAT, yielding two different but perfectly correct puzzles. Only 10 such puzzles have now been published in Times history.

It’s the theme of Tausig’s puzzle, though, that makes it special. Four entries in Thursday’s crossword can include either an “F” or an “M.” Both are correct; neither is wrong. For example, “Part of a house” can be either ROOF or ROOM. The long “revealer” answer, tying those select entries together and spanning 11 squares smack-dab in the middle of the puzzle, is GENDER FLUID.

God’s Plan

“It does cause me some concern but I want to make very clear just because Mr. Morrow was in the possession of this material, does not categorize in any particular light,” Lt. Terrence Gebhardt told CBS 58. “He could have been an individual that was doing research.””

Welcome to KSP Weekly everyone. The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, or TESS, is scheduled to launch on Monday, April 16 from Cape Canaveral in Florida on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. This will be the first NASA science launch for Elon Musk’s company, and we’re super hyped about it.

This MIT-led mission is NASA’s newest exoplanet mission that will hopefully find thousands of exoplanets orbiting nearby stars. In a two-year survey of the solar neighborhood, TESS will monitor more than 200,000 stars for temporary drops in brightness caused by planetary transits. This first-ever spaceborne all-sky transit survey will identify planets ranging from Earth-sized to gas giants, around a wide range of stellar types and orbital distances. No ground-based survey can achieve this feat. Using four wide-field cameras, TESS will observe about 85 percent of the entire sky from quite an odd orbit split into 26 different sectors with 13 for each hemisphere.

TESS will fly in a special highly elliptical orbit that maximizes its visual field, and the amount of sky it can image. Once the spacecraft is launched, it will expand its orbit so it can get a gravitational assist from the moon to move it in a stable orbit that is tipped at about 40 degrees from the Moon’s orbital plane.

TESS orbits Earth in about half the time it takes the Moon to orbit once. This will help stabilize the spacecraft’s orbit against the pulls from the Moon’s gravity. During most of the 13.7 day orbit, TESS will be observing the sky, and as it approaches its periapsis with Earth, it will rotate and transfer all its data back to scientists on the ground. We can’t wait to see what scientists will learn with all the data that TESS will be able to compile, and certainly its peculiar orbit might be something that Kerbals could even try to replicate with a satellite of their own.

[Development news start here]

Since the launch of the Making History Expansion, the team has focused on listening to the community and based upon all the provided feedback we’ve been working on providing substantial patches for both the base game and the expansion. As a result, next week we’ll release patch 1.4.3, which will stand out as one significant patch that not only fixes issues and improves various aspects but also adds exciting new content.

For owners of the Making History Expansion, Patch 1.4.3 will add a brand new airfield and launchpad, named after Kerbal’s favorite meal. The Dessert Airfield is coincidentally located in Kerbin’s Desert, an inhospitable biome where the ruins of an ancient civilization were once found. However, the desert has a strategic value as it lies near the equator and not many buildings in the surrounding area are threatened by likely rocket explosions. Kerbals hope that with such a welcoming and pleasing name, rocket scientists will be encouraged to use these installations more often. Both the launchpad and the airfield will be available in all game modes as long as the expansion is installed.

After witnessing SpaceX’s vertical landings on floating drone ships, the team was inspired to include the necessary tools in KSP for players to attempt such feats. So, with this patch we are adding the capability to place mobile launchpads on the surface of water bodies in the expansion. We can’t wait to see what sort of missions the community will come up with once the patch is out.

Three brand new stock missions for the Making History Expansion are being included in this patch as well. These missions take inspiration from humankind’s own space history, but carry their own Kerbal twist. If you want to learn more about these new missions and the patch’s content, be sure to check out this link that contains the 1.4.3 highlights.

Don’t forget that you can also you can share and download missions on Curse, KerbalX, and the KSP Forum.

That’s it for this week. Be sure to join us on our official forums, and don’t forget to follow us on Twitter and Facebook. Stay tuned for more exciting and upcoming news and development updates!

Happy launchings!

*Information Source:

The TESS Mission. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://tess.gsfc.nasa.gov/

O`Callaghan, J. (2018, April 09). NASA Is About To Launch Its Next Great Planet-Hunting Telescope. Retrieved from http://www.iflscience.com/space/nasa-is-about-to-launch-its-next-great-planethunting-telescope/