Scenes from a revolution - Deputychairman - Star Wars Sequel Trilogy [Archive of Our Own]

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Scenes from a revolution - Deputychairman - Star Wars Sequel Trilogy [Archive of Our Own]:

deputychairman:

Chapters: 4/4
Fandom: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Rating: Explicit
Relationships: Poe Dameron/Finn
Characters: Poe Dameron, Finn (Star Wars), Rey (Star Wars), Rose Tico, Leia Organa
Additional Tags: Sharing a Bed, Huddling For Warmth, socialism in action, defeating space!facism one planet at a time, Revolutionaries In Love, Jedi Rey, Rey floats rocks, Finn finds his place in the galaxy, Poe Dameron takes depression naps, while coming to terms with the total destruction of the Resistance, some of this happens in a hot spring, maybe the invisible hand of the market was the real enemy all along, Angst with a Happy Ending
Summary:

The Resistance survivors light the fire, start a revolution, float some rocks, and fall in love

“Poe, you incited a mutiny in five hours. A revolution in three days ought to be easy!”

His blue-lit gaze flickers up to Finn, Rose and Rey gathered around the table, listening. “Other people’s planet is kinda different to a star cruiser,” he mutters. “Bigger, for a start.”

“If you don’t convince them it is your business, and fast, then you’ll have the First Order down there to do it for you.”

Here, finished and complete, is my The Resistance Does Revolution fic. I struggled to find a way forwards from TLJ but then I guess so did the Resistance; and in-universe I think this process would take some time so this story had to both be long (for me) and take some time to write. 

A huge thank you to Galacticproportions for helping unpack the intergalactic politics and how they map into earth politics, hugely valuable suggestions for making everyone present in their own narrative, and important debate about towels in space. Thank you also to everyone who expressed an interest in this story, in fixing what TLJ broke, and in the life-affirming quality of Finn & Poe’s love, it really helped me keep going. 
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hi- what is your opinion on GMOs? i have friends in bioengineering who seem to pretty much agree on

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from a scientific aspect: 

the facts are, GMOs are the future and the key to increasing crop production for our increasing population if your goal is to keep up food production for more people. remember, the goal right now in agriculture- the key goal that we’re throwing everything into because big yikes fam- is to produce more food off less. so like, vertical farming? good, saves space. smaller plants with bigger yield? great, saves space, can plant more and get more food. plants that are resistant to drought? to high temps? to low fertilizer? amazing, it means you have hardier plants that you can put in places that regular plants wouldn’t be able to stand.

so are they agriculturally efficient? hell yeah, because remember, it takes about 10 years for a crop in testing- GMO or not- to reach a point in development where it can be submitted for approval by the USDA for the market (something I’ve learned in my current job). imagine doing all breeding without GMOs. you would literally be able to do one cross a year, maybe two if you’re in a warmer area (this is why a lot of soybean breeding has been moved to South America, where they can do twice as much breeding). with GMOs, you can develop and test stuff faster, so by a monetary standpoint it’s awesome. 

lets not forget that GMO crops can withstand more because of the pure amount of precision put into them. like, lets say your corn breaks a lot. you can spend 3-4 years meticulously cross breeding your developing strain with a break-resistant variety to get that trait in, or you can just cut and paste in the gene. and get this: it doesn’t even have to be from the break resistant variety. you can pull it from another plant that might be better at not breaking, and get an even better resulting variety. 

another thing that we can’t forget about is that new GMO tech helps us keep up with pests and diseases. at work, i’ve seen experiments involving root pests; plants infected had root systems destroyed down to a single tap root. imagine that happening to a farmer’s field. like, all of it. that’s the kind of thing we’re up against here; to stop infestations and to solve new challenges quickly by developing technology quickly, while still improving the plant to commercial level. 

when talking to the breeders at work, they told me that the industry as a whole recently upped its goal from creating a crop that would give each farmer a 200 bushel harvest (200 bushels has been the goal for the past 30 years; they’ve recently reached it and exceeded it) to 300 bushels per harvest. they have to do this just by modifying the plants. they have no control over how much the farmer plants and/or how many fields they have.

to give some perspective here, one bushel is 60 pounds of grain. they’re aiming to have each farmer that buys their products be able to reliably harvest and sell 18,000 pounds of grain per year. 

the moral of the story is that the breeding and agri industries are under a lot of pressure here, and they have to work fast, because the population is rising. 

knock knock

whos there?

dwindling nitrogen supplies in farmland and unsustainable farming practices but im gonna save that for another time

are they healthier? it depends on what you believe. like, what we’ve found so far is that GMOs don’t hurt you. some of them have added vitamins that can help you (lets not forget the famous GMO golden rice, which uses a daffodil gene coupled with a soil bacterium gene to make a rice variety produce a huuuuuge amount of vitamin A. this has been so effective in solving vitamin deficiencies and health problems in 3rd world countries since it was introduced in 2005 that its won awards and been used as a universal case study for the whole “GMO plants” thing) but most are just like. idk. kind of there? they help the health of the plant and help the farmer bring in income, so???? idk???

are they better for the environment? i have no idea. i suppose indirectly, because like. if you have a heartier plant you have to clear less land for agriculture?? (can anyone weigh in here?). But if these got out into the wild, the effects could be DEVASTATING, which is why the USDA and related government organizations (depending on where you live) make it so you have to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that what you’re putting out into production won’t be crazy damaging if it magically gets out somehow.

ethically: i have no idea man. like im still super split on it. my scientist self says “you can literally buy everything to do it and modify plants to produce heat right in your own home right now” but then im like……………..idk man we just dont know. i dont want to hurt my plant friends. if this hurts our plant friends. idk
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dang it i managed to hurt myself sleepingsomehow i hurt

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dang it i managed to hurt myself sleeping

somehow i hurt my… grip muscle? i dunno, in my left hand, which is my dominant, i tried to pull the blankets up with a thumb-and-forefinger grip and now it hurts like the dickens if I try to pick anything up with those same… uh, tendons I guess, is what’s actually there, you don’t really have muscles in your wrist do you.

I am amazed at how easy it is to totally fuck yourself up. I’d blame age but I’ve been doing this kind of shit to myself forever.
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US Enacts Daylight Saving Time

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today-in-wwi:

A poster from United Cigar Stores celebrating the adoption of Daylight Saving Time.

March 19 1918, Washington–To increase productivity during the war, Germany, Austria-Hungary, the United Kingdom, and France adopted Daylight Saving Time during the summer of 1916; most of the rest of Europe followed within a year.  The change did not extend across the Atlantic, though, with the exception of a few municipalities within Canada.  It was not until 1918, in preparation for their second wartime summer, that the United States adopted Daylight Saving Time.  On March 19, President Wilson signed the Standard Time Act into law.  This codified time zones into US law for the first time; they had previously only been technically voluntary agreements among the US railroads.  The exact boundaries of the time zones were not defined in the law; the authority to set them was delegated to the Interstate Commerce Commission, but they roughly correspond to the Eastern, Central, Mountain, Pacific, and Alaska time zones used today.

Daylight Saving Time would go into effect each year on the last Sunday in March (March 31, 1918) and would revert to Standard Time on the last Sunday in October (October 27, 1918).  The change proved unpopular, and Daylight Saving Time would only be in use for two years; in 1919, it was repealed over Wilson’s veto.  Although a few states would continue using it on a local basis, DST would not be adopted again nationwide until World War II, when it was used year-round.

Today in 1917: British Capture Fallujah

Today in 1916: War Fears in the NetherlandsToday in 1915: HMS Dreadnought Rams, Sinks U-29
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walburgablack replied to your post “dang it i

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walburgablack replied to your post “dang it i managed to hurt myself sleeping somehow i hurt my… grip…”

oy vey. I have slipped twice today while dealing with laundry, both times on the same leg I wrenched the knee on day before yesterday. :(

domestic injuries are just so unfair. it’s just so unfair. c’mon if i’m gonna get physically destroyed it should be, like, fighting a werewolf or something. ugh. 
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… I got myself motivated these last couple of

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… I got myself motivated these last couple of weeks by cleaning my house a little at a time in advance of guests. 

(The visit went nicely. We could probably hang out in an abandoned mineshaft with these people and have a good time. We did have the issue that these are people who have a five-bedroom house with five bathrooms in it, plus a living room and a dining room and an eat-in kitchen AND a family room with a twelve-foot ceiling, and sure they live modestly but are just physically not used to trying to exist in a tiny space. My house has only one public space kind of room, the living room, and it’s not that wide. The man brought a project to work on that was a quilted jacket large enough to fit him, and it was so big that he couldn’t sit on the couch and work on it, and the only open space was the room’s entryway, so no one could get in or out while he was working on it. And the woman had enough room to sit on the couch and work on her project but she knocked everything off the coffee table four times, including once a glass full of a sugary drink that shattered everywhere, because she’s clearly not used to having a coffee table that close, but it has to be, because that’s the size of my living room. It was good for me, though, to realize that it’s not just because my house is messy that I can’t have people over; I physically can’t have people over in my house because the rooms are too small. Four adult humans is Max Capacity.)

In other things, I’ve had the issue that I decided to work on an original project and backburner the fanfic, and the result is that I’m not working on either. So that’s great. I tried to take it back and go back to the fic but now my brain’s like  nope you said you didn’t want this so fuck it, so I have like, 50k that isn’t worthy of updating, and I haven’t uploaded anything since Dec 31st, adn I guess that’s it, I die like this.

And none of my projects for the farm are terribly exciting to me. All the things I have on my list that I want to do, I just… don’t want to do.

So. If only the fucking sun would come out. Well– it did, it was sunny all day yesterday, and I kept thinking, it must be warm enough to go out on the porch, or outside, or something, and no. No, the sun is brilliantly warm but it is solidly below freezing. And apparently always will be. I cannot get out of my tiny cramped house. I cannot spread out and do anything. I cannot. I am just stuck. I am stuck!

On the good side, though, I reread the All Systems Red novella from the Murderbot series, and it was brilliant. but it only took me like. An hour.

Apart from that I slept almost all day yesterday, and I’m just– I’m at work, trying to update my work computer, trying to make myself care about literally anything, and I don’t. I just don’t. 

I need to get back to the farm, because when I’m there, even if I don’t care, there’s so much to do that I can get by on inertia. 
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Mm-hmm Windows 10 just forced me to let it run an update for 2 hours only for it to fail at the end,

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Mm-hmm Windows 10 just forced me to let it run an update for 2 hours only for it to fail at the end, so. 

Back to my normal technique, which is to ctrl+alt+del force quit the updater app every time it starts up.
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Cities That Were At One Time The Largest In The

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galacticwiseguy:

toloveviceforitself:

galacticwiseguy:

historical-nonfiction:

click here for the enlarged version!

this map is fascinating for a variety of reasons but the particular part of it that made me fall down a wikihole was the Cucuteni–Trypillian culture, which I was not familiar with. they seem pretty cool for a variety of reasons but what caught my eye is that they’d build a city, literally the largest city in the world they would build, and then they’d live there for about sixty years, and then they’d burn the fucker down. Why? Nobody knows. They’d move somewhere else and do the whole thing over, and then maybe move back and rebuild the first city identically on the same foundations. In one place they did that thirteen times.

this is some SCP type shit. what was chasing them. what happened in these cities that they needed burning down over and over

…what

right????? also i forgot my favorite part: we can’t get buildings to burn down this way. we’ve tried, nobody has actually managed to set a fire that leaves the same kind of rubble. it is not…traditional…fire
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