So what even is this and how this works.
This was an entry to a "challenge" with the theme flower. The code should draw a flower. That was it. In the image the code is overlaid with the output it produces in a way, that the drawn fern is placed in the white space left empty in the code for it. This covers the "what the hell I'm looking at" part.
The how the hell does it work part is trickier.
if you'll allow me to resurrect the absolute worst twitter discourse: is landing on asteroids in space to acquire metals from them terra nullius or colonialism? if so, in what sense is it?
like with all 'space colonisation' (bad name for it) actually doing it would obviously not be colonialist (no people there innit) -- the way it's depicted in the cultural imaginary, however, definitely draws on the imagery and mythology of colonialism!
like 'asteroid mining' or 'building cities on mars' is something that doesn't exist. like it hasn't happened. and so when talking about it it has to be framed with the language and ideas developed around things that already exist within our culture. hence why, for example, the genre of 'space western' makes sense--why 'space, the final frontier' parses. the metaphorical language and imagery of colonialism is very often used for space exploration, which is i think the only sensible way to argue that so-and-so is 'colonialist' as opposed to arguing about the pure hypothetical of asteroid mining being somehow ontologically morally suspect
there is also another sleight of hand, deliberate or otherwise, to discussing let’s say “space mining” in a contextual vacuum. they are uninhabited spheroids of irons and minerals hanging out in the void; this makes it easier to conceptualize their harvest as a neat process. images of automation, the valorized miner, the benefits to be wrought from all those resources, etc. dominate the imagination. but if this were ever to be an economically viable project, you can be sure that capital would squeeze every last drop out of those space rocks — and in doing this it absolutely will use the familiar devices of colonialism.
if this hypothetical is seriously pursued to its logical conclusion, the realities of resource extraction as they exist now tell us the questions we should be asking: who will be doing the space mining? where will they live, under what conditions? what sort of human displacement can we expect will occur to facilitate the operation of this new industry? what economic pressures will be introduced that drive this displacement? and what i’m gesturing at here is: the question of whether space mining “is colonialist” is undetermined, but in this world under capitalist hegemony we absolutely should be suspicious that conceptions of space mining will absorb it as yet another limb of colonialist power.
I do a lot of communication on the coloniality of space (Treviño, 2020) and what I really like to emphasize is, aside from the imaginaries & future conceptions as outlined so well here, are the settler colonialism & labor politics of the space industry historically rather than just of an imagined future. (I will also point out that we should all ask where Earth ends and space begins - that a big settler logic of “space exploration” is the extraction and exploitation of indeed nature, an ecology that includes humans; the “border” between here and there is politically constructed (Walkowicz 2018)).
Nearly all space launch facilities *and* astronomical observatories (of significance) *and* astronaut analog research sites are on settler-occupied territory. Not just anywhere in so-called “United States,” “Canada,” and “Australia,” but also Palestine, Kashmir, Hawai’i, so-called “Greenland,” Svalbard, so-called “French” Guiana, Alcântara, the list goes on. The reasoning for each and every one of these facilities being reinscribed with emptiness that settler colonialism had already inbued it with - terra nullius.
It’s this re-inscription, the reinvention and re-materializing of borders and colonialism that happens for space development and indeed much of industry as a whole. In French Guiana, the European Space Agency via France escalated occupation of the territory and actively endangers lives - because they built their launch facility (and explosions are an intrinsic part of rocket testing) on a primary road through the country (Redfield 2002). These rockets launch every single ESA mission to date.
In Hawai’i, there is a vicious fight by the University of Hawai’i, Caltech, and other academic institutions of the US and Europe to build the Thirty-Meter Telescope (TMT) on Mauna Kea, which Hawai’ans have been resisting for years. This is a massive ideological project in that space researchers have taken to “educating” on the “benefits” of TMT to Hawai’ians in terms of “outreach” and nonexistent, bullshit “opportunities.” These researchers already place countless workshops and conferences in Hawai’i and have done so continuously during the pandemic, while gentrification continues to push Hawai’ans from living on their own land. University consortia have already established numerous observatories on sacred ground in Hawai’i, contributing to ecological, political, and cultural violence—in tandem with the US military.
This is all the legacy of how space research of all kinds—even planetary science, my field—comes directly from military testing and occupation. Von Braun’s legacy is not one of condemnation and shame, but celebration by NASA; he has buildings and streets named after him at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center. Von Braun who of course used the slave labor of concentration camps to build rockets for the Nazis and made a deal with the US government to be spared trial for war crimes.
None of these cases is a situation where the West exports their labor to fully operationalize these facilities. They are relying on local labor, whether to build or to sustain their workforce. Any expansion of in-space technology means expansion of on-Earth labor and that does not look like hiring white Americans with PhDs. Day-to-day operations are not from the National Academies. The mining that supports space technology is not done by Western academics. The communities that suffer fallout are not the gentrifiers who fly home. The workers clearing the Amazon for the Brazilian launch facilities should be contextualized with the ecological violence Afro-Indigenous people are resisting and being assassinated over. I highly recommend this interactive read:
I will point out that asteroid mining is the perfect example of space coloniality in its extreme silliness. The primary company aiming to do this went out of business years ago. The second any company extracts aluminum or whatever the heck from space they will plummet the price of that material to basically nothing. It’s exactly the experiment to show the excesses of capitalism and where and how settler colonialism becomes writ large in space. Bezos himself referred to a system of indentured servitude for his silly imaginary future solar system empire that will never happen, but it’s the “indentured servitude” we should pay attention to (and I’ll point to the legacy of indentured servitude in French Guiana!), just as SpaceX’s (racist!) union-busting is incredibly important.
The last thing I’ll mention is that all of this falls together as a governance issue…Redfield describes that there is no absenting the relationships, interactions, and activities that happen in space from ideologies and geopolitical realities of Earth because the material history is...continuous. The power remains the same. But y'all touch on that—it will always follow capitalist logics.
There is remarkably little legal protection of space as an extension of Earth. When NASA sent a [literal missile] to the Moon to impact and excavate subsurface ice, there was uproar because they had bombed what many consider a deity. When Curiosity rover, which has a nuclear generator as its power source, was launched, there were protests because there was a very nonzero chance it would explode in our atmosphere (side note: the US military exploded tens of nuclear warheads in our ionosphere, permanently changing our atmosphere and immediate space environment; I gesture to the concept of aer nullius).
The treaties that exist are the Outer Space Treaty, which places limits on staking “claims” of planetary bodies and certain military activities, and which the West is increasingly violating, and the Moon Treaty, which prevents military use of planetary bodies and shared knowledge and remains unsigned by the entire Global North. And—these treaties in themselves are very much not neutral due to being UN legislation, which focuses on "peaceful use" but provides no opportunity for no use. The fight against space militarism and space colonialism (in the literal, derogatory sense) has been happening for decades against Western powers.
Some orgs with good resources on this: Jus Ad Astra, JustSpace Alliance, Space Science in Context
#yeah and another thing I don't see being talked about is what are we going to do about all the trash that we'd bring in from space #like we need to know how to safely process our electronic waste before expanding their production #it's a bit like fossil fuel #we dug it up brought it into our biosphere and look where that got us #imagine if we got asteroid mining really going before discovering some unforseen consequence #and that point the industry would be too big and would fight to keep business as usual just like oil
This is a whole field called space sustainability (which varies in its politics but there is a good leftist contingent). I admire the work of Sahba el-Shawa and Nadia Khan on this.
“Stepping into the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Shyanne Beatty was eager to view the Native American works that the art collectors Charles and Valerie Diker had been accumulating for nearly half a century. But as she entered the museum’s American wing that day in 2018, her excitement turned to shock as two wooden masks came into view. Beatty, an Alaska Native, had worked on a radio documentary about the two Alutiiq objects and how they and others like them had been plundered from tribal land about 150 years ago. Now, the masks were on display in the biggest and most esteemed art museum in the western hemisphere. “It was super shocking to me,” she said. The Met’s ownership history for the masks, also known as provenance, omits more than a century of their whereabouts. Historians say the masks were taken in 1871. But the museum’s timeline doesn’t start until 2003, when the Dikers bought them from a collector. Ownership was transferred to the Met in 2017. ProPublica review of records the museum has posted online found that only 15% of the 139 works donated or loaned by the Dikers over the years have solid or complete ownership histories, with some lacking any provenance at all. Most either have no histories listed, leave gaps in ownership ranging from 200 to 2,000 years or identify previous owners in such vague terms as an “English gentleman” and “a family in Scotland”.”
Company that makes millions spying on students will get to sue a whistleblower
Yesterday, the Court of Appeal for British Columbia handed down a jaw-droppingly stupid and terrible decision, rejecting the whistleblower Ian Linkletter’s claim that he was engaged in legitimate criticism when he linked to freely available materials from the ed-tech surveillance company Proctorio:
If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
I feel drunk reading this. There’s plenty to stare aghast at, but the one that really messed me up was the bit where the court says that posting a link to a work could be considered a performance of the work.
Am…. Am I… performing this pluralistic piece by reblogging and linking it?
Have… have I been performing internet pages every time I’ve linked to something copy righted?
~Stained glass blanket finished project~
I finally finished my stained glass blanket and I'm so happy! This isn't the best picture I have, but I was just so excited to share this with you all! I made mine 6 by 6 squares which is big enough for a double/queen size bed. I also sewed a panel of fabric to the back so I didn't have to hide all the ends. Definitely recommend this blanket if you feel like losing your sanity over the course of half a year!
This week:
A 19 year old passenger with her baby, who only spoke spanish, missed her connecting flight due to weather and would have been stuck sleeping in the airport but my co flight attendant (who spoke spanish) booked her commuter hotel for her and gave her a free room for the night
Another passenger missed her connecting flight home but since she lived just under an hour from me I gave her a ride from dc to virginia beach
My pilot was contacted by the wife of a pilot he'd flown with (who later killed himself) because she'd found a photo of their crew at dinner, so now he takes group photos of every crew he hangs out with, just in case
Another passenger missed her connecting flight and was crying because her mom was in hospice so 2 other passengers who did not know her offered to rent a car and carpool down to jacksonville together
An actor who I will not name but who I'm a huge fan of was in line at the airport pizza place in front of me and my co flight attendant (also a fan) and we were trying so hard to be cool about it and he could tell and he paid for our food because "You all take such good care of us in the air, we should take care of you on the ground."
The van driver for our new orleans overnight heard me say I was vegetarian but wished I could try authentic gumbo and called his friend who is a chef and then drove us to the restaurant where I was given a creole style vegetarian gumbo he'd improvised
After a terrible night which saw me and my co flight attendant trying for 4 hours to get hotel rooms from our airline, the night clerk at a hotel finally took over the phone call and reprimanded them on our behalf, dictating the exact paperwork she needed sent over and then expedited the process so she could give us rooms
When I was little I showed a flight attendant a picture of a ladybug life cycle I drew myself, and he sat down in the empty seat on the other side of the aisle and drew a flipping plane and holy cow that was the first experience I had of someone drawing and drawing amazingly well. I wonder how he's doing...
I still have the drawings! And the notebook!
The notebook in question:
The terribly childish drawings in question:
LOOK AT THIS
I DIDN'T EVEN REALISE HE'D WRITTEN MY NAME
Flipping heck 🤣🤣🤣
Oh yeah, this was a Virgin Australia domestic Brisbane to Sydney flight which I'd done with my family multiple times at this point.
Btw I was 8.
Gerome Gardiner, I have cherished this drawing all throughout my childhood, and if you ever see this, thank you for taking the time on a pretty empty flight to draw me something with such beauty that I have carried it throughout my life.
But I feel I should apologise because I have not kept up my drawing skills and neither have I had much time or energy to do so 😅
I paint pictures with words now ✒️📖💻
One day I'll show you one of my stories! 😁
a review from the cispontine end of london bridge, 8th of april 2023
A quite insightful quote from Stormy Daniels.
[Text ID: We are thought of as less than people. When every story about me broke, it was “porn star Stormy Daniels, real name X,” and they printed my real name everywhere. Every time you see Whoopi Goldberg’s name, or Nicolas Cage or Bruno Mars, they don’t put their real name in parentheses behind it. I had so many female journalists do it to me. And when I said something to them, [they’d say,] “Say her name. Say her name. Her name is Stephanie Clifford, say it! She’s not just porn star Stormy Daniels!” But they never paused to think that maybe that’s the name I wanted. And you just outed my family. I guarantee you wouldn’t misgender me, so why would you use a dead name? And they thought they were doing the right thing because they’re on their big high feminist fucking #MeToo horse and they never even stopped to do the most basic feminist thing, which is ask the woman in the center of the storm what she wants to be called. And nobody did it. /End ID]
Fun fact! When I was googling to find this citation to make it easier to add the text id, google auto-completed "Stormy Daniels" to "Stormy Daniels real name" with her full legal name in giant letters right below the question!
There's also this very insightful bit from her right before the above passage:
"One of the things I want to do, because of what happened to me in court, is to use [my] platform to lobby to change the rule about being able to discriminate against sex workers. Because as a director, all these years in the business, I saw so many girls come in and not want to be stars. They just wanted to make money to go to school, and they didn’t buy purses, they didn’t do drugs, they didn’t party, they didn’t do anything fucking stupid, right? I really got to know these women on a personal level because I was directing at least once a month for 10 years. And so I saw these girls come in, do everything right, get a degree in nursing, leave the business—but then a year or two years later, they’d come back because they got fired over and over and over because they got recognized at work.
And when they came back, that’s when they were broken. That’s when they did drugs. That’s when they died. That’s when I saw them commit suicide, not the first time around. I can name 50 girls right now who have gotten fired because they used to do porn. And that’s got to change and [the rape shield carve-out] has to change. And what they did to me has to change. Because it’s bullshit. You don’t want us to do porn, but you won’t let us do anything else."
DELETE THIS POST
ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME
*clicks play in morbid curiosity*
*hammers reblog button*
I think I find this post every April Fools Day and I am so happy that I do
“While seeking to finance a new stadium for the billionaire owners of the Buffalo Bills, Ms. Hochul, in her words, “started playing hardball” with the Seneca Nation by freezing its bank accounts until it handed over more than $500 million in gambling revenues. The tribe contends it never owed the money, though federal courts have backed the state’s demands. She also nixed legislation that would have granted long-sought recognition to Long Island’s Montaukett tribe, which was declared extinct over a century ago in racist court rulings that remain in force today. But perhaps no official action by Ms. Hochul has angered the state’s Native Americans more than her veto last year of a bill that would have made it more difficult for developers to build atop the remains of Indigenous people’s ancestors. Despite its reputation for being progressive, New York is one of just four states that offer no meaningful protections for unmarked graves discovered on private property. Even deep red states like Alabama and Wyoming offer more safeguards for Native American graves than New York does.”
the RESTRICT act, meant to prevent US citizens from accessing products by foreign companies the US government deems a threat, will result in more than just tiktok being shut down. this is a serious breach of freedom and access to information people dismiss easily because tiktok is put at the forefront of it.
Today is the 20th anniversary of the invasion of Iraq. This map shows the contrast between civilian and US/Coalition casualties in Baghdad, with each dot’s size correlating with the number of casualties reported on a given day





















