What's wrong with Maybe?

Stories? Art? Mythology? Corvids?

[saltshroud]

[meowoongi]

after i watched the film i got myslef thinking like do you think that if an imminent tragedy were to occur (as in the sun is going to die in many years from now), the world would stop fighting and find peace in order to resolve the situation?

[mikkeneko]

on one hand I think the answer is "no," but on the other hand: I'm not sure that it would necessarily need to?

I think any audience post-2020 would have good reason to be skeptical of any work that involved the whole world recognizing the seriousness of an existential threat and being able and willing to work together to resolve it. However, I also don't think that's what's actually going on in Project Hail Mary?

The whole point of the Project Hail Mary initiative is that they don't need the buy-in and cooperation of every government and company and institution in the world. They only need enough powerful sponsors, ones who are effectively willing to write them a blank check, that they can get access to the resources they need and bypass the obstacles that might stop them.*

Much of the flashback part of the book deals with Eva Stratt researching, contacting, and negotiating with disparate interests to make this happen. Taking one of the most drastic elements of the operation, the whole 'paving of the Sahara,' for example. Stratt didn't need the local governments to be willing to abscond their positions and offer up their treasuries to make that happen. The project negotiated it, through Redell, with the understanding that this initiative would end with many local African warlords in command of the world's biggest energy generators and would be vastly enriched thereby. They don't need to broker world peace or even necessarily local peace for that to happen.

And they don't need every government in the world to grant them an exemption from their respective laws, either; they only need the determination to take the necessary steps now and the willingness to take the consequences later. After all, even if an international court later rules against them, they can't exactly un-nuke Antarctica.

*The only major miss Weir made -- since this book was written in the early 2020s and predates some amount of the current fuckery -- was assuming that the US government would be one of those powerful sponsors. Which was a reasonable, if optimistic, extrapolation of how the US gov't has behaved with regards to past concerns, say the handling of Y2K or the ozone layer. The current one very well might not be so cooperative, but even then, the US government isn't the only power in the world with money and a military. Their participation would be helpful, but not required.

I don't know if it's an encouraging or a dispiriting thought, but that's ultimately my take on it: no, you will never get every human on earth to agree on any one single cause no matter how worthy, but also, outside of fantasy scenarios you probably wouldn't need to. You only have to convince enough people.

[timkarr]

Homes. Jocotenango, Guatemala, 2024.

[theriverbeyond]

tbh I can't stop thinking about how i went into Hadestown being like "this is a tragic love story based on a greek myth I enjoy :)" and I came out the other side covered in blood being like "this is a thesis about how capitalism inevitably leads to both personal and global ruin, and so we are duty bound to resist it even as we lose, again and again and again. no matter how impossible it feels or how many times we fail and hit a wall and fall, we try again"

[imsobadatnicknames2]

Nuke canada now

[imsobadatnicknames2]

Did y'all know that 70% of all mining operations in latin america and the caribbean involve a canadian transnational mining corporation?

[imsobadatnicknames2]

Anyway, when I was in college I was constantly going to marches and protests against canadian and saudi mining projects in the Santurbán páramo, one of the most important ecosystems in Colombia in terms of biodiversity, and the source of drinking water of 30+ municipalities in my state, including the city I live in. Ultimately these mining proposals lost their license due to environmental regulations.

But now that our new far-right president elect is looking to suck up to imperial core powers once again, canadian mining corporation Aris mining is interested in re-starting mining projects in Santurbán. Which, would inevitably give cyanide poisoning not only to my city's drinking water, but 30+ other municipalities and indigenous communities.

[imsobadatnicknames2]

The imperial core will see one of latin america's veins and go "is anyone gonna cut that open?" and not wait for an answer

[i-suggest-landback]

i have a better suggestion

[slyandthefamilybook]

I love Eva Stratt... that scene on the ship where Grace tells her she's mysterious and aloof and you can tell that kind of hurts her. she really does care about humanity, she's just not very good at showing it! she sings her one beautiful song to try to connect with everyone else, not to prove anything to them but so she can feel a moment of connection and camaraderie. and then she gets overwhelmed and goes "okay I'm done bye". I love my autistic friend Eva Stratt

[nyanletnest]

bwaow

[littleguysdaily]

Yeah

[klausie]

[playwrongs]

For the record, OP appears to be thinking of the Canon a 2 cancrizans from J.S. Bach’s Musical Offering. It’s written out as a single melody that can be played forwards, backwards, and the forwards and backwards versions can be played simultaneously in counterpoint with one another.

Either that, or they’re thinking of “Jumping Queen” by Beethoven.

[gatheringbones]

[“Fungal appetites are diverse, but there are some materials they won’t break down unless they have to. In one of his workshops, McCoy explained how he had trained Pleurotus mycelium to digest one of the most commonly littered items in the world, cigarette butts, more than 750 thousand tons of which are thrown away every year. Unused cigarette butts will break down, given time, but used cigarette butts are saturated with toxic residues that impede the process. McCoy had weaned Pleurotus onto a diet of used butts by gradually phasing out the alternatives. Over time, the fungus had “learned” how to use them as its sole food source. A time-lapse video showed the mycelium seeping steadily upward through a jam jar filled with crumpled tar-stained butts. A burly oyster mushroom soon bundled itself up and out of the top.

In fact, it is just as much “remembering” as “learning.” A fungus won’t produce an enzyme it doesn’t need. Enzymes, or even entire metabolic pathways, can lie dormant in fungal genomes for generations. For the Pleurotus mycelium to digest the used cigarette butts it might have to dust off an unused metabolic move. Or it might deploy an enzyme normally used for something else and press it into the service of a new cause. Many fungal enzymes, like lignin peroxidases, are not specific. This means that a single enzyme can serve as a multitool, allowing the fungus to metabolize different compounds with similar structures.

As it happens, many toxic pollutants—including those in cigarette butts—resemble the by-products of lignin breakdown. In this sense, to confront Pleurotus mycelium with used cigarette butts is to offer it a commonplace challenge. Much of radical mycology is underwritten by the radical chemistry of white rot fungi. However, it isn’t always easy to predict what a given fungal strain will metabolize. McCoy told us about his attempts to grow Pleurotus mycelium on dishes spotted with drops of the herbicide glyphosate. Some of the Pleurotus strains avoided the drops. Some grew straight through them. Some grew up to the edge of a drop and stopped growing. “It took those ones a week to work out how to break it down,” McCoy recalled. He likened fungi to jailers with bunches of enzymatic keys that can unlock certain chemical bonds. Some strains might have the right key ready to go. Others might have it buried somewhere inside their genome but choose to avoid the new substance anyway. Others might take a week to riffle through the bunch of keys, trying different ones until they get lucky.”]

Merlin Sheldrake, Entangled Life

[gatheringbones]

quote request for any quotes on love, intimacy, and power? hope you're having a lovely time sewing, trying to keep my hands busy today too <3

“One is not loved accidentally; one’s own power to love produces love - just as being interested makes one interesting. People are concerned with the question of whether they are attractive while they forget that the essence of attractiveness is their own capacity to love. To love a person productively implies to care and to feel responsible for his life, not only for his physical existence but for the growth and development of all his human powers. To love productively is incompatible with being passive, with being an onlooker at the loved person’s life; it implies labor and care and the responsibility for his growth.” — Erich Fromm

“A close, daily intimacy between two people has to be paid for: it requires a great deal of experience of life, logic, and warmth of heart on both sides to enjoy each other’s good qualities without being irritated by each other’s shortcomings and blaming each other for them.” — Ivan Goncharov

"I already knew that the great thing to learn about life is, first, not to do what you don’t want to do, and, second, to do what you do want to do. Jane [Heap] and I began talking. We talked for days, months, years… Jane and I were as different as two people can be…. The result of our differences was– Argument. At last I could argue as long as I wanted. Instead of discouraging Jane, this stimulated her. She was always saying that she never found enough resistance in life to make talking worth while– or anything else for that matter. And I had always been confronted with people who found my zest for argument disagreeable, who said they lost in any subject the moment it became controversial. My answer had been that argument wasn’t necessarily controversy…. I had never been able to understand why people dislike to be challenged. For me, challenge has always been the great impulse, the only liberation.” — Margaret Anderson 

“I want in fact more of you. In my mind I am dressing you with light; I am wrapping you up in blankets of complete acceptance and then I give myself to you. I long for you; I who usually long without longing, as though I am unconscious and absorbed in neutrality and apathy, really, utterly long for every bit of you.” — Franz Kafka

“We think the fire eats the wood. We are wrong. The wood reaches out to the flame. The fire licks at what the wood harbors, and the wood gives itself away to that intimacy, the manner in which we and the world meet each new day.” ― Jack Gilbert

[cryptic-corvids]

trying to do the ‘grips the counter and stares into the mirror haggardly while the fluorescents flicker’ thing in my work bathroom but I’m 5’2 and wear floral button ups so the effect is more clown than sad male protagonist

[specialagentartemis]

Intelligent alien species based on bugs but specifically those moths that don’t have mouths and only live for a week after they pupate. This species’ whole conscious life is actually in the larval phase; larvae are the ones considered people, larvae are the ones with conscious and complex brains who build society, and each instar of the larva is treated as a different phase of life. Larvae become emotionally and socially and cognitively mature without ever becoming sexually mature. When they pupate, they metamorphose into something different and strange and close to mindless, with no mouth and no digestive system, whose only instincts are to mate and then quickly die. Metamorphosis is treated, functionally, like a person’s death, and the imago phase is a kind of proto-afterlife of majestic flight and the continuation of the species. Birth and death inextricably intertwined. Sex is not something people do during their lives, it’s a thing that is done as an imago after you’ve passed on from your life but before you return to the soil in death. Resultant eggs are collected by family members to raise. I think this would be fun.

[doctorgrantthinksthatsabadidea]

You may be interested in a short story in the Predator anthology Eyes of the Demon:

The Distance in their Eyes by Stephen Graham Jones (AND it’s the second story so if you just look at the sample on Kindle the whole story’s included in the first 10%)

[mcgravin]

I'd also recommend James Tiptree Jr.'s "Love is the Plan the Plan is Death". It's a story told from the perspective of an alien species who have sapience during the warm summer months, but their minds revert to animalistic, instinct behavior ("the Plan") during the cold winter.

[farewell-to-lorien]

Illustrations for Yukio Mishima's The Sound of Waves | Shiosai | 潮騒, by Lâm Tùng Nguyễn.

[girlknots]

Some utility pole hashira with my Ash @giveherswords ❤️

[namethatghostling]

stop drinking beer with the deer and come have a cider with the spiderrrr

[jkottke]

Checking in with Theo Jansen’s Strandbeests, kinetic machine sculptures that move under their own power along the beach. Some of the most recent versions are quick fast and can even tow humans along behind them.

[knitmeapony]

Gorgeous.

[herpsandbirds]

A record die-off of sea stars was followed by something that stunned biologists

The creatures almost went extinct along the West Coast a decade ago. Recently, they have been making a comeback.

Six months ago, Menge’s team published exciting research — five-legged sea stars were undergoing a significant “baby boom.” The tide pools were denser than they had been before the disease, and the juveniles were eating mussels and clearing space for other species. In short, something rare and wonderful was happening on the Oregon Coast: One of the intertidal zone’s most important predators had returned from the brink...

Read more:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2026/06/06/after-massive-die-off-west-coast-sea-stars-experience-resurgence/