Fayanora: The Djao'Mor'Terra Collective

I absolutely DETEST the "dark forest" theory because it's utterly ridiculous. It assumes that capitalism, imperialism, and conquest is universally normal, which is absurd. It isn't even normal for all of humanity! It's an aberration! And even if it was normal universally, the universe is so goddamned HUGE that there are basically infinite resources in the universe to use without even touching planets with life. Just mining the asteroid belt and the dead planets of our own solar system would probably take us thousands of years to start running dry of things. Then there are nebulae thousands of light-years across filled with so much water and amino acids and other good stuff that it would take a fleet of ten thousand ships with ramscoops a million years to deplete. There are massive, gigantic rocky planets with water and ingredients for life but are icy and dead or too hot for anything to live there, or the gravity is too high because they're so massive. An interstellar civilization could mine those as well, since these super-massive, vaguely earth-like worlds are much too extreme for complex life. Probably too extreme even for simple life!

The explanations I favor for why we aren't hearing signals from aliens are:
1. Aliens are out there and sending signals, but the universe is just so goddamned big that none of those signals have reached us yet, or they're too weak to ever reach us because they spread out too thin. I like this one because no matter how big you think even our galaxy is -- let alone the whole universe -- you are WAY off the mark because everything in space is bigger than the human mind can even begin to comprehend. And the signals we're sending out are already thinning out so much that I'm betting most of the oldest signals are indistinguishable from the cosmic radio background noise.

2. Humans are the only sapient species stupid enough to rape and wreck our own home planet for greed and capitalism. I like this one because I like the thought that war, conquest, imperialism, and capitalism are such aberrations that most alien civilizations are living their "milk and honey / hunter gatherer" lifestyle in peace, and it's only here on Earth that anyone went insane enough to invent war, conquest, imperialism, or capitalism.

Now these two ideas aren't even mutually exclusive. I could see agriculture and even industry developing without fucking up the planet's ecosystem or the aliens killing each other over resources. It would just take longer, with more cooperation, and focusing on mining areas and techniques that would do minimal damage to the environment, and then fixing any damage done as soon as possible.

Call me an idealist, but damn... if I was a better writer, I would be writing a sci-fi novel where industrial civilizations based on cooperation and sustainability arose, and were so common as to be normal. And Earth would be there, but I'd write a humanity that had realized they had no need to bother their neighbors because there's more than enough resources in our own solar system and in solar systems without any life of their own, that it would take millions of years to even begin running out of resources. And by then, hopefully humanity would learn good sustainability lessons both from their own mistakes and from the good examples of their neighbors. And the book or books would make it damned clear that humanity was singularly unique in the sheer speed and violence of their rising from hunter/gatherer to intergalactic civilization. We'd be the barbarians shocking everyone else with how fast we flung ourselves off our home planet. Before us, it would be unheard of for anyone to achieve an intergalactic civilization in less than a million years after the advent of writing.

Sure, there would be examples of civilizations that made it to an industrial level in less time, but the only evidence for any of those would usually be found by xenoarchaeologists digging up the ruins of such civilizations after they nuked themselves into extinction before ever getting so much as a probe into outer space. It would be considered a miracle or something that we managed to overcome our own barbarism. That "or something" making a great many other alien races decide to give us a wide berth in case we were just really good at pretending to be civilized. Basically, "humans are space orcs" but in a... not so good way. Not bad exactly, just... a bit like watching a civilization of the nastiest, most violent meth addicts manage to not blow themselves up, die of an overdose, kill all their own babies from neglect or abuse, or kill each other off for drugs or money, and then get clean and begin getting their lives back on track. There'd always be the memory of what we were, and the fear we'd fall off the wagon again.

Of course we're 100% still in that "violent meth addicts" stage. As long as capitalism exists, we're going to stay there. If we want to get clean, we have to get rid of capitalism and replace it with cooperation and sustainability. We have to start caring for the Earth and the ecosystem and helping it heal from our past mistakes.

So I'm close enough to finishing book 7 that I'm starting work on book 8. Today I was working on class schedules for the main group of kids. A problem I've come across already is that Vedya -- a math genius -- was taking Calculus in book 7. I have no idea what's beyond Calculus, and it's proving difficult to Google, especially as Google and even my go-to search engines Ecosia and DuckDuckGo are getting more difficult to use because of AI creep. Hell, Google itself has been unusable for years, long before it added AI and become completely useless.

Anyway, if anyone has any idea what I can say Vedya is learning, math-wise, for grades 11 and 12, please let me know.

The other day I got some coupons in the mail for New Seasons Market, even though I almost never buy anything there because it's overpriced bougie bullshit. I do occasionally get things there that I can't find anywhere else, like ginger simple syrup or ginger juice or other products by The Ginger People. Also sometimes I get the bamboo toilet paper there, but that's been less frequent because even Grocery Outlet carries at least some brand of bamboo TP even if it isn't the first brand that did it, Caboo.

Anyway, very often these coupons are not at all interesting to me. But a few of these were actually something I would get. There's one for some free cheese with a $10 purchase, though that one is dated to start on the fourth of February. There's also a February coupon for a free pound of 81% lean ground beef with a $10 purchase. And a January one for a free pint of blueberries with $10 purchase. But I don't really care about blueberries. They're okay, but I never buy them unless they're in like a fruit salad or if they're an ingredient.

The last interesting coupon was for free store brand olive oil (extra virgin) with $10 purchase. I had ten bucks, and needed an excuse to get out of the house that would override my hatred for the cold, so I went and got some things. I got two zucchinis, a bag of tortilla chips, and a ginger beer by Fever Tree. It was just over $11, but hey, that's fine. The olive oil in question is over $13 without the coupon, which is ridiculous, especially as it's the store brand. I certainly would never spend more than maybe $6 on olive oil ordinarily. Not that I get olive oil very often, as I tend to cook with butter or sesame seed oil, but I didn't get any sesame seed oil this month, and thought some olive oil would be good, especially if it's technically free. Sure, you gotta spend $10, but I needed zukes anyway, and the other two things are fun treats.

Also, I found two full plastic bags of returnables on the way, just sitting there with nobody else in sight. Clear plastic bags, and not huge bags, but I estimate there's probably about ten to twelve returnables in there. Hold on, I'm gonna go count em.

Holy SHIT I hit the jackpot! There's 33 of the buggers! I now have two full green bags of returnables (had 1.5 before). So I guess tomorrow I'm gonna go back to New Seasons Market to drop off those two bags there.

EDIT: Actually it's 35 returnables, not counting the deposit on the ginger beer.

Using Internet Explorer or Edge to download Chrome is like using a Chevy Nova to bring home an elephant that eats all your food, wrecks all your shit, and sends regular reports about you to the NSA. (Because Chrome is bloatware and spyware combined.)

Using IE or Edge to download Firefox, on the other hand, is like using a Chevy Nova to bring home a complete home entertainment system from Best Buy. One of the non-smart kinds, with Dolby Surround Sound and Bose speakers.

Using IE or Edge to download Brave is like using a Chevy Nova to bring home several Nazi SS officers or ICE agents.

I usually just cook chicken in butter like I do with most things, when I'm not slow-cooking it (which I've stopped, because chicken gets stringy and weird when slow-cooked), and then put BBQ sauce or something else on it. But yesterday I saw a video where someone put chicken pieces in a plastic bag, added a bunch of spices to the bag, and shook it up. I had somehow forgotten this was a thing, despite growing up at the tail end of "Shake N Bake."

So, I tried it today with some de-boned thighs that had been on markdown in the freezer section of Grocery Outlet. Once defrosted, I cut them into pieces, put two thighs worth of pieces into a separate bag, and dumped in garlic salt, garlic powder, and black pepper. Then I closed the bag, shook it up, and dumped the result into the skillet.

Result: far better than I had even thought, for more than one reason. Sure, yeah, it's seasoned pretty well. But more importantly, the texture is AMAZING! I'm used to chicken breasts, and their texture is pretty firm even when cooked. This, though... I've had thigh meat before plenty of times but usually in fried or baked chicken. These were small pieces, basically the size of chopped tomatoes from a can. (I cut them that size to make cooking easier.) They are very soft and moist and succulent, while still having acceptable firmness. Is this just what thigh meat is like? I usually avoid it when buying raw meat because I don't like dealing with bones. But as mentioned, these were de-boned, so it was an easy decision. If this is what thigh meat is usually like, I think I'll be looking for de-boned thigh meat more often!

I decided, this year, instead of spending money on a calendar, why not print free ones from the Internet, since I have a working laser printer and can always go to the library if I need to save toner. January's was just a random January 2026 calendar page.

However, a few days ago the Internet was out for several hours, so I made a February 2026 calendar based on what my computer's calendar said the month would look like. Moreover, I spent the time to number it in the number system used on Traipah, for funsies. It's a base-6 counting system, meaning you can count really high with just two hands. I think you can count to 55 with two hands before you have to find a different way to count the 100's place. Of course, 55 in base 6 is only 35 in our standard base ten, and then 100 in base 6 is 36 in base ten. To get to 100 in base ten, you'd have to count to 244 in base 6.

Anyway, so because this February -- like most of them -- only has 28 days, that's 44 in base 6. And in the Traipahni number system, everything is reversed -- right to left. So 10 is 01, 12 is 21, 100 is 001 and so on. And they don't use the same characters to represent numbers either. The 1 looks like a capital I in a sans serif font, 2 is a V because there are two lines in a V, three is a triangle, four is a + or an X, five is a pentacle, and 0 is O. This calendar prints the Traipani numeral on top, under that is what that number means in its native base 6, and then on the bottom corner under those two is the date in base ten.

Without further ado, here it is:



Click on it for a bigger copy.

I stole the sleeping god idea for the cosmology of my own fictional series. Called The Dreamer, It Dreams reality -- the whole multiverse. It combines that Lovecraftian idea with my thoughts on the concept of God, mainly that any entity with a mind vast enough to create and run the mind-bogglingly vast universe is not going to be comprehensible to humans and is probably not going to notice us at all or care about us more than it cares about any random atoms in the universe.

And then take that idea and multiply it by an infinite multiverse -- taking a universe that's already impossible for the human mind to truly comprehend the scale of -- and multiplying that by trillions upon trillions upon trillions unto infinity. Any entity capable of Dreaming all the infinite universes in the multiverse would be as vast and unfathomable to a single-universe god as that single-universe god is to us.

Bringing Dwarves into the story a bit, for book 8. Pursuant to that...

"Sure, (Dwarves) could see well in the dark, but gemstones and precious metals don’t look very impressive in the dark, even to someone with dark-vision, especially since Dwarves were partially color-blind; they could see browns, some of the darker reds, some yellows, and gray/silver; in fact, the green light of the various glowing life-forms like the glow worms looked white to them. They had names for hundreds of shades of the most common earth tones, but when it came to gemstones, they needed help from surface dwellers with full color vision to identify most of them.

"They could usually tell gold apart from other metals, though since it was so soft, they’d never had much use for it themselves, initially. Once they figured out that making it into things could net them a LOT of resources in exchange, they had gotten really good at using gold to make things for surface-dwellers, with a little help from their surface-dwelling employees."

I'm struggling to figure out if this level of color blindness is realistic. First, is it possible? Second, would a species that lives entirely underground and rarely goes to the surface at all have any color vision at all?

Keep in mind they do have pretty strong dark-vision, but of course there's not really much color in the dark. Sure, they could use various light sources, they even have magical crystals that make light. But their eyes are very sensitive to light, and the light sources they scatter through their tunnels for their surface-dwelling friends and allies are very dim indeed. (Like glow in the dark tape.) Even a first-year student at Fae Springs could easily make a bright enough witch-light to blind a Dwarf, if only temporarily. I'm pretty sure they would need special glasses or a spell over their eyes to be on the surface in the daytime, as they would consider a full moon to be almost unbearably bright.