דגל שכור 🏴 @thufie@pixie.town

Science fiction authors just need to be told "it is okay, you can have ideas." to be saved from the "hard-scifi" vicious cycle of making some object of popular science at the time of writing save the galaxy or stop the evil aliens or whatever. You can have ideas about society and miraculous technology and also write gritty stuff, you are allowed to be creative. It is okay! Pick your own balance instead of selecting the current preset of what is "realistic", because that only ages. Whatever seems 'realistic' to you is all it is. Realistic to the you of the now. It is such an arbitrary goal of writing style to be defined by "hard scifi" that the only giveaway something is "hard scifi" work is just when it seems incredibly dated and unoriginal. "Oh I see, it is like that because the British guy thought like this in the 90s" is all I get from it, not realism, or even much of a sense of "grittiness" (media is only ever getting less restrained over time). Just go ahead and call it "incredibly clockable space opera" because you tell more about yourself than any kind of seriously objective future. Maybe it would be worth doing more collaborative work with a higher variety of perspectives if you were actually serious about that goal of the subgenre.

The worst part of reading "gritty" , "hard scifi" novels are when I am trying to skip over the incredibly uncomfortable and unrelatable amatonormative cishet sexual sequences and then the author makes part of the really overly detailed sex scene have critical plot information. So then I have to double-back and actually closely read the weird fetish of some asshole they think is normal because they are painfully british or something.

I like playing a fun game where I download a highly rated scifi book and intentionally don't look at the author. Then I try to guess what kind of person the author is, their beliefs, where they live, etc. Then once I finish the book I read their Wikipedia page and see how right I was. Although there isn't even remotely a way of measuring how "correct" I am, I think I am getting a lot better. I read mostly female authors before this, and I think the most distinctive departure from that style has been a skew of varous British men writing in the 90s with bad ideas about eugenics and all the half-unpackaged baggage of fallen empire, which is probably more towards the average for the genre as a whole. There are all kinds of words that I am really glad don't get used anymore which were big with that type of guy. The rule with this is that once I read the first paragraph I must commit to finishing the book. I am not allowed to read the wiki article until the book is finished. That's the only way I can stomach a lot of this kinda stuff. It has been interesting to see where ideas come from this way.

As an aside: I think "hard sci-fi" is such an unserious genre. All it indicates is a certain disdain for social sciences and an obsessive focus on contemporary pop-futurism. That shit ages like uncorked wine in a swamp, and can only ever seem 'serious' in the context of its time period. All the pop science theory that is not widely known to be disproven yet always becomes pivotal plot devices that can come off as laughable a mere decade later. Imagine how tacky all the "what if the AI but singularity" and "quantum xyz" writing of this decade will be in 5-10 years when it is clear that stuff has barely changed our world, unlike the books where it somehow fantastically contrives moves a plot along by unlocking secrets of the universe or whatever. Yeah like sure, the doodad of the day from last decade toootally turns out to be super true and change everything radically in practice through inevitable consequence technology alone, sure. I'd like a hard scifi writer to think for a second just how many inventions, refinements, and discoveries amount to basically nothing on their own, versus the rate at which technology has ever really changed human history in vast and sudden sweeps. Incredibly rare. It ain't gonna be the silly pop-science doodad of the decade. Maybe if you had to make up something that wasn't the leading pop-science theory in popular media and design around how it actually changes things massively it would be too hard for hard scifi. Also so much of it is fashy british admiralty style crap, there's no way spacebound people are doing British Empire navy roleplay in anything other than your dreams lmao. The least realistic part, only second to every mention of "quantum" or "string theory" or "graviton" or whatever changing everything.

Replacing your $4,000 audio DAC with a verbally stimming slime A/B comparison for audiophiles

djvu aka "the linux pdf"

It doesn't have to be fire and brimstone to be obnoxiously presumptuous and judgmental. Everybody is capable of that in their own special way ✨🌈

DARE DLC for moms who think sugar is also a drug

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I am in gaslight ASCENDING! It isn't "problematic" it is JUST my predestined fate which I am enthusiastically beholden to!

We here at Lockheed Martin don't like seeing new divisions in the queer community. We were planning on leaving it at Sykes-Picot, but unfortunately we have a few more oil pipelines to build.

sega dreamcast world music playlist to charge my digital chakras to. master emerald power is building up inside.