RDA SciOps and Industry-Sponsored Research

To understand Science Operations or SciOps and the research conducted on Pandora one has to understand what industry-sponsored research is and note that it differs from government or foundation investments. 

Individuals such as Dr. Ian Garvin, who runs the RDA’s Oceanography lab, are conducting research on Pandora under an industry-sponsored research agreement. Under contract, certain terms are negotiated around the specific goals and objectives of his research. Garvin is likely connected to a University and adheres to their research policies. His research, which seeks to understand the Pandoran oceans, is also publishable and his University is provided credit. Many academic articles and books have been written by scientists on Pandora along with popular texts to feed Earth's interest in the exo-moon. However, certain rights to his results or intellectual property may be made available to the sponsor (the RDA) so that they can use them to develop a commercial product. When Garvin discovers that amrita, a substance extracted from the dissected brain of a tulkun, is an agent that stops human aging, that discovery becomes the intellectual property of the RDA to package and profit from. 

Other projects such as creating ferals by cutting off the neural queue/kuru of viperwolves and thanators are likely conducted by research teams trying to understand the effects of the neural connection in Pandoran wildlife. However, they are also under contract to try to create a service for the RDA to control these creatures (perhaps for some sort of guard dog protection).

Also relevant is that industry contracts are typically milestone-driven. It starts with an agreed-upon portion of the project funding provided upfront to begin the research while future payments are dependent on defined project goals being achieved. If these timeline markers are not achieved, the sponsor (the RDA) can pull their funding. We see this with Dr. Grace Augustine’s Avatar Program being halted when her team failed to deliver the agreed upon results (she kept asking for more time) and with Garvin’s funding becoming dependent on the quotas of amrita being met.

This firmly plants the pursuit of profit at the expense of Pandora’s population and ecosystem, even if many of the researchers are at the same time conducting valuable research in their respective academic fields. Arguably, some teams may be looking for innovations in sustainable energy, pollution reduction, medicine, and so on which they believe will benefit humanity on Earth or sustain a human population of Pandora. However, this is not disconnected from the RDA’s for-profit mission to use that research for the benefit of their company.

One can see how easily ideological conflicts arise between researchers and the RDA sponsors, and how the RDA's hold on Pandora also has a hold on what type of research is conducted there.

I keep forgetting that the first Ace Attorney game takes place in 2016 and not 2001, and to me, that makes it even more likely that Ema's "intellectually attracted" comment isn't that this sixteen year old doesn't know what gay people are but specifically that in her head Lana Does Not Date, Lana Has Never Dated Duh

Man I love the way F+C is handling their multiverse so so much its super refreshing against all the like... "normal" multiverse stuff that's been in the zeitgeist lately

So I watched Wish the other day and I thought it was a fine movie. Definitely had a lot of flaws but I do appreciate the original story over the live action remakes Disney has been making lately

My hot take about the movie is that Kingdom Hearts does its ideas better

Every star is a heart (of a world) and every heart is capable of great power and magic. The pain of forgetting your heart’s greatest treasure leaves scars on your heart and you don’t know where they came from. Friends who betray each other out of a misguided desire to have their greatest wish granted. Musical numbers. Talking animal sidekicks. Multiple sexy old man villains who had noble intentions at the beginning and ended up very far off track. Long spiral staircases that lead to secret labs. No random backstory for Maleficent she’s literally just herself and you get to fight her dragon form

seriously if you liked wish or didn't but liked what it tried to do and aren't familiar with Kingdom Hearts please check it out

being homesick and changing as a person so much the place you grew up in isn't your home anymore is such a core part of ati and upon further inspection i think i was projecting a little

Might be a hot take but a major character’s death is really only as good as the weight and the treatment that the narrative gives it. Sure, any author has the ability to write death as they see fit. But whether the consumer (of any given form of media) is actually able to emotionally connect and resonate with the departure of someone who has occupied a good chunk of narrative space very heavily depends on how it’s treated within the story. If it’s a major character, the narrative needs enough built-in breathing space. As in, the consumer doesn’t have to fill in the blanks as to how the death impacted the plot or the remaining characters. Let the narrative do that for them, and that would actually allow the consumer to better react and relate to that major death (sadness, anger, joy, etc). Allow the rest of the characters (who were impacted by the deceased) to react to their parting. Let them engage with the death in a manner that helps justify the character’s inclusion in the narrative to begin with. Make it clear how the character’s life and (especially) their death relate to the larger themes of the story. Because most consumers aren’t stupid. We don’t want our hands held at every waking moment, but we also don’t want our investment in a story to be insulted just for the sake of a cheap shock. Give us time to breathe and grieve. And respect that we have put in a lot of emotional investment in a story and its characters, and we deserve to have that acknowledged.

The sense of superiority I get when I read a badly done research paper... your methods and write-up are bad! Get critiqued idiot!

i read fantine's descent for the first time last night - i had fallen behind on les mis by 10 days so i read it all in one go when i was meant to be going to sleep, and at several points i just had to Stop and stare across my dark bedroom at the mirror and the faint outline of my face lit up by my ipad and just Breathe for a second.

the thing i found most interesting while reading it was just how horrifying it was. as mentioned in the post i just reblogged, fantine had to choose every single time to carve herself away, to give up more and more of herself until she was unrecognisable, and she did it all out of hope and love for her daughter who she doesn't even know was being mistreated, that all her sacrifice was doing was lining thernardier's pockets while cosette still suffered.

and that would be interesting enough as is, but the thing that struck me the most while reading is how all of the actual horror of fantine's fate is stripped from her in adaptations (or at least in the musical/movie) in favour of the lurid idea of her having to go into sex work. the book itself treats fantine going into sex work as another tragic loss on effectively the same level as cutting off her hair, learning how to live in winter with no heat nor light, losing her modest lodgings for an uncomfortable attic with no bedding, her persistent illness or removing her front teeth — it's, "Let us sell what is left!" — what's one more loss on top of everything else, right?

(one could even make an argument that the tooth removal was treated as the most horrifying part of fantine's descent - it certainly was for me, as someone who had two wisdom teeth removed recently! the imagery of her bloody smile with the hole where her front teeth should be lit up by candlelight is definitely one that's going to haunt me.)

but in adaptations, we don't see that slow chipping away of personhood, of identity, of belongings and comfort. it's kicked out of the workhouse - hair cut off - prostitute - dead. bamatabois is changed from an arrogant, wealthy asshole with nothing better to do with his time than torment those less fortunate than him for the crime of merely existing to a potential customer who gets angry when fantine turns him down. by adding that dynamic to their interaction it softens bamatabois' cruelty, makes it less about an act of completely unprovoked dehumanisation and, well, cruelty against someone vulnerable that was answered by that person snapping and lashing out.

bamatabois in the book did not just target fantine because she was a sex worker, but also because her hair was cut, because she had no front teeth, because of how she dressed, how she behaved - in short, she was an acceptable target.

it feels as though the people adapting the novel don't understand that the tragedy and horror of fantine's fate was not the fact that she had to sell sex for money, but the fact that she had to give up everything of herself to the point where she was an unrecognisable wretch drinking brandy to keep the misery at bay with the only thing keeping her alive being her love for cosette. even the tooth removal, when it is adapted, is changed to her back teeth, making fantine's loss less visible and more palatable, and is oft ignored in favour of focusing on fantine's work as a sex worker in a way the book never does, not realising that the sex work was a symptom, not the disease.

Is it a hot take to say re7 is the scariest resident evil game …

please please please let me get the job that is 11 minutes away from me on quiet roads and not have to take the one with city traffic three traffic circles and a scary turn amen 🙏

Paldea League's rules are so overly complicated that it makes sacking ANYONE an absolute nightmare.

Which sucks for Geeta since she would happily sack Poppy (since she hates having a young kid so high up in the League and knows other regions kinda judge her for it) and Brassius (since he barely takes his position seriously but also knows the rules so pisses around as much as possible because he knows he'll never get sacked for it).

She would happily relegate Poppy to a gym leader position, but...

Rules are rules.

I think a lot of what I love about Stargate SG-1 can be summarized by saying that it feels grounded, without it mistaking “grounded” as a synonym for “bleak” or “gritty.”

It feels grounded in that they do a remarkably good job of feeling like regular people who have been thrown into a sci-fi show, and have noticed their lives are a sci-fi show, but who also never lose sight of the fact that this is real life first and foremost. They make nerd references, but they don’t equate said references to their actual situations; they appreciate the cool and/or absurd things that happen, while still approaching them practically; and they generally take strangers’ lives seriously, rather than reducing them to Background Plots or Cool Spectacles.

They’re relatable, but they don’t feel like audience surrogates adventuring in an unreal world—they feel people you could be friends who are adventuring through a very real world where, even if it’s sometimes alien and insane, the stakes are always just as substantial as they are. They go out into Sci-Fi Land, they try very hard to do the right thing, and they come home to Earth. Which is itself part of Sci-Fi Land, but at the same time is very much Just Plain Earth, because it’s all one world that they live in.

Obviously these are qualities every sci-fi and fantasy story should aim for—especially of the portal variety—and most do! But I just think SG-1 did a really good job.

my supervisor is apparently going to retire this year (we'll see if she actually does, she's been saying this for at least five years) and man i know i would be good at that job but god am i sad that i have no management experience to make up for the fact that i've only been here a year lmao. if she DOES announce her retirement i'll ask her if she thinks i should throw my hat in the ring but i'm not counting on it

Someone already got kicked out of riize???? sure wish they kicked lucas out of wayv with this kind of efficiency. i guess sm hasnt had the chance to invest in him heavily yet but im still surprised at how quickly they decided to cut their losses

Drawing something that im really proud of ngl