he spends months cutting hair and talking shit longest relationship ive ever been forced in. stolkholm syndrome is no joke but neither is havana syndrome both of which i encounter too often. so now that he is playing with radiation i can see him clearly now that he glows i thought it was just becuase he shines bright like a diamond because he is pale nope its definitelty the radiation he glows like a glow worm a radioactive glow worm. seams very cancer*ous just like that shrinking thing u do 🤔 2 negatives equal a positive 🤗 i can see them titties coming in nicely either a local stripper got fukd out of a transfer or the radioactivity really got a hold of u. ur kozyrev room more like klavorkian room being held in there so long. i thought of u as the next jim jones “jonestown” now that “i feel like i know u ” ur more like jenny jones with all the chisme u be doing.

where are all the Russian-speaking fans of Peter Watts’ Firefall???

i made a Telegram space:

Firefall RU: Blindsight | Echopraxia

https://t.me/blindsight_ru

[Russian-speaking community].

We talk Blindsight, Echopraxia, vampires, consciousness… all the crazy stuff. Come if you want memes, fanart, theories, or just someone else to get what’s happening in the books

Blindsight audiobook so good look how beautiful the world

So I’m rereading Blindsight by Peter Watts, and I knew Siri was traumatized by his mother, but this particular passage made me… Well, English is not my native language, so maybe I’m mistaken, but it could look like a whole different kind of abuse.

hands you a boquet of my ocs for (late) valentines. bats my eyelashes at you. do you like them.

+ og format of the last two images

Something about parallels between Keeton and Sarasti…

The seizures.

The way Spinzel is the only one to show a little compassion towards them.

The disconnection from humanity. Just enough not to really understand what it is to be human, just enough to instinctively understand what Scramblers look like and how they behave.

The fact that everybody else projects their perception of them on them, without bothering to know the truth. The fact that only they see the truth about the other, only they see the other totally defenseless: Sarasti when he attacks Siri and Siri when the Captain takes control of Sarasti’s body.

Writing Through the Darkness: Creativity, Mental Health, and Vision Loss (Part 1)

In this emotionally powerful Part 1 episode of Blindsight, Bill Lundgren conducts an interview with Elyse Draper. She is an author, illustrator, and founder of the VI&B Creatives Workshop. Elyse shares her incredible journey from visual artist to writer. The onset of vision loss reshaped her life. It also transformed her family dynamics and identity. Through raw stories of grief, Elyse…

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“We were probably fractured during most of our evolution,” James once told me, back when we were all still getting acquainted. She tapped her temple. “There’s lots of room up here; a modern brain can run dozens of sentient cores without getting too crowded. And parallel multitasking has obvious survival advantages.” […]

“Well, in theory,” James admitted, and changed into Sascha who said, “Bullshit, in theory…Well, it’s not like anyone talks about it now. People were fucking barbarians about multicores back then - called it a disorder, treated it like some kind of disease. And their idea of a cure was to keep one of the cores and murder all the others. Not that they called it murder, of course. They called it integration or some shit. That’s what people did back then: created other people to suck up all the abuse and torture, then got rid of them when they weren’t needed any more.”

It hadn’t been the tone most of us were looking for at an ice-breaking party.

Peter Watts, Blindsight

Imagine you are Amanda Bates.
The control you wield over your troops would give wet dreams and nightmares to generals of ages past. You can drop instantly into the sensorium of anyone under your command, experience the battlefield from any number of first-person perspectives. Your every soldier is loyal unto death, asking no questions, obeying all commands with alacrity and dedication to which mere flesh could never even aspire. You don’t just respect a chain of command: you are one.
You are a little bit scared of your own power. You are a little bit scared of the things you’ve already done with it.

Peter Watts, Blindsight

Imagine you have intellect but no insight, agendas but no awareness.
Your circuitry hums with strategies for survival and persistence, flexible, intelligent, even technological - but no other circuitry monitors it.
You can think of anything, yet are conscious of nothing.

Peter Watts, Blindsight

La Revolución de los “Neuralnautas”: Neuralink alcanza los 21 participantes y apunta a la visión artificial

A dos años del primer implante humano, el panorama de la neurotecnología ha dejado de ser una promesa de ciencia ficción para convertirse en una realidad clínica acelerada. El pasado 28 de enero de 2026, Neuralink confirmó que ya cuenta con 21 participantes (autodenominados Neuralnauts) inscritos en sus ensayos globales, marcando un punto de inflexión en la integración humano-máquina.

View this…

La Revolución de los “Neuralnautas”: Neuralink alcanza los 21 participantes y apunta a la visión artificial

“You invest so much in it, don’t you? It’s what elevates you above the beasts of the field, it’s what makes you special. Homo sapiens, you call yourself. Wise Man. Do you even know what it is, this consciousness you cite in your own exaltation? Do you even know what it’s for?

Maybe you think it gives you free will. Maybe you’ve forgotten that sleepwalkers converse, drive vehicles, commit crimes and clean up afterwards, unconscious the whole time. Maybe nobody’s told you that even waking souls are only slaves in denial.

Make a conscious choice. Decide to move your index finger. Too late! The electricity’s already halfway down your arm. Your body began to act a full half-second before your conscious self ‘chose’ to, for the self chose nothing; something else set your body in motion, sent an executive summary—almost an afterthought—to the homunculus behind your eyes. That little man, that arrogant subroutine that thinks of itself as the person, mistakes correlation for causality: it reads the summary and it sees the hand move, and it thinks that one drove the other.

But it’s not in charge. You’re not in charge. If free will even exists, it doesn’t share living space with the likes of you. Insight, then. Wisdom. The quest for knowledge, the derivation of theorems, science and technology and all those exclusively human pursuits that must surely rest on a conscious foundation. Maybe that’s what sentience would be for— if scientific breakthroughs didn’t spring fully-formed from the subconscious mind, manifest themselves in dreams, as full-blown insights after a deep night’s sleep. It’s the most basic rule of the stymied researcher: stop thinking about the problem. Do something else. It will come to you if you just stop being conscious of it.

Every concert pianist knows that the surest way to ruin a performance is to be aware of what the fingers are doing. Every dancer and acrobat knows enough to let the mind go, let the body run itself. Every driver of any manual vehicle arrives at destinations with no recollection of the stops and turns and roads traveled in getting there. You are all sleepwalkers, whether climbing creative peaks or slogging through some mundane routine for the thousandth time. You are all sleepwalkers.

Don’t even try to talk about the learning curve. Don’t bother citing the months of deliberate practice that precede the unconscious performance, or the years of study and experiment leading up to the gift-wrapped Eureka moment. So what if your lessons are all learned consciously? Do you think that proves there’s no other way? Heuristic software’s been learning from experience for over a hundred years. Machines master chess, cars learn to drive themselves, statistical programs face problems and design the experiments to solve them and you think that the only path to learning leads through sentience? You’re Stone-age nomads, eking out some marginal existence on the veldt—denying even the possibility of agriculture, because hunting and gathering was good enough for your parents.

Do you want to know what consciousness is for? Do you want to know the only real purpose it serves? Training wheels. You can’t see both aspects of the Necker Cube at once, so it lets you focus on one and dismiss the other. That’s a pretty half-assed way to parse reality. You’re always better off looking at more than one side of anything. Go on, try. Defocus. It’s the next logical step. Oh, but you can’t. There’s something in the way.

And it’s fighting back.”

Peter Watts, Blindsight

Darkling Fey: We’ll trade skill sets. I could teach you how to–
Nervous Rogue: –Echolocate!!
Darkling Fey: …I was going to say “regulate your emotions,” but okay.

blindsight made me want to have an offputting vampire coworker and i dont think that was the point …

After re-reading “Blindsight” and all its accompanying stories several times, I suddenly picked up on a few interesting details: just how much Jim truly loved Helen, how much he put up with her, and just how damn much Siri takes after his father! To the same extent that Helen is, fuck, so dense. Just an utterly impenetrable woman! And while Siri chose to avoid his mother for obvious reasons, Jim… He’s an incredibly soft type, even excessively gentle toward Helen. I don’t even know how I missed that before.

I actually feel a little ashamed now that I initially didn’t like him much. I won’t argue that a large part of my attitude toward the Colonel was shaped by that very scene where Jim choked Helen. I might have kept thinking that way, until I came across an interesting take suggesting that Siri’s memory of the kitchen incident might be false. Thanks — now I feel better.

I think blindsight by Peter Watts might’ve rewired my brain or something. Wow.

Vampire Life Cycle And Reproduction.

In this entry we’ll discuss the life cycle and reproduction of Homo Sapiens Homovorus.

Do note that a lot of the more biological data was taken by observation on ancient vampiric remains, as our test subjects at the institute wouldn’t give us accurate data as they’re not full vampires.

What our test subjects can, however, give us is a fair assessment of vampiric behaviour regarding mating rituals.

Reproduction:

Vampires exhibit little to no recognizable sex drive, with reproduction serving a purely functional purpose, accompanied by minimal dopamine release. The act itself is highly mechanical, efficient, and occurs rapidly, initiated through a complex non-verbal mating ritual. While this process appears intricate to human observers, it is straightforward for vampires. It involves a combination of facial expressions, pheromonal signals, and other non-verbal cues, though to a human, it may simply resemble two vampires staring at each other from a short distance. If both parties answer positively to this then mating occurs, if not then best case scenario they’ll both go their separate ways. Worst case scenario, they’ll fight each other.

Gestation:

The gestation period of Vampire is around 34 weeks, during this time the mother is much more vulnerable, however she still poses a huge threat. The mother gains some weight but it’s genuinely not that noticeable, instead of a bump on the belly it is just like she has gained a bit of weight.

At birth, the infant vampire will weigh between 1kg and will usually fit in its mother’s palm. It doesn’t cry or make much noises and it will be highly dependent on its mother for the first few months but will quickly grow, reaching around 3kg in 4 to 6 weeks.

By the 8th week of its life, it’s already quite mobile, able to move mostly on its own, but not walk yet and will even help hunting in a very disturbing way. By being a lure. You see, juvenile vampires still have a “Baby Schemas” which are a set of infantile physical features such as large head, big eyes, round faces which are meant to be perceived as cute to activate caregivers behaviours in individuals. Now we know this does not work on vampires at all (we know thanks to brain scans showing atrophy in OFC-amygdala connections, and vigorous testings, some which I personally participated myself and others more morbid than what I personally deem unnecessary) so why would their offspring have these traits? We believe that it was a way to bait humans, imagine being alone in the woods and seeing an infant wandering around, you’d follow it only to be met with its mother…

In fact the whole baby schema seems to have been present in not just the juvenile but also the adults… We know vampires had bigger eyes and smoother features and while we’ve long believed it was unrelated, some of us now believe in the possibility that some vampires used this to try and appear less threatening to our ancestors. This does seem to echo myths of strange beautiful and youthful forest people seen throughout history…

I’m getting over myself, anyway Vampire maturation occurs rapidly, though it’s more complicated than simply an accelerated version of human growth.

For vampires, toddlerhood spans from 5 months to 2 years of age, early childhood lasts from 2 to 5 years, and then childhood typically extends from 5 to 13 years old. Thus, they develop into children much faster than humans but remain in that state far longer. Adolescent spans between 14 to 17 years of age. Vampires reach sexual maturity much later than humans do at around 20 years old, I theorised that their body priorities predatory developments, and a combination of other factors, such as food scarcity is why they mature a bit more slowly than us. It wouldn’t be sustainable to breed at the same rate as your prey

Just as their development differs from ours, so do their reproductive physiology in key ways.

Female vampire biology utilizes both induced ovulation and endometrial reabsorption. Meaning that not only is ovulation triggered by the act of mating itself but the uterine lining is also reabsorbed instead of being shedded.

Meanwhile, male vampire biology utilizes on-demand gametogenesis, where sperm production is triggered only in specific environmental/pheromonal cues. This results in a lower baseline testosterone which contributes to their androgynous appearance However since spermatogenesis isn’t instantaneous this means that there’s a lag between the triggering cue and functional readiness, to mitigate this lag, their physiology utilizes a dormant reserve of viable sperm, perpetually maintained in their specialized epididymis. To store the sperm the epididymal lining secrete a specific glycoprotein and enzyme that suppress sperm motility and metabolic activity, placing them in a state of suspended animation. During this dormancy, the Sperm’s mitochondria are downregulated and its cell membranes are stabilized against oxidation.

In my interpretation of their relationship (a strong word – it’s more like a bond and physical attraction), their interaction plays out less through words or emotions and more through body language. Let’s skip the “why?”– after all, we know Sarasti’s nature, how Keeton’s life unfolded, and what led him to become who he is by the end of Blindsight.

Anyway, every touch, every glance between them is met with a reaction that depends on their actions. Verbal exchange is rarer. That’s regarding the direct interpretation of behavior in their dynamic as a whole.

Come to think of it, I do imagine Keeton might have questioned things, especially early on—partly because Jukka instructed him to, but also because Siri is human. After all, lost as he was, he had to learn to live again; plus, humans need to fill their heads, to understand and make sense of things – their lives depend on it.

Also, keep in mind that vampires have a fundamentally different perception of relationships, and those toothy bastards are incredibly territorial. Don’t be surprised if Siri’s body would, from time to time, be left with not a single spot untouched – you know, “gotta let others know who this person belongs to,” or when one of them needs to relieve stress, and, well…

I have more than one interpretation of their relationship.

– Just recently in the fanfic “Lost” (in Russian; coming soon to AO3), I described them as “a constant recalibration of two broken systems.”

– Likewise, in my unpublished work “Burning” (in Russian, still in progress), I explore the following scenario: during 20 years of uninterrupted drift through space, Keeton and Sarasti become something like interdependent variables (no spoilers beyond that).

– In yet another fic (also unpublished at the time of this post but actively being written), I examine the idea that Keeton, literally by saving Sarasti – who never expected such an outcome – becomes proof that vampires do, on rare occasions, make mistakes.

I won’t dive deep into all the possible interpretations here (I’ve accumulated quite a few, but I can’t yet adequately articulate or “feel out” all of them). But if you’re interested, it could become a topic for future posts.

I thought it over and decided that sometimes (not 100% sure), I’ll take references like this and turn them into… something like that. If it works out, I’ll do it with clear descriptions, not vague interpretations.

Still thinking about how Peter Watts and Seth Dickinson each wrote a novel with identical premises of “humanity’s first encounter with extraterrestrial beings goes cataclysmically wrong due to just how alien these aliens are”, but Watts’s Blindsight is set in a cold and uncaring universe where meaning and purpose do not exist and consciousness is an evolutionary dead-end, whereas Dickinson’s Exordia is set in an extremely meaningful universe where souls are material objects that can be manipulated and grand narratives are a physical property of reality…

…and of those two, Exordia is the more disturbing and fucked up one.