for me it felt like gaiman/ishiguro/murakami for kids
the main impressions i have left of it are of trippy kaleidoscopic space fabric and someone in a jar; i distinctly recall being very frustrated that the author did not bother to explain in great detail exactly how the space witch went from being a star to being a space witch
child me yearned for the spreadsheets
obligatory mentions for tengger cavalry, nine treasures and SULD
i’m a freshwater guy myself but i also do paludariums and vivariums. always wanted to try a topoff only saltwater system based around mangrove filtration with macro and seagrass but am too nervous to make the plunge lol
you invest it in (foreign) right wing radical organizations bent on overthrowing their democratically elected government. that way, when these groups eventually succeed due to your generous contributions they will allow you to swoop in and buy up their country’s previously nationalized natural monopolies at bargain bin prices through local intermediaries at which point you can cut costs and inflate prices for the citizens of the entire country and receive many orders of magnitude ROI
it’s win-win so long as you propagandize enough people about how this specific thing that you’re doing is actually defined as democracy, they’ll be totally ok with it and won’t suspect a thing
you realize that the uptick in frequency of these ‘provocations’ only started in response to the pelosi visit? the incident that had a considerable portion of the entire chinese population howling for the cpc to shoot down the plane and engulf the world in nuclear fire? this is the cpc’s way of appeasing its very large and very rabid nationalist constituency (who are very disappointed that they have not died in a nuclear armageddon, btw) and it is a meme on the chinese internet that despite all of its rhetoric, this pathetic level of ‘not touching you’ fuckery is somehow the lowest that the cpc is willing to stoop to when faced with a de jure violation of its sovereignty.
entity with the time, resources to try to sway public opinion
why would any foreign political entity waste its valuable english proficient resources on astroturfing an online backwater filled with politically illiterate nobodies? peak liberal solipsism
this is my pet concern as well and it’s always struck me as being bit darwinist. i cope by telling myself that instead of environmental evolutionary pressures, it’ll be social and cultural pressures instead. so long as those pressures are grounded in material reality and are able effectively act on the population at large, we won’t evolutionarily overfit and get stuck in some local minimum. all the more reason to prefer socialism over liberalism.