Random Thought Depository @random-thought-depository - Tumblr Blog

Looking at some of the projects promoted in Orion's Arm's "Other Space Operas and similar projects" page and comparing Starmoth and Beacons In the Dark to Big Ideas Grand Vision (I wrote a little about Big Ideas Grand Vision's implicit politics here) and my memories of '00s Orion's Arm and thinking, yeah, I can very much see the imprint of the last twenty years of changes in nerd culture's politics here.

#Orion's Arm #geek culture

do you have an ao3 or something anywhere for posting fanfiction?

Sorry for taking a long time to respond to this, I had computer problems and lost access to my Tumblr password until my computer was fixed.

To answer your question: not at present. TBH for the last couple of years I've been conserving my spoons for my self-rescue and family rescue project and haven't written much besides the stuff I posted here. Maybe if I actually get that apartment in the North Bay I'll get more serious about working on my fiction this summer. Or maybe not, if the new apartment works out the next thing on my agenda will be finally learning how to drive and getting a driver's license, so that may absorb a lot of my energy for a while.

I wrote an original fantasy novella and posted it on Sufficient Velocity back in 2016, so if you're interested you can check that out if you haven't already (I've mentioned it a few times on here). And I can dig up links to some of my other fiction I've posted on Sufficient Velocity and Spacebattles.com over the years easily enough if you'd like.

#about me #my writing

I haven't posted for like a month cause my computer broke, I had my Tumblr password saved in it and didn't have it memorized, and it seemed easier to just wait until it was fixed instead of changing it. My computer's fixed now, so I'm back.

I have some good news about my self-rescue and family rescue project: after two years of entering my family onto waiting lists for various subsidized/below market rate apartments we've finally been offered an apartment we can (borderline) afford! It's just a one bedroom, but it'll be a big improvement from the place we're living in now, a big improvement to our quality of life! It's not a sure thing, so I'm trying to not get too excited, but, oh, it's really nice to think we might be out of the slum place we're living in now and somewhere better by my birthday (July 14th)!

I'm feeling some grief about the prospect of moving out of Berkeley though. The new place would be on the periphery of the Bay Area, in Fairfield, and I think there's things I'll miss about Berkeley; the very pleasant climate, being able to take walks on the UC Campus (I live close to it), the close proximity to easily accessible beautiful semi-wilderness areas, the little bit of that '60s hippie-ish "vibe" that still lingers, etc.. Despite the poverty I grew up in I feel that in some ways I was really lucky to get to grow up here, and I suspect I'll miss it.

#about me

hyumjim

Like there’s no way you guys read The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas and this is what you took away from it right. You thought she meant this all literally and the things the narrator is saying are true things and there’s no particular reason that these things are being said in a story about everyone ignoring a child being tortured so they can have their little treats

random-thought-depository

Let's look at the quote in more of its original context (link to full text of the story - note: I took the liberty of correcting what after cross-checking with another copy of the story I'm very sure is a typo in the quote):

Joyous! How is one to tell about joy? How describe the citizens of Omelas? They were not simple folk, you see, though they were happy. [...] Yet I repeat that these were not simple folk, not dulcet shepherds, noble savages, bland utopians. They were not less complex than us. The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain. If you can't lick 'em, join 'em. If it hurts, repeat it. But to praise despair is to condemn delight, to embrace violence is to lose hold of everything else. We have almost lost hold; we can no longer describe happy man, nor make any celebration of joy. How can I tell you about the people of Omelas? They were not naive and happy children--though their children were, in fact, happy. They were mature, intelligent, passionate adults whose lives were not wretched. O miracle! But I wish I could describe it better. I wish I could convince you. Omelas sounds in my words like a city in a fairy tale, long ago and far away, once upon a time. Perhaps it would be best if you imagined it as your own fancy bids, assuming it will rise to the occasion, for certainly I cannot suit you all.

After a lengthy attempt to get us to try to imagine the joys and pleasures and cool things in Omelas, Le Guin asks us this:

Do you believe? Do you accept the festival, the city, the joy? No? Then let me describe one more thing.

And then we get the twist reveal of the sacrificial tortured child. And after that, Le Guin asks us;

Now do you believe them? Are they not more credible?

There are multiple things you can interpret the story as being about, and I suspect Le Guin intended it to be about multiple things, and you could read in a commentary on class society that would incline you to suspect a considerable degree of unreliable narrator in the part where Le Guin talks up how awesome Omelas is, etc.. But another interpretation I've encountered, which I find reasonable, is that this aspect of the story is (perhaps among other things) a commentary on utopian fiction and its reception and the resistance a lot of people have to seriously considering the idea of radically better worlds. The tortured child is a concession to readers who can only believe in Omelas if it's presented to them as having some kind of loadbearing Terrible Price (TM), and the story is structured to draw attention to that concession. The story reads to me as very much in dialogue with that classic sci fi trope of the lotus eater utopia that's superficially appealing but secretly bad (see: Brave New World, the planets of the week of multiple Star Trek TOS episodes, etc.). And in that context the "treason of the artist" line and the part about the tortured child read to me as different modes of engagement with common criticisms of the idea of utopia, the first engaging with it by refutation ("no, the Omelans aren't living superficially pleasurable but cognitively impoverished lives of vapid stagnant bliss, they're as smart and sophisticated as we are, Omelas is fun in a rich complex diverse way") and the second engaging with it by concession ("you won't believe in Omelas unless I give it some ugly underbelly, so here it is"). And, on that note, the "treason of the artist" and refusal to believe in Omelas unless it has some kind of ugly underbelly look very much like two facets of the belief that "I like it when things are straightforwardly good" is somehow an immature preference.

Basically, I think if you look at that quote in its context, treating it as a legitimate insight Ursula K. Le Guin had is reasonable; the degree to which the narrator is a character distinct from the author in Omelas is actually pretty ambiguous.

#Ursula K Le Guin #The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas

The Hungarian prime minister concedes to Péter Magyar, who is set to win a supermajority in the 199-seat parliament.

#politics

Artemis 2 etched its name in the record books and kept NASA on track for even bigger things to come.

#space #Artemis II mission

collapsedsquid

excerpts from a forthcoming

In the original concept, the idea behind removing cash from the holiday camp was that it would blur social distinctions. Giving everyone the same access to food and drink would remove some of the visible markers of class and therefore some of the potential sources of anxiety. (In the first Majorca camps, the gentils membres were encouraged by the gentils organisateurs to sing songs around the campfire together; it was more like a childrens’ summer camp than the modern all-inclusive). But the concept has caught on and persisted into a less class-conscious world because Blitz’s true genius was to understand that being in a market economy is stressful partly because of the cognitive demand that it places on you. Every transaction is a decision, and decisions cost energy. Removing the price mechanism, for a while, can be intensely relaxing. This is quite difficult for people to understand if they have an economics degree. It might be argued the opposite way; that when you remove the price mechanism, you are destroying information and likely making things worse. If the restaurants in a resort are not competing for business and the staff are not motivated by tips, then standards are surely likely to slip; there is no incentive to provide good service. But you can see what is wrong with this simply by looking at what happens, particularly in beach resorts where the all-inclusive model and the market model co-exist. The staff at the swim-up bar don’t necessarily have any reason to hustle; they might even be told by the management to slow things down, in order to keep costs (and the behaviour of the guests) under control. Meanwhile, beach vendors, masseurs and the sellers of excursions are in a situation of pure market competition. They live or die by their ability to persuade people to part with money in exchange for goods and services. Which of these two categories of people are generally beloved by the guests, and which are considered pests? To ask the question is to answer it. There are a few things going on. One important point is that it’s not necessarily the case that the best way to sell something is to provide the customer with an enjoyable experience. Another strategy, as I learned when I was a stockbroker, is to pester them mercilessly until they pay you to go away.

#class politics #institutions #fun theory in the Lesswrong sense of the term (i.e. theory of fun and unfun)

aksemmi

im not always... much a general fan of retributive violence, whether carried out by the state or individuals, and frequently - the majority of the time it happens really - people post awfully violent threats explicitly or implicitly at various targets which are either undeserved or wildly disproportionate, but i think a lot of people on here treat "vigilanteism" as a policy proposal, where there is an institution (the general public) that will carry it out and we can reasonably distrust and therefor oppose the policy of any kind of extrajudicial violence, but i think this is frequently at least dubious in that its not obvious any individual act of violence will be causative of or dependent on others, and so this doesnt really make much sense as a response

random-thought-depository

The amount of vigilanteism in society is probably responsive to common attitudes toward vigilanteism. A society where vigilanteism is widely celebrated and vigilantes often become folk heroes is probably going to have more vigilanteism than a society where most people think law enforcement should be the job of the cops and the courts and basically trust their state's cops and courts to do that job and thus by default are suspicious of vigilanteism. Maintaining the latter kind of society is part of the liberal truce (and another interlocking part of the liberal truce is trying to institutionally engineer cops and courts who mostly act as something approximating neutral arbiters instead of as blatant partisans of a particular class, ethnicity, religious community, or other special interest group; that's the symmetrical other end of the bargain - vigilantes are likely to basically act on behalf of their own family, ethnic or religious community, class, or other such parochial interest group).

#politics #class politics

nunuisancenewt

This may be me overthinking it but I never got what “Masking” in the autistic sense was supposed to mean

Like OK, A classic symptom of autism is Being socially Awkward/ not being able to quickly and intuitively Read other people’s emotions from there body language/facial expressions in a way that comes naturally to other people.

But if you are wearing like, A Metaphorical Mask, if you have succeeded at the task of Pretending To Be Allistic, that means you can read someones emotions from body language and facial expressions, and like maybe this isn’t something that came naturally to you as a kid but you are capable of doing it now. And if you as an Autistic Adult are having “ Difficulty Unmasking” well it sounds like reading other people is a skill that comes naturally to you now, and requires less mental exertion than, deliberately ignoring that information? To be “more autistic”?

And like, maybe you’re putting on a bit of an act or playing into a role when interacting with most people, and you might act differently than you do naturally when alone, but that isn’t A Unique Autistic thing, Everyone knows what “ Customer Service Voice” means, and theres decades of Academic coverage and popular discourse on Code Switching in relation to Race and Class and Age-group and Formal vs Informal environments. This is a nearly Universal human experience.

random-thought-depository

Illustrative examples of masking behaviors:

Suppressing impulses to stim.

Carefully not showing a socially abnormal amount of enthusiasm for your hobbies.

Enduring aversive sensory stimuli (e.g. eating food with repulsive tastes and/or textures, enduring unpleasant noises, etc.) without comment and while hiding your discomfort to reduce social friction while sharing social events and spaces with neurotypicals.

Basically, the concept gets a lot more comprehensible if you remember that autism is not entirely and maybe is not even primarily a "bad at non-verbal communication and parsing social subtext" condition, it's also a distinctive way of thinking, feeling, and experiencing the world.

#autism

anxeious

this is making me emotional

#space #Artemis II mission

redstonedust

it's a little thing but it annoys me that both blue marble and hello world (photos of earth taken from the apollo 17 and artemis II missions respectively) are South pole up but people often crop and rotate them to be the 'correct' orientation. appreciate our beautiful planet in all her directions smh.

lateleviathan

Unedited "Blue Marble":

Unedited "Hello World":

#space #Artemis II mission

lonestarflight

Apollo 17 vs Artemis II

mementochao

Despite everything, it's still you.

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Also prev tags:

That's really cool actually

#space #Artemis II mission

nasa

Earthset

The Artemis II crew captured this view of an Earthset on April 6, 2026, as they flew around the Moon. The image is reminiscent of the iconic Earthrise image taken by astronaut Bill Anders 58 years earlier as the Apollo 8 crew flew around the Moon. The Apollo 8 mission was the first crewed spacecraft to circumnavigate the Moon.

For more imagery from the mission, visit our Artemis II Multimedia Page.

#space #Artemis II mission

nasa

Welcome to the Far Side of the Moon

A crescent Earth sets behind the Moon.

On April 6, 2026, the Artemis II astronauts flew around the Moon, observing the far side – which we never see on Earth thanks to tidal locking – with their own eyes and with cameras.

See more of the Moon: