"Power Without Knowledge...": President Haig and the Era of Bad Feelings

[Born in the USSA]

One benefit of the uchronian genre (especially future history stories) is the opportunity to explore divergent religious movements, though like divergent ideologies it's unfortunately an underexplored avenue*. From the earliest concept of this TL I wanted to include some strain of revolutionary religious weirdness, and an evolution of Theosophy seemed like the natural choice. Aside from allowing me to have a new religious movement become the dominant faith in a global superpower the ability to claim that all religions contain versions of the truth nicely complements the Cosmicist emphasis on a vast and universal wealth of human knowledge to draw on. It also gives me the opportunity to have a massive triple goddess statue combining Ultima Ayesha, Shakti and Wusheng Laomu in the center of the High Monastery of Leng. I saw it in a dream and had to bring it into the timeline but my process is at least partially based on very strange dreams so it works.

More notes on religious weirdness:

• Given settlement patterns and early history the most religious section of the ARC from the transportation period to the "present" is (as previously mentioned) in the Indic portion** of East Antarctica. There's some minor concern in the more secular regions that Zoranism has coopted Ultima Ayesha for their own use (and that the ARC uses a central symbol of the movement in its flag), but even as a secularized philosophical movement Zoranism is still common in the rest of the continent, the figure of Ultima Ayesha predates her adoption by the faith, and the symbol is used as a metaphorical aspiration for the state's fervent pursuit of knowledge (and space expansion).
• Among their many doctrinal differences with the pure faith the Tsalal do not have Nameless Priests or monasteries, with their priestly caste composed entirely of Gyrovagues, but also ones with vastly more temporal authority (within Symzonia) than their counterparts enjoy in the wider continent. This suits the semi-nomadic nature of the Hetmanates.
• The dominant strain of Antarctic Hinduism is a Shaktist analogue of Nayaa Rasta as a little nod to the excellent Clive-Less World TL, though it lacks its inspiration's focus on not treating illnesses (in the original version a bid to ensure karmic reward and punishment, I guess?) and favors a broad social welfare system. There's also a high degree of syncretism in Indic Greater Antarctica in general, with plenty of Zoranist, Nayaa Rasta and Yiguandao believers also subscribing at least in part to one or both of the other major faiths.
• The Abrahamic faiths would get little if any focus in the novel proper, if only for the sake of being overutilized, though it would suit the Kyriarchy's perception that the Cosmicists are all evil lunatics*** if the dominant Christian tradition was something like the Church of Lucifer from the Lucifer's Star series, i.e. a Gnostic sort of faith that regarded Jesus as a reformed and redeemed Lucifer making up for his sins and fall from grace. It would give me an excuse to have a Christian denomination where my fan favorite Infancy Gospel of Thomas could be an integral part of the canon and I could probably fold in some Yazidist flavor in the bargain since Antarctica becomes a homeland for all sorts of persecuted and dispossessed groups trickling down from the blasted and bigoted north 🤔
• Public preaching is allowed if you have a permit and stick to designated spaces, churches and other religious buildings are subject to the same tax regimen as every other business, and denominational school/government prayer is verboten (though most schools have a small window blocked out for private prayer and meditation).

*Shout out to @Napoleon53 and the AFC! It's unleashed hell on earth but it's a fascinating addition to the genre nonetheless 😂

**Basically the continent is divided into three major geographic partitions: Lesser Antarctica (the Antarctic Archipelago of New Nantucket, Caprona and Dakkar) and Greater Antarctica (divided in turn into Atlantic and Indic halves based on the ocean they border). Dakkar is considered an outlier in its region and is closer to its Indic neighbors in rates of religiosity. In the Protonga RC it varies based on which island you're on.

***They're intense, sure, but most of the stuff actively meant to seem threatening is rooted in deliberate praxis of psyops to unsettle their enemies. Ironically the Church of Christ, Lightbearer is not that, being a sincere expression of religious faith with a lot of misconceptions in the broader world.

 

[Born in the USSA]

Student: Douglas Amundsen, Academic Year 12184
Antarctic University of New Nantucket
Course Materials for History and Political Theory 210- Rise and Fall of the American Commonwealth Party
Professor- Vivian Borchgrevink

I: Course Outline
You are all well aware of the aborted Second American Revolution and the impact of the meteoric rise and bloody suppression of the American Commonwealth Party as a crucial link in the chain of modern Antarctic history. It was, after all, the exiled remnants of the party that would first import Cosmicism to the Antarctic Economic Territories and found the Antarctic Cosmicist Party that would form the nucleus of our own revolution. This is a matter of historiography distorted by nearly 150 years of intervening history and geopolitical shifts. It is crucial to understand that the Commonwealth Party was not founded as a revolutionary vanguard, or even as a wholly Cosmicist project, regardless of how the group is commonly portrayed in the popular consciousness. Through this course you will be familiarized with the electoral contours of the Era of Bad Feelings in the rapidly decaying United States, the gradual evolution of Commonwealth Party platform, and its inevitable betrayal and suppression, and will come away with a more nuanced and better informed picture of the Antarctic foundational myth.

II: Supplemental Materials
"President Haig and the Era of Bad Feelings", Sarah Williams (12000)
Tainted Victories: Contingent Elections in the Second American Century, Adrian Crean (12150)
The Shatter: 2020 in Review, Peter Mitchell (12022)
Blood on the Streets: Political Paramilitaries in the American Years of Lead, Michael Parsons (12065)
The Cosmicist Manifesto: Precarity in the Cthulhucene, Daniel Sutter (12026)
Platform of the Commonwealth Party, various (12030)
A Plea for Normality, Sarah Williams (12032)
The Insular Territories: Colonization to Kanaloa, Adrian Crean (12157)
Platform of the Commonwealth Party, various (12040)
Platform of the Commonwealth Party, various (12060)
A Dream Deferred: Coup, Crackdown, Exodus, Adrian Crean (12160)
Platform of the Antarctic Cosmicist Party, various (12080)
Embers in the Dark: Cosmicism in the North American Union, Adrian Crean (12176)

III: Lecture Schedule
Lectures Monday and Wednesday from 9 to 11 AM, excluding the month of June and all continental holidays. Office hours Tuesday and Thursday from 12 to 2 PM.

IV: Grading
Attendance: 10%
Essays: 60%
Presentations: 30%

 

[Born in the USSA]

It doesn't assauge @andry2806's critique that I'm too scholastic with my fictional ideology but here's a new development that occured to me out of the blue 😅

Here's some more development* for Cosmicism! This concerns a development I'm calling "deformed states and the degenerated state", and while the terms themselves are lifted from (and loosely inspired by) Trotsky their scope is considerably broader.

1. Since the defining feature of the Nihilist stage of the Leviathan is that it's the accumulated shambles of all the previous stages, having putrefied so thoroughly that it strangles the natural maturation of the next stage, in my conception the entire stage would be described as a single degenerated state referring to a disjointed world order under the sway of a global kyriarchy rather than Trotsky's focus on individual worker's states under the control of a party elite.
2. Deformed states, meanwhile, would refer to the point after material or cultural pressures fundamentally alter the course of the prior stages, forcing them down a path where their own contradictions and compromises ensure their inevitable demise and lead to the creation of the following stage. This plays into Trotsky's distinction between the two, where deformed worker's states never reach their ideal form because of internal and external forces. The ideal possible course history avoided would be a hauntology.

In the revised form, the process would flow from the inciting acceleration to the inevitable historical point that mutilates it into a deformed state to the necropolitics left after the inevitable rise and maturation of a new acceleration. As an attempt to hotwire and bootstrap our modern accelerations/hauntologies to escape the Nihilist global death drive the theorists of the Cosmintern believe they've escaped the trap of the deformed state, especially because nothing in their history or strategy is outside the bounds of the founding conditions Sutter expected, though perhaps the rise of the Maximalists itching for total war and Final Victory mean they've finally reached that point. I haven't decided yet, though it would definitely give the period the novel is set in a different tone if they were at the start of an inevitable decline 🤔

Anyway, here are my initial thoughts about the deformed state for each stage of my historical process. Yes, I know they couldn't have helped but become deformed given historical conditions, but that's half the point. Most of these "ideal" hauntologies would have their own baked in flaws, but they could've endured longer and in a nobler and more empowering way such that the actual course of history is a succession of dystopias by comparison.

• Imperium actually produced two failed states, the European model (where the bourgeoisie ran rampant) and the Chinese one (where the bourgeoisie was overly suppressed but effectively controlled). The former led to the development of the Liberal stage and the latter stifled innovation, left the system vulnerable to outside pressure and was eventually snuffed out. The middle road would've been some form of developed cameralism where an ecosystem of private interests could support the state effectively and raise living standards without supplanting traditional systems of control.
• Liberalism is relatively simpler, with the conservative reaction to the rise of mass democracy and the failures and blindspots of the progressive movements leaving the achievements of both seen as a historical half measure that couldn't effectively check corporate exploitation or class/race antagonism. The ideal would've been a genuinely mass democracy (without racial or class barriers) that employed Georgist methods to yoke the exploiting class to the popular welfare.
• Socialism entered its deformed state with the October revolution, locking the process on a path that ignored Marx's original conditions and attempted to jump from feudal agrarianism to socialism without the necessary intervening steps.
• Fascism's deformed state was caused by fighting and losing World War II. I know it was what the ideology demanded but it was still a historical mistake in this framework. The ideal would've been a mature form of Futurism before all the reaction crept in.

*The things I do for ancillary worldbuilding 😅

There's a reason the Cosmicist Manifesto explicitly has a glossary at the end 😂

 

[Born in the USSA]

But on that note, how does an "ideal" Socialism look like from this perspective? Since you only described the deformed state, but not an ideal one

Sorry, thought that was implied. "Ideal" Socialism would've manifested in an industrialized country either before or immediately after the October Revolution in line with Marx's theories. Basically the turning point where deformation became inevitable was the failure of the post-October revolutionary wave to manifest.

Hot diggity dang. Now I am thinking about a scenario where the four stages coexist in their ideal hauntologies, whatever that might look like

Since they all have flaws that's certainly possible and since true utopia is a sucker's bet that world would have its fair share of strife and bloodshed but it would still be a pinnacle of sanity compared to all the crap we went through. Off the top of my head:

1. Cameralism develops further in northern Europe and a series of lucky breaks coupled with better efficiency at scale allows an alliance of Prussia and Sweden to outcompete their neighbors, expand and get in on the ground floor of the imperial game. Bonus points if it gets imported into China and Russia and causes them to modernise ahead of schedule. Expect an earlier Sweden-Norway and united Germany.
2. There's still an Enlightenment-inspired rebellion in North America (since the frontier has a consistent effect of eroding centralized command and control historically), this time between a New Prussia somewhere in the South and a wildy successful New Sweden that survived somehow. We'll give Chaos TL a nod and call it something like the Federal Union of Atlantis or whatever. Bonus points if it starts as a peaceful process of administrative devolution and they just end up making a clean break. Race blindness and socially beneficial landholding wouldn't likely be an initial feature but it would have to get there relatively quickly to meet the mark, so that's what happens. For the sake of wacky political labels we'll call this stage "Freiheit" or something 🤔
3. Since there's still class stratification and worker exploitation in the wake of the inevitable industrial revolution "scientific" socialism still arises in the middle 19th century, though likely from a Brit or a Dutchman in this scenario. Say hello to the Union of Britain(-Denmark?), just not in the KR Syndicalist sense. France would likely be Cameralist (since aspects OTL caught on in France) so they're out, but maybe an industrialized Japan/some portion of India that wasn't railroaded by colonialism would be likely candidates too. Say hello to yet another allohistorical Societism!
4. Since there'd inevitably be an industrialized world war an analogue to Futurism is likely, but I'm not sure where it would crop up. It would have to be somewhere the threat of communism is real or perceived, there's a lot of emphasis on history and tradition to be discarded, and they'd have to feel they lost the war in some profound if not strictly literal sense. Maybe the Chinese reforms didn't go far enough? With socialism/Societism growing on either side and the feeling they got the short end of the stick in a war against Kalmar/German Indochina or whatever they'd be ripe for it. Given the weight of history it's also likely to catch on in South Atlantis. Futurism is a cool name so I'm keeping it.
5. Since all of these "ideal" forms would still have their own flaws and contradictions there'd still be a watered down Nihilist stage of some kind, but given better founding conditions the Cosmicism analogue would arise sooner and maybe just butterfly that entirely? It would fit the ideological model by forming in the the ideal organic Volksgeist process of the gestation of new Leviathan stages after all, rather than having to claw its way out of an ideological corpse world. Maybe Russia ends up reforming after each new model in turn*, some altered form of Cosmism takes root and then the UN analogue after *World War II allows it to spread organically? A history of more effective and centralized states would likely create a scenario where the *UN was more powerful to begin with.

In fact, you know what, I'm canonizing this since I'm suddenly so taken with it. Say hello to Leviathan Renewed, another of the Cosmintern shared world media properties 😂


*In order: Catherine the Great begins importing cameralist systems, followed by a successful Freiheit-inspired Decemberist analogue velvet revolution and proper industrialization that sets the precedent for regular velvet cultural revolutions that install Societism, Futurism and eventually Cosmism in turn?

 

[Born in the USSA]

Home sick all this week, so not really feeling up to a proper update. That said, have some notes on the Antarctic ecology!

As in OTL, the indigenous ecology of Antarctica in Power Without Knowledge was incredibly fragile and incredibly specialized, with climate change and invasive species quickly causing it to unravel horrifically once the ice began to melt. While most actual agriculture during the Macondo period was done through climate controlled hydroponics for the sake of sheer efficiency, the rudiments of a new biosphere continued to form through accidental introductions, deliberate experiments, and natural speciation. Following the Antarctic Revolution, the new regime would take to the project with zeal, using the rapidly shifting environment as a test bed* for the Corps of Discovery's terraforming techniques.

The sequence for the creation of the new biosphere mirrors the CoD's standard policy on terraforming:

1. The soil biome was the most labor intensive to create given the sudden exposure of the Antarctic bedrock, but eventually a stable blend of engineered fungi, mosses, and carefully selected arthropods and invertebrates was found capable of generating the required volume of live soil. Alkaline hydrolysis is common in the ARC, so regular infusions of nutrients have helped the new soil to develop and support a broader ecosystem.
2. To create the proper level of biodiversity the ARC constructed a series of climate controlled domes, each of which was stocked with live soil and a blend of highland and temperate/frigid zone plants and animals, potentially adaptive domesticates, and some specimens modified from the original biome. The populations were then observed, culled, modified, and gradually brought into sync with the Antarctic seasonal cycle and the predicted ecosystem of the region they were meant to inhabit.
3. Once the broader soil biome and the artificial ecosystem were deemed sufficiently stable plants and animals were gradually released from the domes to expand into their new niches. By the present day true fruits are rare in plants, though berries, tubers, windseeds, nuts, galls, and edible shoots and leaves are common, while many animal species hoard during the summers and hibernate during the winters, though there are some** exceptions.

While the Antarctic culinary package originally made use of northern plants and animals, the success of the biosphere project has seen the gradual substitution of foreign ingredients with "home-grown" ones and the creation of new ones. For one example of the latter, have a look at Blue Tea, national beverage of the ARC and inspired by a drink of the same name from @Alex Richards' excellent but tragically short lived In the shadow of the Antarctic. Described as a blend of a tea brewed from a caffeinated shrub, a muscle relaxing berry, brandy and a mix of northern spices, it's kind of haunted me since I started thinking about it, so I thought I'd give it a shot.

In-universe it's helped by the fact that you can just have modified versions of common plants rather than ones that naturally evolved, so just substitute a real plant for its fictional derivative if you want to make it yourself. At its root, Blue Tea suggests to me a black tea toddy flavored with cinnamon and nutmeg and with an added muscle relaxer. The most obvious muscle relaxer would be kava, since that blends well with tea, but we run into issues of liver damage from the combined effect it has with alcohol. To get some of the taste without toxicity issues, maybe a bit of brandy butter to deepen the flavor and help sweeten the blend of strong black tea and naturally bitter kava? As a personal preference my version would also have tapioca pearls, as a bit of a nod to how carb heavy the Antarctic diet is IRL (and because I'm partial to the taste).


*Divides over terraforming praxis helped fuel the initial divide with the Tsalal, though it's a testament to the success of the project that they've been able to survive all this time as seminomadic pastoralists.

**The antipodean bear is active all winter. Despite its name it's actually a large wolverine derivative bred as an attack animal by the AET security forces.

 

[Born in the USSA]

Special thanks to DG Valdron's work on the ecoregions of a deglaciated Antarctica! It's been incredibly helpful for visualizing how I'd distribute plant and animal species in this ecology I'm building from the ground up. Based on that work I'm operating on the idea that the continental face of Dakkar would be a polar rainforest derived from seedstock from the Megellanic subpolar ones*, while the Midnight Coast split between Kosekin and New Swabia (plus the areas around some of the lakes elsewhere) would be marshland, and the islands and continental interior would be a blend/transition between scrubland or grassland depending on elevation and average rainfall/river levels. A variety of mosses would be common and a hybrid of Arctic and Alaskan Lupine would be basically everywhere, since it was integral to stabilizing the new soil.

As fun as an ecology of sloths, monotremes and marsupials would be, the locals aren't gods and that's too big a lift given the timescale, though there are a couple of wacky projects running around. To help puzzle it out I thought I'd lay out a list of Antarctic national plants, animals and other symbols:

• Amphibian- Giant Siberian salamander, a derivative of the traditional variety that gets considerably larger.
• Bat- None, the structure of their wings radiates heat too quickly
• Bird
  • Aquatic- Emperor penguin** (native)
  • Terrestrial- Great Wulluweid
  • Airborne- Albatross (unofficial)
• Crustacean- Antarctic krill (native)
• Dog breed- Southron husky, a new breed that sheds copiously in summer, bulks up considerably in winter, and like the dogo argentino is well accustomed to people but can kill large animals defensively.
• Fish
  • Freshwater- Salmon
  • Saltwater- Emerald rockcod (native)
• Flower- Southron Lupine
• Fossil- Kaikaifilu
• Fruit- Cloudberry
• Fungus- Plowshare lichen, a hybrid derivative from several natural species adapted to accelerate soil development. It's distinct from the fungus used to remediate the superfund sites.
• Gem- Erebus crystal
• Grass- Antarctic hair grass (native)
• Horse breed- None, though there is a new species of alpaca.
• Invertebrate- Vostok octopus, a particularly inventive and difficult experiment grown out of a monstrous and kinda harebrained Macondo attempt to commercially farm a variant of the Antarctic giant octopus. Given how intelligent and venomous they are it's a good thing they haven't adapted to riverine living.
• Insect- Antarctic honeybee, a variant of the Carniolan breed with increased cold tolerance.
• Kelp- Cochayuyo
• Marine mammal
  • Freshwater- Baikal seal
  • Saltwater- Southern elephant seal (native)
• Mammal- Kerguelen reindeer ("native")
• Reptile- Painted turtle
• Rodent- Wooly capybara, another wacky experiment, native to the Dakkar polar rainforest. They winter in the copious hotsprings of the region.
• Tree- Southern beech
• Vegetable- Greater Kerguelen cabbage, a larger domesticated cultivar*** of the native species.

*Themselves descended from the original Antarctic forests, so a doubly fitting set of imports.

**The loss of the ice really devastated the penguins, but the intense investment in coastal rookeries under the new government has helped populations finally stabilize. They've been able to spread up through the river system, but new predators prevents them from predominating the further from the new coastlines they go.

***There's also a wide variety of particularly cold-tolerant potatoes and other tubers that have been allowed to spread wherever they'll grow. From space Antarctica in summer is a lovely blend of deep greens and blues, but the massive added carbon sink is offset by the collapse of several other rainforests and grasslands elsewhere so global warming is still hell on earth.

 

[Born in the USSA]

Also I figured out a capital city for my novel-only state of Frémont: a hypertrophied version of this little town I'm going to call New Troy. It's got good placement and river access, it's roughly equidistant between Omaha and KC, and with its larger metro area would be about the same distance from both Wichita and Grand Island to boot. Plus it was founded at the right time to butterfly Lincoln becoming the capital (Topeka's a year older but whatever) and New Troy is occasionally the state Metropolis is in so there's a nifty little Superman connect.

Frémont facts!

• The state nickname is "The Bluebonnet State", but I'm lazy so it also has Kansas's anthem and Nebraska's motto, and blends their various state plants/animals
• The University of Frémont is centered in New Troy but also has campuses in Omaha, Wichita and Kearney
• Some of the counties are mashed together, so it has a nice clean 175 instead of a slightly ludicrous 193
• I like Nebraska's electoral weirdness, so Frémont has a unicameral legislature and divides its electors by district popular votes
• It has 7 representatives and electoral districts (based on current combined population and compared to the list)
• Given its electoral vote situation and conflicts over police brutality, pipelines and indigenous rights all the parties* going into 2020 are hoping to pick up at least one electoral vote there!
• It has a state flag that isn't terrible!

-America's Heartland​

*Except Manifest Destiny!, since they don't contest the presidency. Since the state contains the geographic center of the lower 48 they are having their party convention there though, the only party to do so!

 

[Born in the USSA]

I'm a day late but happy Memorial Days! The blood is on the wall, zeitgenossen! Thought I'd take the time to lay out some of the (occasionally conflicting) goals of the Manifest Destiny! Party, since most of the others have goals and priorities that match up pretty well to existing parties and factions of parties but Manifest Destiny! is far more interesting IMO. After all, even without trying to coalesce around a presidential candidate what policy in common could regionalists and state separatists have with not one but four flavors of ethnic nationalist?

I suppose it's helped by their cardinal rule: "Anyone trying to drag the party toward crime, violent separatism or ethnic cleansing is a glowie", so the ones frothing at the mouth are safely kept on the outside and any of the ethnats or secesh with a head on their shoulders are forced to trade boots for suits and speak softly to bide time until the inevitable collapse and race war. For the sake of simplicity I'll lay out major goals from more to less realistic, or less to more committed, depending on your point of view, with each ideally building on the prior ones:

1. Localism redux- Pretty straightforward, an emphasis on building local consciousness (though "among whom" depends on who you're talking to) and making state governments more responsive to voters and/or traditionally underserved regions of the states through things like referendums/redistricting and investment, respectively. This is where the party's emphasis on state and local office is dedicated.
2. A Turtle Island longhouse- To better preserve treaty rights the tribes should form a representative continental body and push for changes at the state and federal level to achieve three major objectives:
   • Lobbying Congress and the states as a united front.
   • Gaining some form of direct advisory power within the Department of the Interior. This one gets the most buy in from westerners who despise the Bureau of Land Management.
   • Gaining administrative authority over the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the Indian Health Service through a veto power over nominations to head them.
3. A new Freedmen's Bureau: Several factions are virulently opposed to reparations in the form of actual cash dispersals for Black America but others see the longhouse idea as an inspiration for a similar system that could lobby Congress collectively and coordinate federal housing and job training aid already being dispersed to Black communities.
4. The Bill of (States') Rights- A fluctuating list of proposed Amendments, the most commonly agreed upon version of which focusing on expanding the House to better represent small states, limiting the expansive interpretation of the Commerce clause to devolve more autonomy to the state level, and enshrining clarified rights to the formation of interstate compacts to solve regional issues. More expansive lists involve stripping authority from the Senate, especially combined with the next proposal.
5. A (partially) decolonized America- Basically borderline impossible a single map attempting to better balance state populations and synthesize as many ethnic homeland and regionalist goals as possible without actively shattering the country, through the changing of state boundaries. Ideally it would be combined with the prior proposals to ensure the tribes aren't rolled over and the shift in Senate representation doesn't screw everyone. Proposed boundary changes include:
   1. Dividing Shasta (OTL Jefferson proposal) from California and Lincoln from Texas to satisfy the more libertarian northern California and Hispanophone southern Texas, respectively.
   2. Combining Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, and eastern Washington/Oregon into the new state of Absaroka to satisfy the American Redoubt types, with a small slice given to the state of Sioux*.
   3. Admitting the New York, LA and Chicago metropolitan areas as states to prevent them from absorbing all focus in their respective states.
   4. Consolidation of the remaining Oregon and Washington into the state of Cascadia to give the regionalists half a loaf.
   5. Statehood for Puerto Rico and a consolidated collection of the Pacific Insular Territories in the form of Micronesia to finally allow representation.
   6. Consolidation of Arizona and New Mexico into the state of Aztlan to satisfy La Raza types.
   7. Consolidation of Utah and Nevada into Deseret to partially unify the Mormon Corridor.
   8. Creation of an Appalachian state combining West Virgina with slices of several other Southern states that are traditionally ignored.
   9. The remnants of the central southern states would be consolidated into Cherokee (eastern Tennessee/Kentucky), Chesapeake (Maryland, Delaware, and western Virginia, DC) and a unified Carolina.
   10. A New Afrika-esque state of Douglass in the Black Belt stretching from northern Mississippi through central Alabama and Georgia.
   11. Dividing South Florida from (North) Florida and combining the latter with the rump southern Georgia/Arkansas/Mississippi.
   12. A consolidated New England.

The proposals become less popular within the party as you go down the list, especially since some factions can favor one or two of the proposed new states in proposal 5 only a small minority is comfortable with all of them. For reference Melanesia would be the state with the lowest population (736,081), while with OTL parties but only 41 states the Senate would be divided 44(D)-38(R), give or take. Take away the city states and it'd be tied in a pretty amusing way 🤔


*OTL western South Dakota for the novel version of the map.

 

[Born in the USSA]

Hey gang! Hope your upcoming holiday week is looking promising and as per uzhe the floor is open to worldbuilding questions! In other news I recently watched Scavengers Reign, not only is it fantastic but the cultists in the final scene look vaguely similar to how I was picturing the Nameless Priests! Obviously the future genengineers wouldn't make anything anywhere near as complicated as the biosphere in that series when they finally get to terraforming but there's all sorts of ideas for exotic organisms* to test the limits of theoretical constructed ecosystems.

-Traditionally the Phlogiston symbol of the Empire of Heliodromus also includes Paracelsus' three metals, with (clockwise from top) Sulfer, Mercury and Salt representing the three castes and modified from the three circles. ​

In other news I'll never do anything with it but I had a random idea for a story set in the Separate Spheres shared world! It would basically start out with an Earth person arriving on a dual-mooned alien world in the grips of a quasi-feudal theocratic empire like John Carter. I have ideas for an Avatar-esque elemental system based on phlogiston that would turn out to actually derive from control of terraforming technology, and the story would end with the Earthling wresting control of the machinery from the descendants of the colony ship crew and opening up the broader system** to the Gestalt so that the lost colony could be properly reconstructed and incorporated. At its core the planet would only be inhabited in a massive rift valley with a dome over it and would be a hydraulic despotism divided into three basic partitions:

1. Heliodromus would be the capital, founded at the base of a largely nonfunctional space elevator and controlled with an iron fist by the now decadent and hereditary admin/security crew caste, itself broken into seven levels with the Pater/Emperor on top. The symbol of the Empire would be the Phlogiston symbol, with the actual citizens of the upper caste represented by terra pinguis and alchemical Sulfur and able to use command access to the clouds of radiation scrubbing nanites to make things explode or suffocate people. Their general vibe is "Mithraics from Season 1 of Raised By Wolves".
2. The "middle class" for lack of a better term is composed of the descendants of terraforming engineers, botanists and other life science unions turned guilds. They would have limited control over terra fluida, the "flesh" of the engineered flora and fauna as long as it's sufficiently nanite saturated and use it to produce crops and further the goals of atmosphere, ocean and soil creation. They'd use the symbol for alchemical Mercury.
3. The dregs would be warrior nomads able to control the terra lapidea "calx" that is nanite-saturated soil. They'd raid the other two casts regularly, strip people to the bone with sandblasts, and be descended from a group of exiles that opposed the crew's shift toward hereditary despotism. They'd use the alchemical Salt symbol.

*They don't know how they'll make living gasbags able to survive in the Venusian atmosphere, for example, but they're furiously running simulations and experimenting with DNA to make it happen regardless.

**If I actually wrote it vagaries of language (and the fact that the animals are named after Burroughs' species) would lead the reader to assume that it's a partially terraformed Mars, only for the reveal at the end that it's an entirely alien solar system.

• At its base it would be a dual-star system, with a red giant (Sol) orbited by several planets and beyond them a white dwarf (Luna)
• The action would take place on the roughly Earth-sized but generally Mars-like Mithras, orbited by two moons (Cautes and Cautopates) that are larger and rounder than Phobos and Deimos.
• Beyond Mithras we have the Tauroctonian System, centered on the vaguely Jupiter-esque Taurus and its five Mars-sized moons (Scorpio, Draco, Canis, Spica, and Corvus).
• Last but not least we have Aion, maintaining the OTL affiliation of "the ringed body past the main gas giant" with "named after the time god", though Aion is a stable black hole with an accretion disk rather than a gas giant.

The fact that their generation ship was called the Plymouth led to the Mithraic naming conventions, oddly enough, since someone suggested it as a joke early into the centuries-long transit since Mithras was "born from a rock" but it stuck and took on a life of its own.

 

[Born in the USSA]

*I finally figured out how to make my Gargoyles idea work after digging into enough abandoned OTL concepts for the series! Strap in for a Disney superhero universe that doesn't actually have any superheroes in it!*


In the nineties Michael Eisner of the Walt Disney Company became fixated on the idea of acquiring an expanded universe property. OTL he would try and fail to acquire Marvel Comics, but here Marvel's ability to buy up DC Comics a decade earlier would stabilize its fortunes and put the newly-rebranded Ultra Comics far out of Eisner's reach. His grand plans for the company would not be in vain, however, and he would be able to finally snatch victory from the jaws of defeat with the creation of the Gargoyles expanded universe which would, through the creation of spinoff series and movies that never saw the light of day here, prove to be exactly what the Disney juggernaut had been looking for.

As it was here, the cornerstone of the new property would be the wildly popular Gargoyles animated series, which would still premiere in 1994 with relatively minor initial differences. The human lead would retain her original first name Morgan, for example, in a deliberate bid for "Morgan Maza" to evoke similarly alliterative comic book naming conventions. The core of the series would be familiar to our readers, with the Manhattan Clan of time-displaced gargoyles partnering with a Detective Maza to defend Manhattan and introducing aspects and characters like the Third Race, Xanatos and the Quarrymen that would become central facets of the shared universe going forward under the stewardship of series creator Greg Weisman.

The series would avoid the repeated Season 2 hiatuses and poorly conceived third season, instead dividing the former into two seasons of its own* and conceiving a final season we only got in comic form centering on the Illuminati. The original plan was to create a series of spin-off series to continue expanding the world, but changes in the media landscape would instead drive a hybrid approach, with a combination of ongoing (The New Olympians, Gargoyles: 2198) and limited (The Phoenix Gate) series released concurrently with animated movies and comic series set in the Gargoyles universe. Despite the aggressive expansion of the franchise it was originally self contained, with properties either rooted in the capstone series or in a spinoff that was, but that would change with the Atlantis franchise.

Starring Eric Stoltz and initially released in 2001 to compete with the respectable success of Dreamworks Animation's Road to El Dorado and its sequels, Atlantis: The Lost Empire would have a longer runtime justified by the enduring popularity of the Indiana Jones franchise to properly accommodate sadly discarded creature encounters between the sinking of the submarine and actual arrival at the city, with lava whales, airborne cephalopods and other memorable designs developed by Mike Mignola. Successful enough to earn a sequel, Atlantis: Shards of Chaos revolved around the ancient war between Atlantis and the suitably Lovecraftian Mu and featuring a mercenary army under a surviving and vaguely steampunk** Helga Sinclair attempting to destroy Atlantis. The final scene would reveal Demona as the reborn Helga's benefactor and her mercenaries as the first iteration of the Quarrymen, firmly tying to two properties together in ways that would be further explored by the Team Atlantis spinoff series. Linking the properties would also help Disney in its plagiarism lawsuit over similarities between The Lost Empire and Nadia: Secret of Blue Water, though the recursively expanded lore of the Illuminati and Quarrymen drew parallels with the latter's Neo-Atlantis.

Originally unnamed but colloquially known as the Gargoyles Expanded Universe, the "classic era" of the Disney Connected Universe would stretch from the 1994 premiere of Gargoyles to the 2004 release of Gargoyles: The Bad Guys, though the franchise would continue in comic form after that interval and Weisman would spearhead a soft reboot/expansion of the franchise told through television in 2010. Persistent attempts to revive the DCU on the big screen screen would be optioned over the years, though the recent announcement of a Gargoyles film helmed by Jordan Peele and a live-action Atlantis television series under Guillermo del Toro has led to excited fan speculation that Disney might finally be getting into the live action cinematic universe game.


*Season 3 roughly corresponded to the World Tour arc of the original series, but with more recurring core characters and a bit less filler.

**Shards of Chaos was actually proposed and the cyborg Helga thing was part of it. I pulled the Lovecraft stuff from the Kraken in the otherwise forgettable sequel as a reflection of the higher impact of the Cthulhu Mythos in popular media TTL. There was also a plan to cross Atlantis with Gargoyles and the named spinoffs of that series were actually consider so I'm not just pulling this whole thing out of my ass 😂

 

[Born in the USSA]

Yes I know I said Space Race was next but work has been busy and I haven't had the energy to do it 😅 In the meantime I did a deep dive on Avatar lore (the cartoon one) for a random idea so here's a short something on that. Disney rolled out Gargoyles to respond to Ultra Comics, so here's Nickelodeon's response to Disney. I won't put it in paragraph format but aside from some general changes in plotting based on what the creators have said could've been but the title should make it clear what the major divergence was for the franchise.

The Last Airbender (2005-2009)

• Some character designs and characterizations are slightly different.
• It gets more serious earlier on: the Kyoshi Island episode in Season 1 ends with the village burning to the ground while the group leads Zuko away and Azula's first real scene in Season 2 involves her incinerating an underling.
• With no live action movie it gets the planned fourth season, called Harmony (or something), and involves postwar reconciliation and the Ursa search/Azula redemption they ended up expanding and putting in the comics.

The Legend of Korra (2012-2016)

• Asami starts as an Equalist spy as originally planned, cue redemption arc and relationship drama.
• Season 2 has the remnants of the Equalists feature in some role, something apparently cut for time, though I'm torn about having Amon straight up make a return somehow and absorb Korra's uncle's role/plan since the latter doesn't seem like a compelling villain.
• There's a Season 5 basically adapting Turf Wars and Ruins of the Empire.

In the modern day the franchise is basically doing what's in the works OTL, with a live-action series and plans for a set of animated movies.

 

[Born in the USSA]

As mentioned in the last post im considering some tweaks to Canadian political history to both discard the trope that they survive a collapsing US and to foster some cross-border political ties that'll eventually bloom into the North American Union. So, in order:

• 1978 (Nov.)- The general POD for the timeline, with Harvey Milk surviving his OTL assassination.
• 1979 (Jun.)- To strengthen his minority government, Progressive Conservative PM Joe Clark tosses some scraps to the small remnant of the Social Credit Party rather than completely ignore their requests for legitimacy.
• 1979 (Dec.)- The Socreds don't abstain from the vote of no confidence in Clark, still losing support in Quebec for not delivering the goods but maintaining their small conservative Anglo constituency in the prairies.
• 1986 (Aug.)- British Columbia Premier Bill Bennett choses not to resign, so his OTL successor Bill Vander Zalm never gets the opportunity to destroy the Socreds by association with his scandals.
• 1993 (May)- The "Battle for Seattle", a mass protest of a corporatized and gentrifying Columbian Exposition in that city, a focal point of the crystalizing anti-globalization movement and the Manifest Destiny! Party.
• 1994 (Jan.)- President Perot fails in his bid to slow walk the adoption of NAFTA, further inflaming the currents unleashed by the events of the prior summer.
• 1995 (Oct.)- "Yes" wins on the Quebec independence referendum. Tensions mount but don't erupt into state violence, though a decade-long period of "encouraged" demographic sorting begins.

Though they'd never admit it Quebec is fairly middling as an independent country, and they've attempted to compensate by forming trade ties with other Francophone nations and have also bolstered several other ethnocultural secessionist movements* by their example. The Quebec branch of Social Credit has been stone dead since 1979 though thanks to my other changes the Anglo faction is booming after a fashion, having become the defacto separatist party in the prairie and atlantic provinces. More surprising is the strain of the movement that simmers in Quebec's northern reaches, chafing under the Fracophone yoke and hoping to secede to either rejoin Canada or form the center of a new indigenous polity alongside Greenland and the Northwest Territories. Quebec has no participation with Manifest Destiny!, though the three strains of Socreds are observers at the very least despite occasionally conflicting goals among themselves.

Some minor notes on Mexico, since I don't want them to be left out— the Labor Party (1990) and Ecologist Green Party of Mexico (1993) undergo a fusion, basically becoming Mexico's equivalent of the Citizens Party and butterflying several later parties with similar areas of concern. There's unfortunately also a pretty robust Kaczynskian Regressive scene in the country along with cartel problems and a steadily festering Synarchist reaction to all three.

*Mostly regionalist ones in the US but also Catalonia, Khalistan and others abroad. Some say the creation of Kurdistan had a greater impact on these sorts of splittist tendencies but it's a matter of debate.

 

[Born in the USSA]

While the precise end of the First Space Race is a matter of some scholarly debate, it was undeniably dead by the time Haig got into office. With the increasingly fractious international situation and a worsening global economy the superpowers simply lacked the resources and popular and political will necessary for thriving space programs. An ironic consequence of this was that the only nation actively pursuing new space-based projects during the late eighties was Iraq, though development of the nation's Project Babylon supergun system would come to a screeching halt with the capture of program architect Gerald Bull in the First Levant War. While the Perot Administration would pursue development of the International Space Station*, and with it the revitalization of the sorely-neglected space shuttle program, attention and investment would still flag, and it would be another generation before great power competition once again pushed beyond the atmosphere.

The start of the Second Space Race is commonly dated to circa 2018, a consensus made somewhat easier by a confluence of factors— aside from a global recovery from the economic crash a decade earlier, the period also saw the creation of the Space Corps under Buchanan and the fracturing of the shared purpose in space that had temporarily united the interests of the US, PEC and ROC. Each began pulling in different directions, announcing grand plans for space stations and probes that would be purely national concerns. Not to be outdone the USSR would announce its own competing projects, with the transorbital landscape only growing more crowded with the rise of an ecosystem of private companies eager to get in on the ground floor of the greatest gold rush in history.

The Second Space Race would continue on and off for the next fifty years, leaving a decidedly mixed legacy in its wake. While great strides were made in autonomous probes, for example, the dream of self-sufficient colonies on Luna and Mars, or of deep resource extraction from the Belt, would be undercut by shifts in national priorities, interruptions in funding, and several spectacular disasters, all as terrestrial resource scarcity drew focus frequently back to fighting wars the old fashioned way. There was a smattering of bases offworld, of course, but nothing that could remotely justify the hype or the money spent. The final nail in the coffin would prove to be the Hyperborean Wars, a set of conflicts over the now ice-free Arctic Circle kicked off by the massive destabilization of trade and vital resources caused by the Antarctic Revolution.

The Third Space Race began with the ARC acquisition of Easter Island, followed by the transition of the newly renamed island of Protonga into the nation's premier launch site. This was an inevitability born out of consistent ideological commitment to space-based expansion. The initial wave of Northern shock and horror was quickly replaced by a renewed commitment to the various space programs, if only to beat the Cosmintern to the punch, but the gradual expansion of the latter throughout the global south, combined with Cosmicist work on space elevators and lingering fractures and hostility within and between the Arctic Council members, would prove severely limiting to the Nihilist Powers.

In the narrative present the ARC and broader Cosmintern are devoted to three particular goals which will likely only accelerate with the predicted victory of the Maximalists going into the next Constitutional Convention:

1. The threat of a Kessler cascade has been growing exponentially since our own time, with a sustained effort to clear the translunar space of debris before the sheer density of hazards makes sustained space operations impossible one of the few shared global priorities.
2. The Porphyrios class is a derivative of the old Orion drive concept, exemplified by the currently under-construction ARCH** Ultimatum. Meant to secure an effective and efficient vehicle for extraplanetary colonization and to protect drone convoys towing resources sunward, the fact that several such craft would give essentially unchallengeable orbital supremacy in the event of a global war is a nice bonus.
3. Although several colonies are being constructed on Luna and Mars to better contain the Nihilist efforts on those bodies, the true prize for the Cosmintern Standing Committee on Nondominioms is Venus. Quite aside from the fact that the gravity is closer to standard, you can get water without towing in ice and that the most tolerant atmospheric band for aerostats is rich in oxygen, there's also the matter that it has a similar day/night/year cycle to Antarctica anyway, so it won't be much of a shock to the first pioneers. Once the Porphyrios are built plans are underway to construct an electromagnetic shield at the Cytherean L1 Lagrange point and work from there.

As with practically everything else the Cosmicists do there's already been a lot of theoretical work done on how the culture of the liberated precariat can be adapted*** to these new worlds to complement the fanatical drive of the materials scientists and engineers making the projects viable. Only time will tell if these grand plans will prove successful, or whether the Nihilist death drive will spark a war and once again cause the incipient Space Age to crash and burn.


*With the Second Republic of China taking Russia's OTL spot at the table.

**"Antarctic Revolutionary Commonwealths Host", since calling your space fleet a navy is lazy.

***One fun aside I found— given the length of Cytherean sol (243 days) and year (225 days), the time when your birthday (for lack of a better word) lines up exactly with the time of sol you were born would be roughly 16.63 Earth years, so it's not hard to imagine that a sweet sixteen on Venus would be an incredibly important cultural milestone for the future colonists. They also have planned names for the continents if the planet is successfully terraformed generations down the line!

 

[Born in the USSA]

Despite its very high level of tensions and proxy wars the 21st century wasn't considered a Cold War as such, but rather a return to earlier models of multipolar Great Power rivalry, albeit with much higher stakes. The rise of the ARC and Cosmintern had a nice crystallizing effect on things, hence the Second Cold War label for the current conflict. As such, here are some handy notes to sketch things out:

1. Despite the extremely aggressive space policy, the Cosmintern and the nascent Maximalist wave are not trying to spark a war, they just have spooky vibes. The human and environmental cost would be too high, so their current policy is aimed at moving quickly to secure an unassailable high ground, under the theory that the Arctic Council could be gradually reformed through economic means and eventually peacefully brought into the fold. Assuming they don't freak out and hit the button, of course.
2. I'm considering moving some of the nonaligned nations into the Cosmicist camp early, since life at the tropics sucks really badly in the future and the Cosmintern is the only side offering a genuinely optimistic mass political program*. The Monrovia Pact (western Africa) and America Unida are the prime candidates, though the rapprochement with the Regressives in the big green swath across the MENA is still happening during the narrative present.
3. Despite the fact that half the map looks like a wine stain and the rest is all blobby, the United Nations does still exist, though the fact that India and Brazil were elevated to permanent Security Council status to bribe them into helping contain the ARC blew up in the SC's faces when they had their own revolutions but managed to keep their seats. As you can imagine even less of consequence gets done**, though ironically the General Assembly is more representative than it is now, since aside from the fact that the member states of the various federations*** (and the various Regional Commonwealths) still have seats several indigenous groups and (more regrettably) corporations have seats too. The Cosmintern has subtly reinforced this trend (except for the corprocracy bit) since it'll make the conversion of these defacto subnational pseudostates into Regional Commonwealths easier down the line once the UN is abolished.
4. Completely unintentional on my part but since turns out the Arctic Council was rooted in the Arctic Environmental Protection Strategy of 1991 both sides of this Cold War have an origin point in the same year 😂 Anyway, despite how fractious they are when not presenting a united front at the UN****, the Nihilist powers do at least make some effort to work together to contain "Cosmicist aggression", mainly mediated through the Arctic Treaty Organization, a NATO successor created after the Hyperborean Wars to help "limit conflict", ie prevent non-Council members from getting any of the goodies. Members rely on cloak and dagger to jockey amongst themselves these days. It's not that crazy, both the USSR and the Russian Federation tried to join NATO OTL, and with the decline in (North) American power and their split with Europe they couldn't exactly say no this time.

*And yes, the ARC is fully aware that actually correcting the climate catastrophe of the Cthulhucene will make their continent much harsher, but they're committed to their principles, confident in the ability of their society and ecology to adapt gradually and fully planning to have a significant segment of their population involved in the space colonies by that point.

**Except on areas of genuine common ground, at this point mainly the aforementioned space debris and unaffiliated pirates/terrorists.

***Many of which contain more members even factoring in their larger size, given a trend of balkanization afrikaanization within 20th century founding states without the component pieces actually leaving the broader alliances. Catalonia is an easy example in the PEC.

****Since together they hold four of the six permanent Security Council seats.

 

[Born in the USSA]

The release of the X-Men '97 trailer inspired me to do this little number 😂

While the 1985 Marvel acquisition of DC was relatively clean from a business standpoint, a simple buyout followed by a rebrand, actually reconciling the properties involved would prove a more daunting task. Even having the Crisis on Infinite Earths and Secret Wars events lead into the 1986 Amalgam event and then decohere into separate characters operating in a single world, getting everyone where they needed to be, so to speak, there was still the matter of reconciling two vast and often convoluted settings and character stables. Aside from fan and writer jurisdictional questions about SHIELD, the Avengers and the Justice League, there was also the particular standout that Mongul was inspired by Thanos who was in turn inspired by Darkseid, with all three now coexisting!

Several Ultra writers would spend the following decade attempting to stitch everything together, but it was the streamlining of this drawn out process through the Ultra Animated Universe that would really help stick the landing during Ultra Comics' brief time as the hyperpower of the comics world, introducing the new canon in a digestible way to new generations of potential readers. Running for over a decade, the UAU consisted of a series of animated shows linked through crossovers and overarching plot elements. In release order, they were:

• Batman: The Animated Series (1992-95)
• X-Men: The Animated Series (1992-97)
• Spider-Man: The Animated Series (1994-1999)
• Superman: The Animated Series (1997-2000)
• Ultra 2099 (1999-2000)
• Static Shock (2000-04)
• Justice League (2001-03)
• Avengers Assemble (2004-05)

By tying DC's Project Cadmus to Mister Sinister, Ultra writers and the UAU were able to gradually create a throughline for the universe*, linking the experiments to create Superboy and Galatea** to the Clone Saga unfolding concurrently in the Spider-Man properties and tying the group to the experiments or "accidents" that empowered Captain America and Static among others*** and responsible for the adamantium bonded to Wolverine's bones. Seemingly unconnected events in the earlier animated series were gradually revealed to relate to Cadmus in a years-long mytharc, culminating in a sort of "twilight of the superheroes" bringing the disparate plot threads together in Avengers Assemble.

The UAU would also introduce the definitive Teen Titans roster for the Millennial generation, made up of power couple Superboy and Jubilee along with Static, Iron Lad, Robin and Starfire, with Spider-Man acting as a mentor to the younger generation. The team would prove the centerpiece of a reboot of the setting in the form of the 2010 Teen Titans series, sharing the expansive world of the Ultra Comics universe with a new generation of fans and priming the pump for a long-delayed live-action Ultra Cinematic Universe to reboot all the one and done films of the preceding two decades and better compete with the Image box office behemoth on the silver screen.


*Basically take Weapon Plus on steroids and have Sinister as the man behind the man.

**Yes I'm keeping both, Galatea was cool. Also Superboy's telekinesis is the result of adding an X-gene, so he's a Kryptonian-mutant hybrid clone. Since Sinister sampled it from Jean Grey he fills the role of Nate Grey in the broader Ultra universe, more or less, though he's ironically not nearly so OP.

***I despise recent Sinister clone Doctor Stasis, but the backstory that he's at least indirectly related to Weapon Plus, the gamma experiments that made the Hulk and the spider that bit Peter Parker is functionally transferred to Sinister here. All told Cadmus has a hand in a lot of hero and villain origin stories.

 

[Born in the USSA]

Have a random thing that struck my fancy!

Have an "ethnicity" (technically a clade) for the Separate Spheres media franchise in my Power Without Knowledge TL. Despite the fact that it's fiction in-universe it's still aspirational, so there are political/social factions actually trying to manifest it into lived reality, hence why I'm counting it as relevant here.

Name: Homo ludens (scientific), "humanity" (colloquial)
Language: Gestaltisch (lingua franca), High Human (administrative)*, too various to count
Religion: Too various to count.
Ancestry: Homo sapiens sapiens (primary), various posthuman hominids, various near human hominids (genetically reconstructed), cetaceans, primates, cephalopods, avians, non-terragen species, other.
History: In accordance with the historical process of Geist first outlined in The Cosmicist Manifesto, "old" humanity (Homo sapiens sapiens) began spreading beyond the bonds of the cradle world as the Cosmicist International transitioned from the Zeitgeist revolutionary stage to the Weltgeist stage of global government and nearspace colonization. The transition to the Gestaltgeist stage came with the technical achievement of the first of the generation ships and the social transformation into the Grand Nation of the Human Gestalt**. The discovery of FTL travel eventually enabled the true realization of the GNHG through the reconnection of colonies, an expansion of the terraforming frontier, and the eventual uplift and incorporation of truly alien species.

*Gestaltich is the eventual culmination of Antarctic Standard English attempting to absorb rules and loanwords from an interstellar diaspora (and several species without conventional vocal cords). Needless to say it's an obscene mess for any normal diaspora citizen to try and learn but to move up the ranks they manage somehow. High Human is a variant of Ithkuil used either by the posthuman enforcers of the GNHG or by the historians or monument builders recording human history for future aliens to appreciate post-collapse.

**Take the Cosmicist International of my TL and add a layer, with each fully incorporated solar system selecting a representative council that (combined with the others) forms the main legislative body of the GNHG (enabled by some form of FTL communication and under the guidance of an AI actively shaped by the human communications infrastructure). The symbol of the GNHG is a sigil with the N and H combined and one of the G's rotated to create an overall rotated symmetry, all contained within a Struggle symbol.

More language facts: Gestaltisch (and to a lesser extent High Human) is actually one of the end goals of the Maximalist Fraction, expanding on the relatively limited Xenofemenist Fraction's goals to add extra genders to ACE and the Novuteran Fraction's weird obsession with þ. Aside from having thirty-something letters and a veritable rainbow of grammatical genders, Gestaltisch in its ideal form would also have two distinct methods of writing: first would be a standard latin-derived phonetic alphabet and second a sigil-based logographic writing system fostered by the increased efficiency of inputting it aided by computer programs. The latter would be incredibly difficult to actually create but it's slightly streamlined by a standardized set of rules regarding how words are transformed into logograms, including not only limits on how letters can be reshaped and what positions they can have in the final design of a given word but also such standard practice as the uniform removal of vowels from the words in question before transition.

 

[Born in the USSA]

I'm threadmarking this one so I actually remember to do them all but I wanted to consolidate a few disparate lists of ideas for posts so I don't let any fall through the cracks:

• The Regressive impact on ecofiction
• Random oneshot media ideas
• 2016 election
• Martha Washington
• Anton and Hob/satanic panic, I'll probably link this one to an homage to the style popular in the Cosmintern called Huxley and Blair
• Ultima Antarctica Press/the evolution of the ARC publishing ecosystem from underground revolutionary publishers to established institutions
• Something on the 2018 midterms and the start of the Shatter
• More flags
• Updated ARC/world maps
• The Basic Law (when I finally get around to finishing the damned thing)
• A rundown of Sutter's pulpy novels

I'll update as new things occur to me since life has taken a downward turn and I can't be expected to remember every stray thought popping into my head in this troubling time 😅

 

[Born in the USSA]

Here's something that I thought of today, it'll be the preface of the Basic Law appendix to Oubliette:

A (Brief) History of the Basic Law​

It is impossible to fully understand the lived reality of the Antarctic state without first parsing the history of the Basic Law. Given a lack of any form of preceding participatory government at any real level it is not an exaggeration to say that it forms the foundation of the first successful Cosmicist experiment, and that everything else has sprung from it in response to evolving conditions both within and beyond the new polity. Unlike the old Constitution of the United States which originally inspired it changes to the text are actively edited in with the cyclical turning of the ARC constitutional conventions, so, to those outside the academic fields of constitutional theory, it is valuable to demonstrate the course that the document has taken as we approach the fourth such turning of the wheel of Zeitgeist manifestation.

In its first iteration the Basic Law was only one foundational document among many. Part of the Natural Laws (12103) promulgated by the I Convention that would form the legal framework of the post-Consolidation government, the I Basic Law was composed of what we would now recognize as the Preamble and Articles Two, Three, Four, governing the nature of the Continental Congress, Executive Quorum, and Bicameral Judiciary, respectively. Here we see an influence from the United States Constitution, perhaps unsurprising given the roots of Antarctic Cosmicism in the transported American exiles, though the enshrining of the concept of vanguard pluralism and the party-state that would eventually become Article Five was a new innovation on that model.

In the original conception the Natural Laws would remain intertwined but ultimately distinct, referencing and reinforcing one another while theoretically remaining flexible enough to change with social and geopolitical realities in the fullness of time. At this stage several of the later Articles were already present in more or less their current forms, such as the Declaration of the Rights of Personhood and of the Citizen (later Article One), the Organic Acts (later divided into Articles Six and Nine), the Foundation of a Social Ecology (later Article Seven) and the Principles of a Popular Economy (later Article 8). The eventual Article Ten existed, in a simpler form, as a general legal framework for the amendment of the Natural Laws, though it was not itself counted among them.


While this decentralized arrangement was considered sufficient in the heady days that immediately followed the Antarctic Revolutions, the continuous pressures of Nihilist containment would demonstrate the need for consolidation and a streamlining of the constitutional order. Pressure gradually built among the Antarctic social base, reaching a fever pitch as the expiration of the I Basic Law approached and revolution at last began to spread among the precarian peoples of the global south, truly ushering in the long-promised transition from Volksgeist to Zeitgeist on the international stage. The II Convention took up the cause with gusto, expanding several of the Natural Laws even as it combined them with the original Basic Law, among other changes expanding the framework of the party-state into its own Article of the II Basic Law (12133) and adding to it the legal framework of the newly expanded Cosmicist International as a sign of global precarian solidarity.


The II Basic Law was the first iteration of the document to be truly recognizable to modern observers, the first to contain all ten of the Articles with which you are undoubtedly familiar. Compared to the churn of the prior Constitutional cycle the III Convention made relatively few changes in the creation of the III Basic Law (12163), primarily clarifications of language and the removal of previously unforeseen constitutional loopholes. In comparison, the upcoming IV Convention appears to many to be a more contentious affair, with dissatisfied elements of the base united under the young Maximalist Fraction and publicly disparaging the even hand of the III Convention as symptomatic of a lack of resolve* in the face of continued Nihilist exploitation and obstinacy to the north. Opining on the nature of the nascent IV Basic Law (12193) is an exercise for future historians, though I am certain that the Antarctic experiment, as vanguard of the global precarian revolution, is strong enough to weather whatever is ahead.

To follow is to yield


*In layman's terms the III Convention favored containment, while the Maximalists are much more animated by rollback. It's understandable for both of them, since from the perspective of the former they were still operating on the belated assumption that the revolutionary wave would continue north and eventually drown the Arctic Council and the latter are far more bellicose having grown up in a world where the fronts of the Second Cold War have long stabilized and the kyriarchy and its chain dogs continue to squeeze every drop they can from their oppressed precariat.

 

[Born in the USSA]

This was originally going to be my centralized post of random media/cultural ideas that couldn't carry an individual update but the first one I picked turned out to be meatier than I expected so here's this instead— in my defense I was able to fold in a few of my one-off ideas at the margins 😅


Although the point of divergence for the Era of Bad Feelings was in the relatively recent past, within a decade events had drastically shifted, with the assassination of Reagan barely six years on from the origin kicking everything into a higher gear, unleashing a butterfly swarm of radical political change and resulting cultural tumult that would produce the warped geopolitical and media landscape that characterizes life in the 2020s. One of the most impactful of these changes was Ridley Scott's helming of the Dune Chronicles, which quickly became a runaway hit and would contribute to a much sooner public embrace of his earlier Blade Runner. Eager to capitalize on the newly lucrative property, Warner Bros. immediately set out to create a sequel as quickly as possible, though noticeably without either Harrison Ford or Ridley Scott himself.

The end result of this mad rush would be 1987's Total Recall, directed by David Cronenberg and starring Patrick Swayze*. Still set on Mars in 2084 and with a broadly similar plot to the version we know, it is still important to acknowledge the changes made to work the concept into a proper sequel. Intended to more fully explore the Offworld Colonies mentioned in the original film, the oppressed mutant population on Mars are in fact replicants, modified after their creation to live longer at the cost of the physical mutations originally promised to Roy Batty by Dr. Tyrell.

Cronenberg had a noticeable design impact on the physical nature of the mutants, from the four-breasted stripper** to more unsettling offerings like Quato. The tone of the film was more meditative and less satirical than the Verhoeven version, focusing far more on the nature of memory, identity and economic and social exploitation, and Dan O'Bannon was able to fight for his preferred ending, where the handprint in the finale is an exact match for Quaid, inducing "Total Recall" and revealing to him that he is not Hauser, but rather that Hauser had died attempting to infiltrate the reactor and been replaced by a Martian simulacrum whose ability to survive the attempts on his life was a subconscious form of precognition.

Popular upon its release, plans were set into motion to create a sequel starring Swayze and based on a third unrelated Philip K. Dick property, though his remarkably full calendar at the time caused these plans to eventually fall through. In the original conception the sequel would be an immediate continuation, showing the drastic measures taken on Earth to prevent the spread of the awakened Quaid's replicant revolution. Eventually retooling the project into an interquel to better bridge the gap between the 2019 of Blade Runner and the 2084 of Total Recall, 1997's Minority Report was set on Earth in 2054 and still starred Tom Cruise.

Set in an artificially domed and climate-controlled Washington, D.C., surveillance technology is ever-present, constantly scanning eyes to automate the hunt for replicants, while the arc of the film explores Precrime, a future system of law enforcement to preemptively arrest criminals. Falsely accused by the system of future murder, Cruise's character Anderton exposes a closely guarded secrets that there is both a margin for error in precognitive vision*** and that careful exploitation of the precrime system can allow for a murder to still go undetected. Plans for a fourth installment set after Total Recall are currently in development hell, though 1999 would see the release of a television tie in to the series in the form of Blade Runner 2070, starring Colin Farrell.

Given the implications of the Replicant Trilogy on the broader media landscape have a "Where Were They Then" montage!

• While Schwarzenegger had long been interested in the Total Recall script, the scheduling conflicted with his starring role in Robocop the same year. He cited Stallone's performance in 1984's Terminator as an influence.
• 1990 would still see a Paul Verhoeven sci-fi film on another celestial body in the form of his adaptation of The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. It would later be implied in Starship Troopers that the fascistic Earth government was a direct response to the brief success of the Lunar Revolution.
• The metafictional Blade Runner 2049 parallel would eventual manifest in the form of Demolition Man 2, released in 2018.

*Both attached to the OTL project at different stages.

**Her original design, discarded because it was considered unsettlingly bovine by the executives. Here she gets off light compared to most mutants.

***In humans, explaining away why Quaid's awakened perception is implied to be flawless in Total Recall. Many reviewers have noticed parallels to Dune, noting how weirdly specific it is that Warner Bros. two science fiction franchises of the period were adapted from the works of bearded midcentury science fiction authors with an interest in mind-altering substances, both of whom were born in the 20s and died in the 80s, and revolved around people who could see the future.

 

[Born in the USSA]

Was thinking about the eventual 2016 election today while out running errands and I figured I'd lay out a couple of subcultural symbols (besides the previously mentioned Weathermen logo) for relevant groups that don't quite rank up to being flags on their own. I've got to clean up a lot of clutter on my computer to get it working properly but hopefully once that's done I'll be able to make more flags, I know @Laserfish was wondering!

• First off we start with the nonheteronormative community! Since the survival of Harvey Milk butterflies the creation of the Pride flag the community uses the pink triangle as a universal symbol. Also, in keeping with the original non-denominational intent of the Pride flag OTL I'm just accelerating the reclamation of the term "queer" that some in the community are advocating now, both because the initialism separates people into singular tranches and because I personally feel it defeats the point and is becoming unwieldily as it gets longer without actually spelling anything.
• While the POW/MIA flag precedes the POD by about six years I'm having a new streamlined version made co-official by Haig, so it's flown at government buildings from about 1990 on. The new version is black, with a ring of barbed wire* in white and the words "YOU ARE NOT FORGOTTEN" underneath. Given how militarized the government has become the design and the slogan have taken on a very sinister cast. It's firmly a rightwing symbol now, embraced by the "operator" culture birthed by the War on Terror and by the Myrmidons (along with the sovereign citizen/Z-Thought flag** that ironically has rainbow stripes).
• Fitting an egoist movement the Grinders don't use a central symbol. The generally prefer either the Subversive Party frog or things like gears, pistons and circuits blended with DNA imagery.
• The Double-V racial justice movement is appropriating the double peace sign
• The Green Knights and Left Regressives use what we recognize as the Extinction Rebellion hourglass.

*Basically that crown of thorns from the KR Savinkov flag.

**A black and white sovereign citizen flag where each white stripe is filled in with a color to represent a different tranche of service member.