/ˈbɑːltəkʊteɪ/. Knows some chemistry and piping stuff. TeXmacs user.

Website: reboil.com

Mastodon: baltakatei@twit.social

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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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    • The Terraformers (2023) by Annalee Newitz. In lieu of a single simple reset, there is a continuous bargaining between capitalistic rentiers and enslaved residents who fight over hundreds of years throughout the final stages of a planet’s terraforming. Homelessness, mass transit, wealth inequality, and racism all are running themes.
    • Hieroglyph: Stories and Visions for a Better Future (2018) by Ed Finn (ed.) and Kathryn Cramer (ed.) is anthology of several science fiction authors who submitted stories with the purpose of specifically counteracting the trend at the time of (post-)apocalyptic stories anticipating a bleak future for humanity. One particularly aspirational story that persists in my memory is Girl in Wave : Wave in Girl by Kathleen Ann Goonan; it is a story about the sociopolitical impact of universal literacy, achieved thanks to the release of an inexpensive medicine that enhances human cognitive abilities, allowing anyone to overcome learning disabilities such as dyslexia. Other stories in the anthology are optimistic for other reasons, but this story comes to mind when I read your post.



  • baltakatei@sopuli.xyztoPolitical Memes@lemmy.worldOooo
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    10 days ago

    Reminds me of the final pages of chapter 3 of the second volume of Maus (1991) in which a Jewish survivor of the Holocaust acts egregiously and unrepentantly racist to a black hitchhiker, surprising a friend who thought that the suffering would have engendered empathy for discriminated races.

    page 259 of 296

    Torture damages people, plain and simple; don’t expect victims to gain wisdom or empathy from the process. So, maybe don’t give them nukes and back the religious megalomaniacs among them who end up committing the same genocidal practices against others such as the Palestinians.





  • Hard mode: set time zone to UTC (or Reykjavik; it’s the same) and force yourself to add/subtract offset hours every time you want to know local time. Also, this forces you to track when exactly daylight saving time starts and stops.

    Benefit: you know when space probe stuff happens because they’re almost always timestamped UTC. Also, playing Eve Online becomes slightly easier.