"Sulphur for your art."

OKAY SO.

Gaia is the Greek personification of the Earth, right, and Terra comes from Terra Mater (Mother Earth), the Roman version of essentially the same thing.

And I think we tend to view Ancient Greece as a kind of mythical fantasy place (this is fair, much of the culture of Ancient Greece the average person interacts with is fiction) vs. Rome, which is very real to the average imagination. When one thinks of Rome, one thinks of real events that actually happened (the Ides of March, the Great Fire, maybe the big fuckoff wall in England, etc.)

What I think is super interesting about that is that this is an effect of the primary technology of the Roman empire—colonisation—being so blisteringly effective that Roman mythology and their incredibly pervasive religion (and the 5D chess they were playing with it in order to facilitate the colonisation project) is pretty much invisible unless you sit down and look for it. Did you know the Romans had a god-personification of doorways (Forculus)? Now you do. And yet it's ALWAYS Romans In Space because we think of them as a real and serious imperial power vs. like, theatre nerds.

This is a shame for science fiction I think because other options include:

Space Peloponnesian League. Nice planet you got there. Sure would be a shame if anything happened to it. Have you seen our armada. Would you like to contribute to the armada, thus enlarging it, to ensure nothing unfortunate happens to your nice planet?

Space Sparta. Empire run entirely on the dominion of one single other planet with a population of perhaps 100x the legitimate citizen population. Control of said planet maintained by random acts of terrorism enacted by particularly horrible children. Bad at warfare despite putting all their time and attention into it. Deluded into thinking they're good at defence where the fact of the matter is that no one in their right mind would want their barren death planet.

Space Scythians. What home planet? Oh no they live on their ships. Yeah they just raid whatever planets they pass for supplies. They have this whole sector under an iron fist.

Space Persians. Hello new subjects we are religiously mandated to defeat chaos and also we're collecting your plants for our gardens. We have hundreds of vassal states and they're all terrified of us, for excellent reason.

and so on and so forth

Not to suggest these literally never come up in science fiction but the ratio of Romans to other possible imperial structures is way off and imho it's because Romans were such unbelievably successful colonisers that we think of them as real (and therefore reasonable fodder for science fiction) where almost all other ancient civilisations end up being used as blueprints for fantasy even though they were real too.

I don’t mean Australians are a “stick it to the man, fight back against those in power” kind of people – we’re generally not. And I don’t mean we have a “we’re going to do the status thing but pretend we don’t and pretend to all be equal in mixed company” thing that middle-class Americans do. I mean the status-respect system does not exist, and if you try to use it, it weirds people the fuck out at best, and insults them at worst. Treating someone most countries would say is ‘above’ you differently in Australia is basically telling that person that you hate them; it’s saying “I’m forced to interact with you due to our current circumstances but I don’t see you as a person and won’t grant you the basic respect of treating you like an equal”. (When I was in America, I was constantly suppressing the instinct that random service people were sassing me because they overuse honourifics and were so keen to help me.)

This makes interacting with foreigners really baffling in a lot of circumstances. In university, my international friends would often describe Australians as “friendly, but very rude”. They thought we were all arseholes because of the way we spoke to our PhD supervisors and soforth, and wouldn’t believe us when we explained that our behaviour was respectful and that being deferential would be weird and awkward and insulting to them. Learning Japanese had a similar problem; everyone in the class could get the concept of different levels of formality and deference in language, ans was happy to memorise the usage of various words for Japanese people, but using them on each other was super weird, and we’d only ever use the most casual form of anything unless specifically instructed otherwise by the teacher.

The reason I’ve been thinking of this lately is because I’ve recently become aware that a lot of countries have like… a special respect for their country’s leaders? I don’t just mean “yeah, that guy makes the rules”, but that having that office makes them better than everyone else, somehow. Which I expect from countries with royal families, because Tradition, but I’ve recently found that Americans feel this way about their President, too. (Except the current one, who seems to be enough of a dick to break the system.) Like, if six Americans were in an aeroplane that was going down and there was only one parachute and one of the Americans was A Generic Non-Trump President, it’s just assumed that that guy gets the parachute? Like he’s automatically the life worth saving over the others, and they’d just give up their chance in favour of him? And that’s so weird to me. An Australian prime minister would have a 1 in 6 chance at the parachute; however the people decided, “this guy happens to be the leader of the country” wouldn’t be a factor. 

When Americans don’t like a President, they usually feel the need to work in how he’s “not my president”, either through sheer denial, or by finding some way he’s theoretically illegitimate (different ways votes are counted, wild conspiracy theories about birth country, etc.), and while making sure those rules are obeyed IS extremely important, I’ve recently noticed that part of the motivation seems to be that they’re invested in whether he’s Really The President because being the President somehow makes someone Special rather than just a normal dick who’s been put in charge of the group project. (You see the same thing in “THIS IS TRUMP’S AMERICA!”, like him becoming President gives him superpowers or something).

I remember in school we were always taught to treat others how you wanted to be treated. You were no better or worse than anyone else. You want to be treated equal to everyone else and that meant being polite and showing decency and helping each other out. It’s true we only use titles for teachers or elders (indigenous Australians use “Aunty” and “Uncle” as a show of respect to their elders) but outside of that if someone calls you Miss y/n or sir or whatever it’s just uncomfortable. In hospitality and retail some of us will still use sir/ma'am mainly because we don’t know customers names but even then that’s rare and usually applied only to elderly. We personally don’t want to be addressed by titles or even surnames (unless it’s a nickname which I’ll get to) so we don’t use the titles or surnames for other people. With surnames often we use them as a nickname if we dont/can’t shorten their names. Getting a nickname (a good one, not one that is intentionally meant to bully you ofc. E.g. ScoMo is the nickname for our PM but he’s a piece of shit and ScoMo sounds a lot like Scum-mo) is the biggest show of respect in Australia. Usually it’s simply just adding a vowel or changing it up a little. I.e. John = johnno, Darren = Dazza, etc. If we can’t do it to your first name we do it to your last name. If we can’t do it to your last name it’s either a feature or behaviour and we put it in a good light. You ever notice that Australians like to make fun of each other and “insult” each other? There’s a very subtle difference when it’s truly meant to be insulting but that’s our way of being affectionate for each other. We will point out your flaws and make fun of you (and stop if you say no) and we will give you a nickname and it’s all in good humour. It’s one of the things I find foreigners get really upset about because they dont understand why we are so rude to each other. You build up a hard skin in this country and forget hat sometimes that stuff IS a bit insulting.

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On May 8th, 1980, smallpox was declared eradicated. Meaning there is no natural spread of smallpox anywhere in the world.

Smallpox infections date back at least 3,000 years. There are smallpox scars on the Egyptian pharaoh Ramses V.

The last documented person to have naturally contracted smallpox was 23-year-old hospital cook Ali Maow Maalin, who survived the disease in October of 1977.

The last person to die of the disease was 40-year-old medical photographer Janet Parker, infected in a lab accident in the summer of 1978.

Smallpox was a terrifying disease. It was horrifically painful and killed 1/3 of the people it infected, leaving the rest badly scarred.

We got lucky with smallpox. It had no animal reservoir. Being that it only infected humans we were able to vaccinate our way to eradication.

Today variola major, the virus that causes smallpox, officially exists in 2 places: the CDC in Atlanta, Georgia, USA, and the Vector Institute, Koltsovo, Russia. It is likely that many other countries have samples as well.

Deliberate infection with cowpox to prevent smallpox was the first effective vaccine. We owe every other vaccine to this one breakthrough.

The smallpox vaccine causes a scar at the injection site. You probably know someone with a smallpox vaccine scar. Routine childhood vaccination for smallpox ended in 1972 in the USA.

We used the smallpox vaccine to vaccinate against mpox in 2022. Because of this, I have given the smallpox vaccine. We also vaccinate researchers and others at high risk.