"Jar Jar, you're a genius"

We cast her anyway, in a chorus role. Offered her lots of support and encouragement and kindness and grace.

At the next audition she whispered. Anyone who had never seen her before would have thought she was the most nervous kid there. But the directing team was abuzz afterward. Did you see? She did it! Once or twice I could actually almost hear her! Amazing.

Got cast again, in a chorus role. She’d been making friends with the other kids, and they offered her encouragement too.

And the next audition we said wow I can hear her! She’s speaking! Let’s give her a handful of lines! She can do it!

He did a wonderful job, but as he was returning my plant to my custody, he explained "I watered her every other day, I gave her new dirt, moved her into the sunshine, prayed the rosary-"

"What?"

He looked at me, confused. "Isn't she a plant you pray with?"

"No," I said slowly. "She's a prayer plant. That's the... colloquial name of the plant."

Upon seeing his stricken face, I realized something went wrong. Turns out, this entire time, he's been including my plant in on his prayers and leaving her near icons.

The reason it was so important for narrative purposes, was that the plot concerns the visit of the Astronaut, in his completely opaque spacesuit, to a planet populated entirely by self-aware robots (originally from Earth) who have built their own society and are petitioning to be allowed to interact with Earth again as equals.

They have a democratic government and free choice of careers etc. as the orange robot serving as guide tells the Astronaut.

The Astronaut notices that there are two different types of robot on this world; the orange ones, who are in charge, gifted access to all information and facilities. and the blue robots, who are seen as more limited in function, have less access to information and resources, and are not allowed positions of power or as wide a choice of employment opportunities. Even transportation is segregated.

The Astronaut investigates further and discovers that the blue and orange robots are actually structurally identical, there is absolutely no difference between their potential or capabilities, and it is only because the orange robots are instructed by their Educator system to consider themselves superior, that the difference exists.

The Astronaut tells the robots they are not ready for re-alignment with Earth, until they come to terms with their own unfairness, and how Earth had had to deal with this issue themselves. When that time comes, the robots will be able to ally with Earth.

Then he leaves in his spaceship, and it's only in that one final panel that we see the Astronaut is black.

Not subtle, nor should it be, but for 1950 this was a breathtakingly powerful statement, perhaps the first of it's kind in the genre.

That's how I'd do it but given that her 'I do what I want' evasion of copyright might not extend to making everything accessible to the entire online population and iirc Stratt being kind of controlling and particular about who she works with, I'm not sure that's how she'd do it. Unfortunately since she made everyone speak English as the lingua franca (authorial bias showing imo) she might just put everything in English to shrink the amount of data. That would simplify the project but you lose a lot in translation, so that's better if her goal was simply to aid the mission crew vs preserve Earth's cultural heritage.

Actually I have 7 minutes before I have to sign on. If our priority is just mission effectiveness rather than cultural preservation, the strategy I'd probably take off the top of my head is:

Qualitative interviews with the crew and relevant subject matter experts. Go through that data to identify themes/topics most likely to be relevant to the mission.

Have LIS or related experts transform those themes into a controlled vocabulary.

Develop an automated tool that can ingest your content, generate a brief abstract, and assign index terms from the controlled vocabulary.

Have human expert review of the tool's output. (This will probably need to be spotchecking if you've got a small team of experts; again we are talking about all of human cultural output here.)

This is basically the other side of the scale from the first suggestion - it would give you a faster, more targeted search that would help you zero in on mission-critical content. (After all you probably don't need your search tool running through the scripts for 50 years of General Hospital when you're trying to find emergency treatments for a crewmember experiencing arrhythmia.) The tradeoff of course is that if you end up needing something you weren't expecting (like, say, linguistic theory because you just met an alien) it might not be as effective.

(None of this is touching on how this much data is being STORED of course. I have to imagine at least the audiovisual content is compressed and only the index is being actively searched, and content is unzipped if it needs to be accessed. Which again points to needing a really good indexing system. But I'm not a computer scientist.)

Take my gay cats, Tumblr!

he thought time relativity was for one day he mad!!!!!!

[scribbled this sometime last week? bc this post reminded me of that part in the book again and i kept giggling about it]