#ShowerThoughts about something I'm writing for #Modders...

I imagined Herbert (the guy who was cryo'd in the 1980s) asking Nuki (the author-insert who was born in the 1990s) if functional #immortality is a slippery slope to paranoia or megalomania, and she responds with "Some people do, that's why the technology keeps advancing, but it actually makes me a lot more concerned for people who don't have a recent backup: if a plane goes down with me on it, my forks go on, but everyone else? I don't know if they even have a backup, let alone a recent one. I'd rather deal with the inconvenience of my body being destroyed than see someone die for real."

What if living indefinitely in a high-freedom state actually makes you MORE empathetic, because other people's #mortality is more real to you?

I should go somewhere with this...

#OprahWinfrey Just Addressed The Decades-Long #Speculation That She And #GayleKing Are #Secretly A #Lesbian #Couple.

“I used to say to her: ‘You’ve got to do a show on this, because it’s hard enough for me to get a #date on Saturday night without people thinking we’re #gay!” Gayle joked.

#Women #Lesbians #LGBTQ #LGBTQIA #Entertainment #TV #Representation #Culture

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/stephaniesoteriou/oprah-winfrey-gayle-king-lesbian-rumors

Was #JFK #bisexual? A #viral #tweet is reigniting #speculation — here's the #tea

Was #President #JohnFKennedy #family? Here's what we know about his #forgotten #queer #history.

#Women #Transgender #LGBTQ #LGBTQIA #History #Presidents #Representation? #Culture

https://www.pride.com/history/was-jfk-bisexual

S2.9 is now available on YouTube!

In this episode, Ariel discusses the topic of ecocriticism with Dr Jenny Kerber, Associate Professor of English at Wilfrid Laurier University.

What is ecocriticism? Why is it important, especially for environmental activists and solarpunks, as a narrative reframing device? Solarpunks work very closely with speculation and imagination and as architects of the narratives by which we live our lives, it helps to have tools like ecocriticism at our disposal.

Join Ariel and Dr. Kerber to think through terms like “wilderness” and “nature” and “the Anthropocene”. How do we hold on to hope, despite critical engagement with the dark side of our environmental narratives?

https://youtu.be/uSz6YvhVsLI

#solarpunk #SolarpunkPresentsPodcast #ecocriticism @academicchatter #NarrativeReframing #Wilderness #Environment #EnvironmentalFiction #Environmentalism #Ecofiction #academia #GreenAcademia #speculation

My Christmas gift from my husband was an I.O.U. to convert our disused goldfish tank into a little planted tropical tank to house some neon tetras. Things being as they are, it’s taken until now to do anything very much about it, but in my moments of focused displacement activity the past few weeks I’ve slowly been putting the habitat together, choosing and getting the plants growing, keeping an eye on the water quality and so on. (Aquarium-keeping, like all hobbies, is in fact one activity masquerading as another; just as sewing is, really, mostly laundry and ironing, and home brewing is mostly really *prissy* washing up, aquarium-keeping mostly feels like a school chemistry experiment, complete with dipsticks, test tubes and coloured indicator solutions.) By the end of last week I was reasonably confident the tank had cycled suitably well to introduce some algae-eating shrimp. 

So off we popped to our local excellent aquarist supply place and picked up a little group of Amano shrimp. These are new creatures to me – tiny, mostly translucent things looking rather like wingless crickets (about an inch in length at the moment, this may just about double at full size) with rows of small spots along their abdomen and wildly long, delicate looking prehensile antennae the length of their entire bodies, which seem to provide almost instantaneous information about the appearance of any food item within the tank. 

They scuttle, yes, but they also leap from perch to perch, and even swim – though it looks almost like flying – when they want to cover ground quickly, or get hold of the shrimp pellets still floating on the surface of the water. I’ve sometimes found one hanging upside-down, bat-like, from the roots of my floating frogbit plants. They’re delightful little souls, active and busy, something of the moderately-complex programmed automaton about them, scuttling here and there doing shrimpy-things and hopefully scoffing any algae trying to build up in the tank before it gets out of hand – as it often can in the early stages of establishing planted tanks. Delightful, that is, when you can find them at all. 

Douglas Adams – whose immaculate sense I would never doubt – believed that mice were the embodiment in our reality of vastly powerful hyper-intelligent pan-dimensional beings with a passion for Brockian Ultra-Cricket. And, not to sound silly (and fully accepting that the current PhD focus on Science Fictional stuff might have me looking, not so much for Reds under the bed but for aliens behind every bit of driftwood) but I have a feeling something similar might be going on here? 

When I go to the tank, it’s usually pretty easy to find the first shrimp. As for the rest, well, unless they’re anticipating feeding time, they very often turn out to be rather elusive. Are they in the shrimp-tubes? Nope. Clinging onto the long floating fronds of the Java fern? Nope. Around the back of that rock then? Nope, not there either. And then, presumably summoned via some implausibly advanced technology transmitted by the first shrimp – the scout – using those almost otherworldly long and delicate antennae, suddenly, there they are. Just where you were looking. Literally where they weren’t just a second ago, *while you were still looking there*. 

What I have, I conclude, isn’t so much a group of Amano shrimp as a sort of inter-dimensional invertebrate timeshare. It stands to reason, once you think about it: When no one is watching, leaving one designated scout behind, the rest of the mob jump from this tank, and into somewhere… else. There’s no way of knowing if they’re going up the road, across the other side of the planet, to some shrimp-friendly planet somewhere on the other side of the galaxy, or into an entirely different reality altogether. But here, surely, they are not.  

It makes a certain amount of sense – I can’t fault the efficiency of the scheme, certainly, and I imagine the energy required for skipping across (presumably no fewer than) four dimensions of time and space goes some way to explain the little creatures’ voracious appetites. My husband wonders whether they’re eating the algae or engaged in piracy, smuggling it to another dimension where it’s worth more than platinum?

One thing you need to know about these little shrimp is that they are reported to have a habit of attempting to flick themselves out of their tanks if stressed (to sadly terminal effect, since they aren’t air-breathers), for example, soon after being newly moved to new premises. It seems much more likely to me that this is actually the result of a slight navigation error in the early days of trying to travel back to new coordinates, but keeping their tank sealed up snugly and/or dropping the water level for a few days if that won’t upset the tank’s other occupants are probably nevertheless sensible precautions, just while they get their galactic bearings. 

Regardless of their foibles, I recommend these little inter-dimensional joyriders to you – they’re fascinating little souls, if you can find them, and amusing to watch for really quite a long time (though it’s probably polite to turn your back from time to time so that they can get on with their jobs in their other realities without too much inconvenience). I really want my new little dudes to feel at home… I wonder if anyone sells TARDIS-shaped shrimp hides?

Lore and Ordure is a digital busking project supporting my PhD studies –
if you enjoy what I’m doing here, please throw some money in the hat! [ko-fi.com]

[ loreandordure.com/wp-content/u…] [loreandordure.com]

This blog only exists thanks to the generous support of my readers, so, thank you! 
Your tips and donations support my weekly writing here and contribute towards my PhD expenses.

Please subscribe via email [loreandordure.com] & share my work with others who might enjoy it.
You can make both one-off and recurring donations on my Ko-Fi page [ko-fi.com].

https://loreandordure.com/2024/05/07/so-long-and-thanks-for-all-the-algae-fish-tank-tales-of-the-unexpected/

‘Property poetry’?
"Real estate is another way to say Australia."

"Kate Holden connects Turnbull’s persistence in illegally clearing vast tracts of koala habitat, and his murder of Turner, to British Enlightenment theories of property. The English philosopher John Locke, she observes, “placed emphasis on labour to morally justify the owning of property. The more work put into the land, the more settled a man was upon it. Holden traces associations between Locke’s ideas, the history of terra nullius and the “strange, morbid fixation in Australian myth of just how hard a person has to work on this land.”

"[b]y the time of Australia’s settling, the ineluctable mark of a British citizen was land ownership. It enfranchised him, gave him rights […] Land – elemental, foundational – was the desperately prized asset in a new colony. Without it, man was only an object."

"Yet the contradictions and inequities surrounding the trade in stolen land are rehearsed largely without reflection or analysis across contemporary Australian culture."
>>
https://theconversation.com/property-poetry-real-estate-ads-and-literature-have-more-in-common-than-you-might-think-214835

Donald Trump 'Slurring' Words Again at Rally Sparks Speculation

https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-rally-slurring-words-cognitive-state-new-hampshire-1863045

what if more than half of dinosaur species during the Cretaceous were little fluffy chirpy tree-dwelling birds just like today?

Is it even possible to construct a good argument that this is unlikely, given that such small tree-dwelling birds are unlikely to be preserved?

#dinosaurs
#birds
#Cretaceous
#passerines
#speculation

#SarahHuckabeeSanders’ convoluted #story about her $19,029.25 #Podium #Grift is #unraveling by the day.

#Speculation is the nearly $20,000 was meant for a #European #Vacation, rather than a #podium. Almost identical podiums are available on #Amazon for as low as $975.

#Women #Transgender #LGBTQ #LGBTQIA #Arkansas #Conservatives #Extremism #Fascism #Fraud #RepublicanParty #Hate #Bigotry #Violence #Genocide #Discrimination #Homophobia #Transphobia #ThePartyOfHate

https://www.queerty.com/sarah-huckabee-sanders-convoluted-story-about-her-19029-25-grift-is-unraveling-by-the-day-20231012

#Speculating About #Celebs' #Sexuality Is #Divisive — Here's Why It's Still #Necessary .

Here are ten #arguments against #speculation—and why they may actually do more #harm than #good.

#Women #Transgender #LGBTQ #LGBTQIA #Entertainment #Music #TV #Movies #Representation #Culture

https://www.pride.com/gay-celebrities/celebrities-sexuality-speculation-reasons-explained

Trump's unnamed co-conspirator sparks massive speculation

https://www.newsweek.com/speculation-identity-unnamed-conspirator-trump-indictment-georgia-1819966