iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

E. B. Moon (they/them) 🏴 🌱 🚀 🏳️‍⚧️ @ebmoon.bsky.social · 02/09/2025

Rama was originally the far-off imperial center of the short-lived TTRPG campaign I ran in 2019-2021. Now it's the far-off imperial center of the novel series I'm currently writing (starting with DELVER, which long-time readers have seen some excerpts from). #Septopolis #Writesky #WritingCommunity

A medieval-style fortress city/castle at the base of a glacier, forming a dam from which emerge vast torrents of water. It looks a bit like a colder version of a cross between Gondor and Rivendell.

PC: "Glacier Castle" by DrawingNightmare on Deviantart

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E. B. Moon (they/them) 🏴 🌱 🚀 🏳️‍⚧️ @ebmoon.bsky.social · 01/09/2025

It's the imperial capital but hasn't featured in anything I've actually written so far. This should be a fun way of fleshing out the city itself. Some photo refs for what I imagine it looking like (but bigger): Skardu, Pakistan; Chamonix, France; Zermatt, Switzerland. #WritingCommunity #Septopolis

A large valley between two huge mountains in the distance. Fields of green and clusters of trees are visible, along with a town and smaller human-built structures farther off.

A mountain glacier that looks like a cross between a ski slope and a storm-tossed ocean.

A brightly lit alpine town nestled tight in a valley between two mountains. In the distance is the Matterhorn, a huge snow-capped mountain.

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E. B. Moon (they/them) 🏴 🌱 🚀 🏳️‍⚧️ @ebmoon.bsky.social · 29/08/2025

Ooh fun. Don't think I've ever publicly posted a map of Osian before. Big honkin' JPEG incoming...

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E. B. Moon (they/them) 🏴 🌱 🚀 🏳️‍⚧️ @ebmoon.bsky.social · 28/08/2025

Anyway, much as I love Blade Runner, I think it's pretty clearly worse on gender and labor than the novel. It's aesthetically monumental but politically very shallow. Like c'mon, it's the height of the Reagan era and Scott can't translate the tiniest bit of the novel's racial politics to film?

“The TV set shouted, “—duplicates the halcyon days of the pre-Civil War Southern states! Either as body servants or tireless field hands, the custom-tailored humanoid robot—designed specifically for YOUR UNIQUE NEEDS, FOR YOU AND YOU ALONE—given to you on your arrival absolutely free, equipped fully, as specified by you before your departure from Earth; this loyal, trouble-free companion in the greatest, boldest adventure contrived by man in modern history will provide—” It continued on and on.”

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E. B. Moon (they/them) 🏴 🌱 🚀 🏳️‍⚧️ @ebmoon.bsky.social · 28/08/2025

Riyana, the Deepdark's human visitor, meets Kel for the first time, seeing him through the eyes of her anthropological training. #WIPSnips #WriteSky #WritingCommunity #WritingPrompts #amwriting #fantasy #darkfantasy #weirdfiction

The dokalf who stood before her was small for a male, no more than two meters in height, androgynous in the soft features of the face. The forehead was tall and flat, the teeth broad and gapped in the way typical of the western Arctic populations. The marks of male gender at his face overlay an older feminine sigil, now scarred over. He gave a boyish smile. No facial hair. Voice high and piping. Ears rose to a point just above the hairline, which formed a crown of two inches at its widest. The pale, paper-white skin was a stark contrast with that of herself and Shrai.
She took off the unwieldy gauntlets and set them back into the trunk. She had nearly reacted with violence to an unexpected knock at the door—and with tools unsuitable for combat, which she was barely able to use without hurting herself. She was more on edge than she’d thought.

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E. B. Moon (they/them) 🏴 🌱 🚀 🏳️‍⚧️ @ebmoon.bsky.social · 27/08/2025

An intimate moment between Kel and her closest friend, just before they each renounce their vows as nuns and go their separate ways forever. #WIPSnips #WriteSky #WritingCommunity #WritingPrompts #amwriting #fantasy #darkfantasy #weirdfiction

“You’re not to ask where I got it,” she whispered through a grin. The consumption of an insect, or any other animal, was a strict violation of our vows as sestren. But we were no longer sestren. Anyway I wasn’t, and she soon wouldn’t be.
She pushed gently forward on my teeth, a motion that shifted my head upward, gently levered my jaw open, and maneuvered me slowly backward onto my hands as she stretched out her body lengthwise atop me. She moved her fingers to stroke the base of my neck, and with the other hand placed the cricket onto my accepting tongue. I crunched it, savored the sweetness, swallowed.
“I’m going to miss you, Sister Kel,” she said before unrolling her body backward from atop me and rising to her feet. I looked into her eyes for a long moment, but I couldn’t speak for fear of crying.
She offered me her hand to stand, and we went back to my cell to gather my few belongings. Within the hour, Ag’tzua had walked the librarian and me out of the kalst for the last time. Soon she would be gone from the sisters too.

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E. B. Moon (they/them) 🏴 🌱 🚀 🏳️‍⚧️ @ebmoon.bsky.social · 26/08/2025

Back to DELVER today. Having been led near the surface by the old prophetess T'az'ul, Kel bids her farewell. adventure = journey #WIPSnips #WriteSky #WritingCommunity #WritingPrompts #amwriting #fantasy #darkfantasy #weirdfiction

When T'a'zul and I were confident of her strength to make the journey, I slid the board of shadow under her feet and kissed the back of her hand in obeisance before she skated into the darkness. I listened intently for a long time, but I think within half an hour they had slid far enough that they were only a faint whisper in the earth, and I felt the tether from the platform to my h’jar snap. She was on her own, and I doubted I would ever see her again. Yet the vow I’d made to M’ag’na hung heavy in my mind.

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E. B. Moon (they/them) 🏴 🌱 🚀 🏳️‍⚧️ @ebmoon.bsky.social · 25/08/2025

Not from DELVER, but from a short story in the same setting. (And Riyana, who also appears in DELVER, is the narrator.) Reptile = dinosaur. #WIPSnips #WriteSky #WritingCommunity #WritingPrompts #amwriting #fantasy #darkfantasy #weirdfiction

We lived in a small village outside Esker then, in a little house among the woods not far from the edge of town, and two women from your father’s regiment came to visit near the beginning of springrise. They were from Nulruh, and brought with them a selection of their native foods, along with baskets of baby clothes and little toys. We ate fried cicadas with truffles, and drank a foul-smelling mushroom liqueur (mine diluted with water, of course). Your father sang us a song he had learned on his deployment, about bandits on the Red Road and the smell of dinosaur blood. At that time of year the sun hangs for weeks in its low circle over the thawing mountains, so that time passes without a thought. I am still not used to it.

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E. B. Moon (they/them) 🏴 🌱 🚀 🏳️‍⚧️ @ebmoon.bsky.social · 24/08/2025

A bit more of Baltigai, while Kel tries unsuccessfully to impress with his (*cough*) mastery of the karlek's native language. #WIPSnips #WriteSky #WritingCommunity #WritingPrompts #amwriting #fantasy #darkfantasy #weirdfiction

To my great relief, the visual obstruction began to fade. I saw Baltigai half-standing, half-crouching on the apron outside of his root cellar. On his haunches he rose barely to a meter tall. Further up the hill, up a rocky climb of about twenty meters, was his home. Inside, I knew, a staircase connected the root cellar to the farmhouse through the sheer rock.
He lit the bowl of a copper pipe and inhaled the smoke of something blue. “You’re welcome to it,” he spoke as he inhaled. He held the smoke for a beat, then breathed out. We began to speak at the same time, but he didn’t seem to hear me. “Thank you again,” I was going to say, and excuse myself.
“How goes the dig in the north, Kel?” he asked through the cloud instead. He began to walk toward me between the potato rows, his ornate hammered silver cane leaving a deep impress in the field’s soft soil alongside his hooves. I had long since removed the chestplate again, and I carried it in my right hand.
I recalled one of the few Karlish phrases I knew. “H’grwd b’jul.” It meant, roughly, “The birth is done, and I am the afterbirth.” I added, “W’w’wrgd.” “It’s finished,” though what I had meant was “W’w’wrgpas.” “It has stopped.”
His eyebrows rose and his long nose curled in surprise. He coughed through another puff, then leaned over the fence downwind of me. “All of it, then? Antimony, phosphorous, even iron?”

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E. B. Moon (they/them) 🏴 🌱 🚀 🏳️‍⚧️ @ebmoon.bsky.social · 23/08/2025

This is a poll on Truth Social. The Right's pedo implosion continues. Don't let up.

Truth Social poll asking "Should Trump pardon Ghislaine Maxwell for giving up 100 names?" Yes: 11.8% No: 88.2%

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E. B. Moon (they/them) 🏴 🌱 🚀 🏳️‍⚧️ @ebmoon.bsky.social · 23/08/2025

Some exposition on religion among the karleks (think dwarves with antlers and hooves), and how uncomfortable being underground makes Baltigai, our primary karlek character. #WIPSnips #WriteSky #WritingCommunity #WritingPrompts #amwriting #fantasy #darkfantasy #weirdfiction

His beliefs about the origin and nature of the universe were those of the most orthodox karleks: that the great world, called Onni, was neither flat nor a sphere, but the elongated horn of a dead giant, and that when the giant’s body had rotted away, we would plummet endlessly in a black void. Until his arrival, and perhaps to some degree even afterward, he had imagined the darkness of the earth as a malevolent spirit intent on his destruction. The high altitudes and higher latitudes of Raylia are more susceptible to the extremes of winterset and springrise than most countries on the surface. Yet Baltigai, unlike many other upsiders, knew that the deep earth was not cold but hot, and though he sweated uncomfortably here, he had made it a serviceable home.

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E. B. Moon (they/them) 🏴 🌱 🚀 🏳️‍⚧️ @ebmoon.bsky.social · 22/08/2025

MANIFEST DESTINY is about love and resistance in an authoritarian post-apocalyptic United States. It will be the last fiction I publish under my old pen name, and it's coming out SEPTEMBER 12. Mark your calendars (or hit me up for an ARC if you're so inclined).

A book cover: A man and woman, seen from behind, hold hands while facing a squad of armed soldiers wearing gas masks. All is in greytones, except for wispy flames that swirl up from the road in front of them. Title: MANIFEST DESTINY

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E. B. Moon (they/them) 🏴 🌱 🚀 🏳️‍⚧️ @ebmoon.bsky.social · 22/08/2025

Arguably the inciting incident of the whole novel, here Kel realizes he has accidentally killed a sacred insect. #WIPSnips #WriteSky #WritingCommunity #WritingPrompts #amwriting #fantasy #darkfantasy #weirdfiction

My eyes found it an instant later. Amid the coagulating grey veins I had extracted from the porous limestone lay the delicate yellow-brown body of a long-cycle cicada. Two of its legs had sunk and fused into the recently molten rock. I skittered haphazardly over to it on all fours, hoping in vain that it might still cling to life. But I saw immediately that a whole third of its body had been practically reduced to ash. Its compound eyes gazed around, lifeless, and in a gruesome corner of my mind it reminded me of Ag’tzua’s cricket morsel.

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E. B. Moon (they/them) 🏴 🌱 🚀 🏳️‍⚧️ @ebmoon.bsky.social · 21/08/2025

8. Moonlight (2016). Not much to say about this one beyond the obvious. The first, most honest depiction of minority queerness in a mainstream film in a long time. It's a technical triumph, and (one hopes) has helped finally sweep away the post-code moralities of anti-sex anti-queer American cinema.

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E. B. Moon (they/them) 🏴 🌱 🚀 🏳️‍⚧️ @ebmoon.bsky.social · 21/08/2025

An earlier passage than most of my snips to date. B'ab'she and Kel try to gauge how much each other knows about the human/diamond situation, without revealing too much. #WIPSnips #WriteSky #WritingCommunity #WritingPrompts #amwriting #fantasy #darkfantasy #weirdfiction

I looked down into the recessed pit of the barracks as I approached. By now I had caught up enough with the figure walking ahead of me to recognize B’ab’she himself, still wearing his broad steel dig helmet.
Seeming to sense my presence, he stopped in the doorway to his cell. Blowing from one end of the long, serpentine central thoroughfare to the other, the wind made a high-pitched whistle that forced us to shout in order to be heard.
“Kel’xx,” he said with a smile. “What will you do without a dig to tickle your h’jar?”
“I’ll keep myself busy,” I replied, trying to rub the clouds of sleepiness and coal grit from my eyes.
“Maldi says it’s diamonds. The deposits Ix’sha mentioned.” Only his two front teeth showed in a devious grin beneath his wispy beard. “If they’re sold, then we’ll all—”
“So says S’anthe,” I lied, interrupting his mercantile fantasies. I was not about to tell him I’d spoken to an upsider about such things. Why, indeed, was a subcaptain speaking to an apprentice delver about such things?

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E. B. Moon (they/them) 🏴 🌱 🚀 🏳️‍⚧️ @ebmoon.bsky.social · 20/08/2025

Tree of Life (2011). Apart from being visually gorgeous, I think this is a solid contender for the best film of the century at the time it was made (I wouldn't put it at the top now, for reasons I'll post about next). It's the best part of a mushroom trip distilled in a way only film can do.

A man seen from behind walks toward a sunrise across a plain of water in The Tree of Life.

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E. B. Moon (they/them) 🏴 🌱 🚀 🏳️‍⚧️ @ebmoon.bsky.social · 20/08/2025

Surprised to see I had this word. A key part of the dokalfar is that their "career" is typically determined by individual polymorphism (a bit like worker ants), but among the Sestren of Alhal things are a bit different. #WIPSnips #WriteSky #WritingCommunity #WritingPrompts #fantasy #darkfantasy

When, at the age of 19, I left the monastery of the Sestren and the klon at Deep Ren’no to be a delver among the mines and narrow, closed-doored dormitories of Esker’s Flat, it was not my teacher but Sister L’ix’ba the librarian who elected to come with me. We told her there would be no books there, and a lot of hard work. But she had apprenticed with Sister B’ex’er as a breaker when she had first come to the kalst. A mining klon would always need demolition work, she said, and she never minded a change in career. She was nearing middle-age then, no older than seventy.

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E. B. Moon (they/them) 🏴 🌱 🚀 🏳️‍⚧️ @ebmoon.bsky.social · 20/08/2025

6. Bowie's album 1. Outside, a sadly underrated release from 1995 that suffers in attention from having come out right before Earthling. Eno produced, and it's very apparent in the album's ambient soundscapes. What stands out to me the most, though, is the lyrical content.

The cover of Bowie's album 1. Outside. White background, with Bowie's face askew, drawn in what looks like rubbed charcoal or watercolor.

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E. B. Moon (they/them) 🏴 🌱 🚀 🏳️‍⚧️ @ebmoon.bsky.social · 19/08/2025

imo helped lay the groundwork for what we now call the "social thriller." It was the first movie that convinced me that virtually all 20th century horror fiction is imbued with a eugenic fear of disability & that the urge to classify humans in a hierarchy of value is alive and well in genre fiction.

Henry, wielding a torch, confronts Frankenstein's creature near a cliff.

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E. B. Moon (they/them) 🏴 🌱 🚀 🏳️‍⚧️ @ebmoon.bsky.social · 19/08/2025

Eugenics didn't exist in 1817, but even Mary Shelley's descriptions of the monster are colored by the era's first inklings of scientific racism and "human geography." Whale's foregrounding of the creature's "abnormal brain" fits perfectly well with the novel's themes of prejudice and deviance, and

Black-and-white still of a jar containing a brain, labeled "Disfunctio cerebri / Abnormal brain"

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E. B. Moon (they/them) 🏴 🌱 🚀 🏳️‍⚧️ @ebmoon.bsky.social · 19/08/2025

very clear that the doctor (renamed Henry Frankenstein instead of Victor) is the villain, and if anything he's less sympathetic here than in the book (in no small part because the novel character Henry is absent). It's very much a 20th c. adaptation, but it's a good adaptation nonetheless.

Close-up: Boris Karloff as Frankenstein's monster.

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E. B. Moon (they/them) 🏴 🌱 🚀 🏳️‍⚧️ @ebmoon.bsky.social · 19/08/2025

4. Frankenstein (1931) is pretty widely regarded as a great film, but often gets denigrated for its deviations from the novel it adapts. I'd argue most of the criticism in that regard, though, comes from viewers conflating it with many of the later Hammer-era films. Whale's picture is

Frankenstein's creature and a little girl sit by a lake.

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E. B. Moon (they/them) 🏴 🌱 🚀 🏳️‍⚧️ @ebmoon.bsky.social · 19/08/2025

3. Robin Williams' performance in What Dreams May Come (1998). It's an Orpheus and Eurydice retelling (based on a Richard Matheson novel) about a man who travels to Hell after his wife's death to rescue her from Satan.

Robin Williams side-hugs Annabella Sciadorra against a matte painting of Heaven

Robin Williams, covered in paint, inhabiting a three-dimensional canvas.

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E. B. Moon (they/them) 🏴 🌱 🚀 🏳️‍⚧️ @ebmoon.bsky.social · 17/08/2025

Having been raised on Star Wars and Star Trek, a piece of SF media where poverty and boredom were not only common but often the point of the story was refreshing. Also Edward Wong Hau Pepelu Tivrusky IV, anime's greatest neurodivergent gremlin and my first genderqueer role model.

Spike, wearing shabby pants and an oversized, puffy jacket: "You think I look like I got money?"

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E. B. Moon (they/them) 🏴 🌱 🚀 🏳️‍⚧️ @ebmoon.bsky.social · 17/08/2025

2. Cowboy Bebop in its entirety--the aesthetic, but especially the mood of depression, ennui, the feeling that something was missing, and that what little joy we find sometimes comes from fooling ourselves into thinking we might be able to get it.

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E. B. Moon (they/them) 🏴 🌱 🚀 🏳️‍⚧️ @ebmoon.bsky.social · 17/08/2025

1. Everything about The Truman Show (1998). One of the many movies I first saw while definitely Too Young, I didn't know why I resonated with it at the time. But it makes a lot of sense that I was drawn to the same critique of mundane reality in Philip K. Dick's novels a few years later.

The Truman Show theatrical release poster. Jim Carrey climbs a flight of stairs built into a matte painting of the sky.

Jim Carrey in The Truman Show, wearing anachronistic high-waisted pants and a red striped shirt. He has a big smile and waves in the camera's direction.

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E. B. Moon (they/them) 🏴 🌱 🚀 🏳️‍⚧️ @ebmoon.bsky.social · 09/08/2025

gave him a place to shine as protector of baby Hope (who... well, she definitely doesn't make my top ten, but there's less to dislike about her as a child, especially in the 25 issues of this run that could as easily be a totally separate time travel story unrelated to the wider X-verse). 2/

Cable carrying tiny baby Hope in a pouch on his chest, a la Mandalorian and Grogu. Also by Olivetti.

Cable looks down at a young Hope Summers, who has walked in on a sensitive conversation. "I couldn't sleep."

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E. B. Moon (they/them) 🏴 🌱 🚀 🏳️‍⚧️ @ebmoon.bsky.social · 09/08/2025

Gotta be Cable, especially in Swierczynski's Lone Wolf and Cub-inspired volume 2. He comes from a period when most of the X-Men books were heavy on theme and light on character (and I *loathed* him playing straightman for Deadpool), but the return to classic X-Men time travel with Messiah Complex 1/

Cable from behind, drawn in Ariel Olivetti's airbrush style.

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E. B. Moon (they/them) 🏴 🌱 🚀 🏳️‍⚧️ @ebmoon.bsky.social · 08/08/2025

#SFFChat A4: From my dark fantasy WIP (DELVER). Kel recalls the underground monastery where he grew up, and how alien the surface seemed to him as a child.

The monastery is a monolithic structure occupying half a dozen cubic kilometers spread to the west of and above the diminutive klon of Deep Ren’no. The vast majority of the citadel lies within a miles-thick deposit of limestone, so that the walls of my childhood home pictured the tiniest fingerprints of prehistoric life, small bubbles of memory resisting the dead earth around them. To me it was a map of the monastery itself, each resident tucked away inside a tiny cell barely wide and long enough to lay down. I knew these rocks had once been washed by something called seas—they were like wells, Ag’tzua said, only much deeper, and many thousands of times wider.
Directly east and south were the farms and fields which provided both the Sestren and the klon’s other residents with their food and textiles. The largest of the fields was worked by Sister Y’ex and her class of novices. It was their task to grow many of the medicinal and ceremonial plants required by the sisterhood’s rites—only this close to the surface the required climates for many of them were hard to maintain, and fires of varying sizes could often be seen from afar among Y’ex’s silos and seedbeds. It was here that the humans settled.

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E. B. Moon (they/them) 🏴 🌱 🚀 🏳️‍⚧️ @ebmoon.bsky.social · 28/07/2025

I already did. That's how I know you're just making shit up.

Roy Cooper's net worth is between $1m and $5m.

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E. B. Moon (they/them) 🏴 🌱 🚀 🏳️‍⚧️ @ebmoon.bsky.social · 26/07/2025

Pretty sure the account you're replying to is run by the same person lol. Same writing style, same "Prime Video" claim to fame, same incessant replies to indie authors. God they're everywhere.

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E. B. Moon (they/them) 🏴 🌱 🚀 🏳️‍⚧️ @ebmoon.bsky.social · 23/07/2025

Yeah I'm sorta confused by all the people praising WSJ for their supposedly hard-hitting reportage here. They do their best to bury the lede (that Trump lied about Bondi not telling him his name was in the files) and, to top it off, made sure this was the last sentence above the paywall.

Being mentioned in the records isn’t a sign of wrongdoing.

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E. B. Moon (they/them) 🏴 🌱 🚀 🏳️‍⚧️ @ebmoon.bsky.social · 21/07/2025

Found his cousin yesterday (actually a few of them, but this is the only one I managed to photograph).

Similar to the last figure, but this one rendered in oranges, yellows, and pale greens. This figure is leaping into the air with his feet tucked slightly under him, as if performing a skateboard trick. The overall mood is abstract, wiggly, and alien.

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E. B. Moon (they/them) 🏴 🌱 🚀 🏳️‍⚧️ @ebmoon.bsky.social · 20/07/2025

For those not already aware of this nerd, nothing surprising here.

Rick Tumlinson is the founder of spacefund, a venture capital firm investing in space startups. He also founded the space frontier foundation, earthlight foundation, and new worlds institute and was a founding board member of the x-prize

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E. B. Moon (they/them) 🏴 🌱 🚀 🏳️‍⚧️ @ebmoon.bsky.social · 20/07/2025

Who is stopping them, Rick? Is it, perhaps, their own failed monstrosity of a rocket? SpaceX has been holding NASA's checkbook for about five years now. Their failure to meet every timeline and goalpost they've ever set for themselves is on them.

3. Let SpaceX go to Mars. They’re aiming for a 2030 flight. Yes, that’s after China’s 2029 landing. So what? We’re headed for a farther shore — and meanwhile, three U.S. commercial space stations and a lunar outpost will be under construction (even if it’s being built by robots).

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