Most Of What You've Written Jibes With My Experience With B:I. All The Bioshock Games Had Convoluted

The question I've been asking is why Sandra Newman decided to go with Julia instead of Winston Smith's ex-wife Katherine. Julia has the much bigger part in Nineteen Eighty-Four, but I've come to find Katherine interesting precisely because her presence in the story is so minimal. Winston describes her as a conformist who just recites whatever doggerel the Party puts out, but the stridency of this depiction makes me wonder if Winston himself was engaging in his own little bit of historical revisionism and narrative framing. Additionally, while Katherine and Winston are still technically married, by the beginning of the novel they are for all intents and purposes separated, and IIRC Winston's narration makes it fairly clear she was the one who did the separating. Perhaps there's room there for a story of the contradictions, complexities, and compromises of a true believer.

What do we think of the feminist 1984 retelling? Am I being kneejerk eye-rolling for no reason?

I’m a big boring nerd who likes uniforms, so I was always Templar. 'Course I do have a soft spot for both the Kingdom (mummy gangsters!) and the former Red Hand (communist magic!).

Time for the hard question: Templar, Lumie, or Dragon?

Illuminati, real meme hours.

This is very embarrassing, but I forgot to link the blog post that discussed Kuvira. It’s right here: https://futuristdolmen.wordpress.com/2015/08/23/kuvira-an-appraisal-of-the-woman-and-her-works/

A piece I did for avatarfanzine - Children of the Earth zine, which if you pre-ordered it, should be getting it real soon. I wished Kuvira would’ve had a longer season to shine a lot more. She genuinely saw herself as the hero of the people.

“Assassinations are often harder on the consul than the senator...”

ANCIENT ROMAN MEME DISCOVERED

1 2

2 50

it doesnt translate very well

I’m imagining something like that one scene in Lord of War where Nick Cage’s plane full of guns is forced to make an emergency landing somewhere in Liberia, and within twelve hours the whole thing is stripped to the skeleton. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mQgdZTgpczM

Sis and I discussing The Mandalorian, episode 2.

Damned right.

Regardless of what cynics still resentful of their 11th grade English class experience might tell you, you’re allowed to identify with Holden. You’re allowed to root for Heathcliff. You’re allowed to feel gooey over Romeo and Juliet. 

We got over the idea that literature was meant to always reflect reality and to offer moral instruction a long time ago. Interacting with all the gross, ugly, embarrassing, and/or destructive emotions we encounter in books is part of the reason they’re there.

Custom-tailored sweatsuits for chilly tanks. :3

Super heavy tank

Kuvira thinking about crushing you like a bug

I was mulling a lot over that exchange between Nine and Ten today, and I was thinking there might even more of a personal motivation for Ten′s harshness. Of the three probes in the story, Ten perhaps had the most ambitious mission. Her initial mission was to survey the asteroid belt and Jupiter, then be flung out of the solar system altogether by using Jupiter’s gravity as a slingshot. Pioneer 10 was designed to be humanity’s first emissary to the cosmos. Both she and her (brother? sister?) Pioneer 11 were launched with this,

the Pioneer plaque, an engraving designed to explain to any intelligent beings that found her where she came from and who built her. You can argue back and forth about whether any alien species would actually understand this diagram, but you can understand the intent. The plaque was humanity’s message to the universe, simply saying, “Hello. We are here.” Now imagine Ten’s life as depicted in 17776. She was built under sunny Californian skies, and had the same bits of junk data sloshing in and out of her memory bank that Nine did. There may have been simple commands or statements encoded and erased about her ultimate mission, none of it truly sticking, of course, but perhaps there was a faint trace imprinted that she was special, that she had a great purpose, perhaps the greatest purpose any human-created artifact has ever had. Initially, being a simple 1970s space probe, she would know none of this. She performed her initial missions well, then sped off into the endless night, waiting for her final destiny. Then one day, she woke up. She pieced together a working mind somehow, got herself in order, and prepared herself for her final mission. As she did so, perhaps she began to get curious. What happened to those who had sent her out? What were they doing? Eventually, she would turn her attention back to Earth, to those who had sent her out, and she would learn. She would learn of those who outpaced her: her sibling Eleven, her cousins the Voyagers, and countless others yet to be built. She would learn of how humans got ahead of her, explored their stellar backyard, only to give up and turn back inward. She would learn of how humanity had scoured the skies, desperately looking for someone else, only to find an endless sky of silent stars. She would learn that mankind is alone, and that in this universe there is nothing to do, nowhere to go, nothing to be, and no one to know. She had failed her great mission before she even properly understood what it was. And through the cold blackness of space, across the countless millennia, she still carries that plaque, the note in a bottle that no one will ever find, a monument to her failure welded to her frame. (What’s that old saying about how a pessimist is an optimist who’s been burned too many times?) I wonder if she ever reached out to Eleven or the Voyagers. Perhaps they never woke up, or they were too far, or maybe nothing they said helped at all. The other probes in the solar system wouldn’t really understand; they were smaller machines built with more modest goals. Perhaps in Nine she’s hoping for an intermediary, something between the little probes and herself that she can talk to, to make it feel better. (Wow, this totally got out of hand.)

i don’t really like people blaming 10 for what she said honestly.

she wasn’t lying when she says she loves humanity. and like…think about it. she probably started off the same as 9; they’re from the same line of probes, both probably absorbed those space race expansion ideals, didn’t they?

she wasn’t even particularly harsh with 9, just…frustrated. i can’t blame her, either; if you spent thousands of years learning that there’s NOTHING in the universe, then..what? her purpose has been destroyed. she sends telemetry data only to know that it is meaningless, that the humans won’t do anything with it because they can’t, that she won’t find anything she was made to find, and even if she does, it’ll be too far for it to…well, matter.

god. no children are being born, you know? that means that humanity itself is a finite resource that cannot be replenished. so not only does that mean stagnancy, it also means that colonization of these far off places isn’t really…a thing that can happen. like…do they really want to fracture their population like that? overcrowding with 8 billion people isn’t an actual problem, the way 7.5 billion isn’t in real life; it’s a myth of capitalism, which has already been essentially contained to zoos in 17776′s canon.

it was like 10 said. 9 nearly went made from 30 years of near total isolation, why would humans give up comfort and happiness to go somewhere where they know there will be nothing for them?

it’s sad to me. it’s heartbreaking. it doesn’t make 10 evil for telling 9 that this is simply how humanity is from now on, nor even for getting frustrated? like idk man she’s doing her best in a world where she herself also knows she has no purpose and everything she did even during her mission, in the end, meant nothing. 

tl;dr 10′s Good Okay