brin_bellway: forget-me-not flowers (Default)
Brin ([personal profile] brin_bellway) wrote 2020-05-20 01:47 am (UTC)

TBH I didn't know they'd actually written the song: I'd only heard the *concept* of the song.

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Also come to think of it, the Siderea OP is *itself* in large part about how we don't have enough art impressing upon people how big a deal plagues are, so I suppose that was further encouraging me to look at "Hide Away" from a social-engineering perspective.

(I'm not sure to what extent it's true. I'll buy that there's a lack of discussion of *that particular* plague, but I feel like plagues in general get a fair bit of cultural airtime. That could absolutely just be salience bias on my part, though.

Certainly one way or another there are a great many people who are horrifyingly cavalier about disease (I don't think I'll ever forget the girl who casually mentioned she had a cold *after* I'd been sitting next to her for like an hour), but I don't know if more art would help. I don't understand where the difference lies, why so many people didn't experience the developmental stage I went through around age 10, when I became old enough to remember clearly from one winter to the next how much illness sucked and old enough to really grasp that there were things I could do to prevent it.

(Right now I'm gunning my post-work decon procedures just about as hard as they'll go (at least, given the available equipment), straining fifteen years of practice to their limits, and when I do I'm acutely aware that most people *can't* do this even if they now want to: they're too inexperienced to pull it off.))

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>>(Ditto with: apparently our culture loves "this is not a place of honour" and wants to put it everywhere, which I feel like is a failure on *some* level.)<<

Yeah. OTOH, if it's going to fail you *want* to find out quickly, so it's a good thing we have.

(...at least, it's a good thing *if* the relevant authorities correctly parse this as a failure and don't try to actually use it in a real-world scenario. AFAIK there are currently no serious plans to use it, and I hope there never will be.)

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