I note the convenience that Eldraeic particular descriptions (i.e., those starting with el) do not convey any particular number unless one is specified.
Could be one plan. Could be many plans. Could be all plans everywhere. You don’t get to know unless I’m feeling specific today.
"You say that as if we were somehow unaware of our relentless juggernaut of cultural imperialism and infrastructural hegemony.
“By the way, would you like some root beer?”
(I am just cackling madly at the thought of Congress rushing madly to pass “Terran content” laws. Sorry, folks, the best defense against cultural imperialism is a self-confident culture, and decades of relentless self-abuse isn’t how you get one of those. Your bad.)
((One could have hours of fun placing bets on which cultures have a strong enough self-image to survive the memetic tsunami coming out of Mirrortown and Summerion…))
“How did Atlanta, Georgia somehow become a massive cultural provider from Earth? Tokyo I get. London, I get, somewhat. Even Paris. But Atlanta?”
“It’s a long story.”
Actually, at this time and in generalization, I must revive the Star Spangled Man With a Plan discourse.
Well, insofar as that’s one point I passed through on a lengthy train of thought that passed its way through there on the way to why despite a certain affinity for Tony Stark, Steve Rogers is unquestionably the Empire’s favorite Avenger, and current rightist “cultural Christianity” discourse, and the old Bene Gesserit maxim “Disembodied cultural forms lose all vitality”, and observing any semblance of a principle in terrapol being shouted down for nuance and invoked only to support pragmatism, etal., etal. but this margin is too small to support a paradigm-dump.
Let me explain. No, there is too much. Let me sum up.
When it comes right down to it, the thing that makes much of Earth today the object of pity mingled with contempt from the modal Imperial is that the standard acceptable worldview is ironic detachment masking cynical pragmatism, lest anyone be caught in the nigh-unforgivable sin of believing in something, or even liking it more than they should. (Fucking. Nihilists. Again.)
You can say a lot of things about the Imperial metaculture, and people do, but absolutely no-one can deny that they believe in certain things pretty damn hard and are absolutely sincere about putting those beliefs out there.
In defense against cultural imperialism terms, this is both good and bad. Good, because many human culture are conditioned to sneer at such things (to no more effect than the wind howling has upon the mountain) and flinch away; and bad, because to those few desperate for them and willing to accept the price, they’re incredibly addictive.
(It also means that that same much of Earth, in my view, has bugger-all chances of becoming a major culture-provider short of a cultural shift into near-unrecognizability, insofar as - a few hidden gems aside - our media etal. comes infused with our zeitgeist, and our zeitgeist tastes like sewage.
There is absolutely no market for our extremely large and popular meta-genre of Here We Are Lying In Shit, And That Is Good, And There Can Be Nothing Better.)
I still strongly suspect that the Imperials would probably find the highpoint of Earthican culture to be various Oulipo projects.
…even if mostly in the sense of “hey, look, those folks can actually write good, sometimes”.
(I planned to post about that on Things Eldrae Might Appreciate but apparently somehow never got around to it - admittedly partly because my comment about it it kinda devolved into an extensive astronomy tangent and then I never really quite finished either part [and since then I’ve forgotten what the astronomy tangent was].)
On a lighter note, really awkward conversations on historically earlier first contacts:
“Our ruler is titled the Emperor of All Under Heaven. Yours?”
"Look, son, you want to talk threats? If you want to write yourselves some Empire insurance, you’ve got to think about what’s here that we actually care about.
"Like, say, a divergent cálenlethis ecology. So you might want to consider learning the gentle art of good planetary stewardship before anyone feels the need to explain it to you at the point of a battle-plane.
"Also, being very nice to the goodest boys, and the goodest birds, and the goodest octopodes and cetaceans and rats likewise, lest any of their relatives decide they don’t like the way their cousins are being treated and decide to come down here and explain that to you.
“That’s it. Your entire⁴ threat model rounded off to two special interests because we’re a year down the line and unless you do something completely batshit to come to their attention, no-one² else in the M3N¹ remembers who you are, and you probably prefer it that way.”
An ugly acronym standing for “the Mandarinate” plus “the Names, Numbers, and Novas”, meaning, in essence, “senior governance plus high society”.
This is not strictly true. Tassyn Lochran, Great Lord of the Sextant for the Transveil and Its Dominions is almost certainly aware that there is a small blue dot on the map in his office labeled, depending on timeline, “United Nations of Sol”, or “Sol (Balkanized)”, or “Empire of Japan³ (And Some Other Countries We Take Less Note Of)”, or “Holy Martian Republic of Musksylvania (etal.)”, but it would take some fairly epic batshittery to actually make it onto his desk, rather than that of the Director MoSaO (Transveil).
Okay, in the Kaguya-hime scenario things would be a little different.
Of course, the real threat is “shit free traders do”, but that’s a different ball of wax.
"About a year and some change after going fully digital, I got a job with the Japanese government, being a (simulated) American idiot.
"This requires some explanation.
"Japan had, before First Contact, been having a problem with foreign tourists coming in and being idiots of all sorts. Name a stupid thing that even someone that has never been to Japan would go ‘hey, maybe you shouldn’t do that…’, they’ll do it. And film it on Instagram. Usually doing major property damage in the first place.
"And you can arrest people, fine them, PNG them, do all sorts of things, but none of that is proactive. None of it is solving the problem before it happens.
"Then, we get First Contact and now we have something called ‘rent a thought’ where you can make sure people coming into the country can at least speak the language and know that what they’re doing is stupid. And if you don’t have a licensed, authorized rent-a-thought package (and the hardware to run it) when you come into the country, the Japanese will provide you with one, of course.
"So my job was to be an American idiot-somebody who wandered onto a twelve-plus hour flight and didn’t have a clue what he was doing, but also someone who knows enough to be able to translate cultural concepts so that ‘it makes sense.’ For somebody confined to a hospital bed for half of his life before First Contact, getting paid to live in one of the countries you always wanted to travel to? Perfect!
"Except…well, it’s the Japanese government, which means you had to deal with government stupidity…(1)
"They specifically wanted uploads for the job, so they could test out language and cultural packages. So, we get some server space while we’re at work?
"Nope!
"We have to use one of the ‘pool’ bioshells that they had on hand. The reason they explained was ‘security and physical testing.’ They had mixed-and-matched something like about fourteen different head types and fourteen body types, and each government office got a ‘random selection’ of these for their uploads to use while at work. Did a yearly rotation if they weren’t being used immediately, that kind of thing. And you got assigned a shell on the basis of your birth gender as an upload, or your core idenity if you were an AI.
"I know they didn’t give me the worst shell they had, because that would have required planning. Tiny head on a massive (as in fat) body, body odor you could smell on yourself no matter how many times you took a shower, a penis that required a microscope to find, and I swear some kind of motor-neuron disease. Think chinchilla head on a St. Bernard body that was starting to have deep-tissue necrosis.
"Whoever had this body last had to have been a chain smoker (how, I don’t know), as in ‘lighting a new smoke with my previous smoke, any chance I could get.’ And the body was LoJacked and if I tried to leave the offices with it, alarms would go off, my legs would lock up, and I’d get dinged by my supervisor after they brought me back.
"No way to exercise. The only thing showering would do was create a fresh layer of nicotine and cigarette ash. I had to eat at the cafeteria every day-the food was nearly three times as much as it should have been for how bad it was. And people barely wanted to be around me in the open floor bullpen, because I swore the body was oozing nicotine and tar from the pores.
"After a week of this (and I couldn’t get reassigned, because the body was ‘not damaged’ and ‘cosmetic’ issues weren’t a problem), I asked if I could just buy a new shell and use that.
"Nope! Can’t bring an unapproved, outside shell into a secure government area as a short-term contractor, have to use the pool shells.
"Probably the only way I stayed sane, at first, was that I could upload to my own server after work, and not spend a single minute longer in the pool shell. Then I got lucky, or made my own luck.
"During my research on housing, I found this company that offered those classic Japanese apartments-studio to two bedroom danachi with an internal lift and storage system to a nearby warehouse to hold cybershells and bioshells. Perfect for people doing dolly cuddling, traveling, digital commuting, wanted to do the AirBnB thing of ‘living’ in Tokyo for a while, that kind of thing.
"And Japanese law might have prohibited you buying a high-performance shell in Japan, but if you could buy it legally from your country of origin, there was no reason why you couldn’t have it sent there, as long as it didn’t have implanted weapons or explosives or such.
"I got a two-bedroom unit, and deliberately decorated the living area as ‘neutral’ as I could. The first bedroom I bought a great male Japanese bioshell for ‘wandering around’ and getting a chance to actually have a life outside of work.
“The second…I wasn’t sure what I was going to do with it until I made this bet with Aoto and somehow I started doing outcall sex work in a female bioshell, all in the name of ‘research’…”
-Things That I Really Should Have Known About, PC +20
(1-I’ve got some of my Imperial readers who are having a happy chuckle about how silly us over-sexed monkeys are. Here’s my reply to you-The Buttered Biscut War. Go look it up, I’ll wait.
(Okay? Yea, your governing bodies can make mistakes, big ones. While going completely wrong with logic and reason and the facts. The only difference between the Buttered Biscuit War and some human screw-ups like Pigs Is Pigs or The Baby Cooper Dollar Bill is that we had a distinct lack of KEW strikes. And that the Empire usually doesn’t make the same mistake twice.
(Usually.)
“Feh. That was commercial fraud and y’all damn well know it.”
- Major Samív “Excuse Me, Did You Just Deny My Men Their Refund?” Sargas
I was about to say that most cases of commercial fraud are not handled by sending in Imperial ground troops in Legion strength, saturation KEW bombardments, and “acquiring” five metric tons of satsumas, but considering that a Sargas is involved…
…we’re lucky there’s still a planet left when it was all over.
Some things are important.
Also, not to put too fine a point on it, but no ship anywhere near Earth is going to rate an entire legion. Hell, I haven’t put together firm numbers on sizes of espatier detachments, but specialized assault vessels aside, a superdreadnought isn’t big enough to rate a full legion. Nothing flying gets more than an ala.
Making it Major Sargas probably means he commands a cohort - fighting strength of 516 - which would be an oversized espatier detachment but might be vaguely plausible for a large cruiser type and its escorts if it happened to be passing through on patrol and all the ships were in one system at the same time.
(That said, a cohort is probably more than enough to knock over your small country of choice.)
Okay, someone write this .
“Alright Sensory, help me out here; shoot, talk or watch?”
“How do you feel about putting them out of their misery, Sir?”
“… let’s go with talk, shall we?”
Going to close this thread now because of its increasingly inconvenient length. The replacement thread, in which I have summarized certain information up to for your convenience, is located here:
Earth Fanfic (Post-Contact Hilarity II) - General / Fanfic - The Eldraeverse
