The last 36 hours have been quite a lot

It's a little weird painting a picture that criticises carrot-at-the-end-of-a-pole motivations, and then have about a million white stem people in my mentions go "actually it's good"

Or stuff like "hey stop ruining this you're making me uncomfortable", because in their world, launching a rocket for the moon was the most urgent problem they could think of

Or that my points were moot because one day /they'll/ get to go to space, like they are a temporarily embarrassed space millionaire.

Or that you can somehow escape the dumpster fire of capitalism by wearing its dumpster fire shirts into orbit, in denial that you're just bringing it in tow wherever you go until you unhitch it yourself

It was a bit painful to see, not just because it always sucks to be "wow cool robot"ed, but also because at the same time four incredible POC furries ran a stream that raised $9,000+, and were then criticised by white people for being too vocal about it for their taste

It's not a thing that's inherent to spaceflight research or even STEM as a whole, but an issue that's pervasive throughout our society, that we never stop and think about how things could be different, let alone follow through on those thoughts

AI computation, transportation tech, rocketry and ballistics - it's always shoot first, and hope to yourself someone down the road will fix it for you if there are any problems.

When do we stop and realise, actually, we are the ones down the road meant to fix it?

When do we ask ourselves, actually, this time, we have to make sure we're 100% sure this isn't going to give us problems to fix down the road - because sometimes, you don't get that chance.

I've received a lot of messages over this thread and the artwork therein - many of them heartbreaking. https://twitter.com/Kavaeric/status/1276913938379177985

Someone messaged me about how they went through the entire 4+ years of getting an aeroeng degree. But at the other end they found the only jobs on offer were for startups more interested in margins than actually making good tech, or companies building drones to bomb people with.

They are working to be a librarian now.

I have someone else who messaged me and said they cried, because they looked at the tiger's eyes and saw their dad working late shifts, trying to get that last piece of engineering to work

A lot of people messaged and replied to me thanks for creating the piece and the subsequent thread. I say that's just my job as an artist, really, to try to capture something in the human condition, however vague or innocent or perhaps upfront and visceral.

There were many people, mostly white STEM folks, who were mad at me for "ruining" space travel for them.

I know a lot of you STEM people think us artists are inferior human beings, but if there's one thing I want you to hear me out on, it's this.

In the big artist's comment thread, I mentioned the collage project, and by proxy, JK Rowling.

I can understand how my train of thought can seemingly violently pinball around disparate topics, but I'd like to think I mention everything for a point. https://twitter.com/Kavaeric/status/1276925086692511745

If you are out of the loop, JK Rowling, over the course of the past few years, has been revealed to be transphobic, and possibly racist and antisemetic. It came to a head a few weeks ago when she published what was in effect her hate manifesto.

For a lot of my peers, Rowling's work was their childhood. It was the thing they looked up to.

You can only imagine the feeling of betrayal when it dawns upon them that this was what they were aspiring for.

For those people, there was a process of having to face an unknown: what do you do when you realise the thing you so love turns out to have some very real and very potent faults that can bring real harm?

There are a few ways to go about this. You can just ignore it and continue to buy her books and tickets for her films and give this racist antisemetic transphobic fart even more money.

I mean, you can; whether or not you should is up to you to decide.

You can also just swear off Harry Potter forever and burn all your books and merchandise and condemn anyone who even so much as glances at those books ever again.

While the STEM people in my mentions seem to think that's what I recommend, I um. I don't.

What a lot of my peers did, and it's something I can get behind, is to acknowledge that there are things that they genuinely like about the work, while acknowledging that it does indeed have elements that are troubling and need to be criticised.

There's a fantastic tumblr post detailing how you can't really separate the work from the artist truly, that to do so is irresponsible and futile, but that it does not void your affinity for the work.

I invite you, dear STEM person, to have a read.

https://accio.tumblr.com/post/615394155935531009/hey-do-you-think-you-could-expand-a-bit-on

I bring up Harry Potter and Rowling because it is an incredibly high profile case. But it is far from the only instance. It's something that happens all the time.

Lovecraft, the creator of a beloved fantasy subgenre, has to be confronted for his racism and bigotry. The TTRPG community is currently reacting to the next DnD edition removing the concept of an inherently evil race, a concept from Tolkien, the father of the western fantasy.

None of us here really know much about building rockets or how the hell we're gonna clean the soil to grow food on Mars.

But we can, as non-STEM, guide you on how to deal with having to face the thing you love and has brought genuine good to the world, has never been innocent.

This is extremely true if you are an artist, because your work - like an engineer or scientist or any other scholar - is built upon the shoulders of those who came before you. Nothing is truly original, it is just plagiarism from a thousand sources simultaneously.

For my worldbuilding project, +700, a crazy place where you can store the energy of a small nuclear bomb in a battery the size of your keyboard and where half the astronauts are talking spaceplanes with blood red teeth, I have to ask myself what kind of shoulders I stand on.

Mass Effect is one of my biggest influences, you can probably see it in the kind of peppy attitude and my insatiable appetite for Bauhaus modernism and neofuturism.

But as an artist, I just have to be critical about the things I love. I cannot pretend everything is innocent.

Yet, as an artist, I understand that by confronting these issues, that doesn't mean everything sucks and I can't enjoy anything anymore.

I play Mass Effect 3's co-op multiplayer with a group of friends every Saturday night, almost without fail.

I played Andromeda from beginning to end and am now standing at 96% game completion - not planet viability, completion, knowing the kind of hell its developers went through, and knowing how it carries the torch of the troubling aspects of the Mass Effect trilogy forward.

I enjoy the design of Mass Effect's guns and vehicles. I like the Hammerhead and Nomad rover (sorry, Mako). I thrist for Garrus. For fuck's sake, I wrote a whole thread describing my love for the Normandy. https://twitter.com/Kavaeric/status/1264587507066380289

(Also, @RowelandFox, for our Mass Effect 3 sessions, I know I told you you should unlock weapons, but don't forget about buying Equipment Packs for those equipment power-ups)

What matters is that as an artist and as a patron of art at the same time, my existence is almost predicated on how "this thing I like has problems" and "this thing I like has genuine good" are not mutually exclusive, and in fact embracing both is the responsible thing to do.

People still read Harry Potter and run campaigns fighting Orcs and I still play video games that have space Romans.

We enjoy the things we like, and that's why we confront their inferior qualities as well.

And I feel like STEM, including spaceflight, should adopt this as well.

As a kid when I drew those pictures of the Shuttle for class, I full well knew what the Shuttle's deal was. How it became something of a white elephant, perhaps built for all the wrong reasons.

I know that Apollo and Gemini and Mercury were built on the backs of Nazi ballistic missile technology, and that civilian rocketry owes its success to the development of nuclear missiles.

The question you must ask yourself is not "is this thing wholly good or bad?" To focus only on the bad is to live a soulless, crushing life. To focus only on the good is to blind yourself with false faith, a mindset associated with anything but rationalism.

The question you must ask yourself is "how do I confront all faces of this thing I hold dear, and how can we move forward from here?"

I worldbuild a setting that does away with or confronts Mass Effect's most troubling aspects. Game Masters write stories that frame Gnolls and Orcs as sympathetic protagonists. Harry Potter fans are now enjoying fantasy books written by and for trans people.

It's possible to enjoy watching the back end of a space rocket land on a barge in the middle of the sea while simultaneously asking ourselves if we should make an effort that we're landing first stages on barges for the right reasons. https://twitter.com/Kavaeric/status/1276659036889505792

It's not an easy question to answer, no. And a lot of the time the solution asks you to make some sacrifices that really do take the wind out of your sails. Sometimes you just gotta put something on hold and say, no, give me some time to think, I'm not ready for this yet.

But you're a scientist. Or a programmer, or an engineer, or a biologist. I doubt you chose that field because it was easy. To assume otherwise would be an insult worse than any Amazon-sponsored Moon mission can be.

Keep reaching for the stars, but simultaneously, look out for those who do not have the means to reach.

Fusion energy will not fix anything if there is no world left to fix. Life-saving drugs developed offworld will not matter if they cost a million dollars a dose. New tech may as well not exist if the select elite keep the benefits for themselves.

More importantly, our existence as a space-faring species is not simply to expand in all directions hoping that you'll stumble upon answers out there by accident, but that you also look to yourself and see how you can grow.