Alistair Young @cerebrate@schelling.pt

I am pretty sure I can land a commercial airliner.

By which I mean push the right buttons on the computers to set the plane up to land itself.

'Cause, y'know, I have only loose theoretical knowledge of flying, but I am a gorram twelfth level master of beep boop.

Rules of thumb for electricians: in sufficiently old buildings, all wiring exists in one of three states:

a) Not current
b) Current
c) Carrying current

Pitch: a historical fiction series about the Duvalier family rule of Haiti.

I call it “Doc Dynasty”.

In _Dune_, the Missionaria Protectiva planted legends of a Messiah for their own later use.

In the #eldraeverse , the equivalent organization planted legends of the Fair Folk to remind people to honor their contracts and not fuck around with the pretty and pointy-eared.

#notactuallycanon

@joehill @DoesntExist@mastodon.social

...he's not their Messiah, he's a very naughty boy.

#montypythonsdune

@joehill @DoesntExist@mastodon.social

Their legends originally, but the Missionaria Protectiva had been quietly tweaking other people's legends for later Bene Gesserit for millennia by the time of _Dune_ .

me: Today, with all the major social media sites in the world down, I feel pretty good about my decision to self-host everything important.

world: But there are only two people on your self-hosted chat server!

me: I repeat, I feel pretty good about my decision to self-host everything important.

Thinking about starting a scam selling AI-generated old masters.

I call it "Make Monet Fast".

If you cannot perceive profit in anything other than express monetary terms, then for the love of sanity, please stop having opinions about anything at all, ever.

One day, it is possible I will see one of those memes of a symbiont pair sharing resources with the "yo why are they doing this if there's no profit incentive" caption without the urge to kill rising, but it is not this day.

(Spoiler alert: they are both profiting from the relationship. That's what makes it mutualism - i.e., what the popular meaning of symbiosis is assumed to be - and not parasitism and provides the evolutionary incentive for them to do it. Idiots.)

@martinsuntals

(And why not "people"? Well, while some of those groups are unquestionably the same "race-meaning-sophont-species" in their own eyes, they are definitely separated into different "peoples" in ways not dependent on phenotype. Just ask them, and try not to pick a side.)

@martinsuntals

...There are polytaxic "species" who are one culture/people/polity likewise, and are offended at being split up. There are the people of machine ascent who don't _have_ a concept of species, they have models and codelines.

3. And so on and so forth.

4. In short, it's easier to coin a word than offend a lot of people, most of whom have guns and some of whom are guns.

@martinsuntals

So why not just "species"? Well, in least to most important order:

1. Some species have big ol' sticks up their butts about being classified in the same way as non-sophont lifeforms. (Plus, it makes my wiki look untidy.)

2. Not all "race-as-sophont species" are actually species. In my 'verse, the ren-gu and ren-qu are a symbiont pair who are quite insistent upon their oneness despite their technical twoness...