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Infinite Wishes đŸłïžâ€âš§ïžđŸš€ is a weblog by Emma Humphries

The more you know, the more jokes you get.

04 Mar 2025 » You Didn't Build This

The investor class deserves no credit for landing on the moon

Credit: NASA/Firefly Aerospace

Shareholders don’t build spacecraft, they steal the value created by the technicians, engineers, and scientists who build the spacecraft.

24 Feb 2025 » For All Mankind Fanvids, Updated 24 Feb 2025

Appreciating a series of fan videos for the show "For All Mankind"

Credit: Lady Dag0n3t

Vidding, where fans of a TV show or movie edit clips and music (often not from the show or movie,) into a narrative, has been around since at least the 1980’s. Henry Jenkins’ Textual Poachers (1992) was my introduction to the fandom1.

Instead of trading VHS tapes, vidders mostly share their work online and I pleased to have found Lady Dag0n3t’s appreciation videos for all four seasons of “For All Mankind,” the inter-generational, alt-history saga of what happens when the Soviets land on the Moon before the US. Each video is a collection of clips from the show set to a song from the period covered by each season, summarizing the arc.

For season one, Dag0n3t uses Jimmy Ruffin’s “What Becomes of the Broken Hearted,” carefully mixing Ruffin’s vocals with the drunken and bitter Astronaut Corps singing along with it at their dive bar2 right after Alexi Leonov lands on the Moon.

Season two sees the Cold War extend to space3 and Reagan nearly killing all of us4, and Dag0n3t chooses REO Speedwagon’s anthemic “Roll With the Changes” as the soundtrack for a countdown to midnight thriller.

Season three, set in the 1990s, introduces space billionaires, in competition with the US and the Soviets (who did not collapse,) to get humans on Mars5. They use the Smashing Pumpkins’ “Today” as the theme of the new space race.

Season four, the most recent, sets working people on Mars, doing jobs similar to those in the US Antarctic Program, in conflict with the now cooperating Soviet and US hegemony, over who will benefit from a metal-rich asteroid which will make a close approach to the planet. The Stroke’s post-punk “The Modern Age” with its insistent guitars is Dag0n3t’s soundtrack for a season which becomes a heist in deep space.

The show’s not perfect, but one of the roles of fan vids is critique of the canon. These vids celebrate the show, highlighting the parts the vidder cares about such as the relationships between the characters (including the queer ones which I hope Season Five doesn’t erase to appease Elon Musk.) And if you haven’t seen the show, these will help you decide if it’s worth investing 40+ hours of your time watching it.

  1. When I read this in 1992, I had been volunteering with WisCon, the feminist science fiction convention, which at the time prided itself on keeping away from “fandom.” I learned from the book that there was an active community making and swapping fan videos for Quantum Leap in and around Madison. If people coming to WisCon were in that fandom, they didn’t talk about it. WisCon divested itself of its anti-fandom bias, and I’ll take partial credit for that because I moderated a panel in the late 1990s with the cringeworthy name “How Buffy (the Vampire Slayer) Made Fandom Safe for WisCon.” We got over ourselves, and WisCon now has a popular vidder’s party every year and we all sing along to bironic’s vid of “Starships”. ↩

  2. In the show the dive bar, The Outpost, is purchased by Karen Baldwin, the ex of one of the Apollo astronauts (invented for the show,) who then sells the rights to it during season three to make it into a chain. This reminded me of a hamburger joint on Greenville Avenue in Dallas I loved as a kid, which was also sold to make a chain. Mumbles something about “Baby Back Ribs my silk-clad ass.” ↩

  3. Sally Ride pulls a gun on Ed Baldwin aboard a nuclear powered shuttle orbiter to keep him from starting World War III. Cynthia and I were cheering her dyke energy. ↩

  4. As he did in our timeline. ↩

  5. I won’t spoil who gets there first, but it’s some clever world building. ↩

06 Feb 2025 » Burning Links

Writing it down so I don't forget it happened.

Credit: Screenshot by the Author

I had to edit a 10 year old blog post because people voted for Trump despite knowing he’d try to erase the existence of LGBTQ+ people.

02 Feb 2025 » Was Banning Pronouns Worth It?, Updated 02 Feb 2025

Are those higher prices worth the cruelty, friend?

Credit: Photo by the Author

There are two main manufacturers of high powered motors for the rocketry hobby. One of them is in Ontario. Trump’s 25% tariffs on Canadian imports hurts our hobby.

I must ask those rocketeers, who voted for the felon, if attacking trans people was worth a 25% increase in motor prices.

How miserable person do you have to be to get upset about using people’s pronouns? So mad you voted for a felonious sexual predator who promised to raise prices (which tariffs do.)

Queer and trans people are already in your hobby. We have high power certifications. We are LCOs and RSOs at your launches. We are not going away, more of us are getting into the hobby, and we don’t like punitive tariffs. Especially when it’s the result of you being petty.

30 Jan 2025 » Books Read in 2024

The books I read in 2024

Will I do a separate music post for 2024? I don’t know.

  1. Orlando, Virginia Woolf
  2. The Imposition of Unnecessary Obstacles, Malka Older
  3. Red Team Blues, Cory Doctorow
  4. All Systems Red, Martha Wells
  5. Dune, Frank Herbert
    • Another one of those “why am I reading a dead white guy” moments
  6. Victories Greater Than Death, Charlie Jane Anders
  7. Abolish the Family: A Manifest for Care and Liberation, Sophie Lewis
  8. Space Forces: A Critical History of Life in Outer Space, Fred Scharmen
  9. Dust: The Modern World in a Trillion Particles, Jay Owens
    • This shook me with the scale at which we’ve altered the world in a few centuries (even more than I had thought we had)
  10. There, There, Tommy Orange
  11. Navigational Entanglements, Alliete de Bodard
  12. The Lifehouse: Taking Care of Ourselves in a World on Fire, Adam Greenfield
  13. In the Deep, Kelly Jennings
  14. A Walk Through Paris, Eric Hazan
  15. How Infrastructure Works, Deb Chahara
    • A reminder of how our modern infrastructure liberates us, esp. women, keeps us from dying of disease, and what work must be done to keep it focused on liberation and safety.
  16. Metal From Heaven, August Clarke
    • Vivid and brutal. A fantasy novel confronting the valorization of the lucky and wealthy
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