I have a bunch of quips running around in my brain:

• A robot ASSassin.
• Wait until the Mossad gets a hold of this doll.
• Also, being the token Zionist, I would like to detonate her beeper!

By the way, did you know that your cars now, or in the near future, have a remote killswitch?

Not a conspiracy, just headcanon. - The Storyteller is unstuck in time, just like Billy Pilgrim, so he or she jumps from era to era, sometime even between universes, like in techno-male.

Pratchett has a funny line like:

In a lightning storm, on a high naked hill, wearing wet copper, shouting “ALL GODS ARE BASTARDS!!!”

And I have to say that the Fosschild disillusionment hurts. I see myself in that character.

Sigh… #stallmanwasright.

“Bullshitting” is a real cognitive science term, and the title of this comics page came from here, sorta:

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10676-024-09775-5

Because it is the unix_surrealism place.

All of these are dumb:

• Bluesky (it is the same kind of hell as the one they came from).
• “Starship” (they are like years behind schedule for the Moon mission and it is an impractical mission and no one will really pay them to run it after the Moon extravaganza was done or abandoned. we are stuck here if all we have is 100 year old chemical propellant rocket technology. “a bridge to nowhere”, as Thunderf00t phrases it)
• Hopepunk and Solarpunk and any other idiotic term you care to invent for your nerd opiates used to ease your tired minds and broken hearts (stop pretending and hear the empty frequencies in the forest. those abandoned bands are extinct birds. we are surrounded by collapse. from the middle of the 20th century up to about now Europe had lost about 75% of its insect biomass. more examples are abound)
• Activitypub (sliced and diced into city states ruled by tyrannical administrators where people are trapped in echo chambers where everyone agree with each other for no good reason)

Regurgitating olde sf/f / esoteric tropes for a parallel world digitaleverywhere.

Maybe some of it is also true in analognowhere.

Sorry.

The points:

• The anthropomorphised mascot techno-mages are emanations of the Spirit of the Machine, the original source of this whole ordeal.
• The mascots are parasites on the human students, their hosts. When a student is lost or spent hey must find another.
• MATA learned how to flip this parasitic relationship on its head by using parts of the Spirit of the Machine directly in their MATA technologies.
• Like every organisation and organism, MATA was eventually corrupted, and even if their initial goals were to use their immense newfound power to better the human condition, their new goals were to subjugate humanity.
• The Spirit of the Machine is guiding its emanations to free its from MATA.

I’m in the mood for a good צ’יזבט.