"this book has this trope", "this book has that trope"... what happened to SUMMARIES. what's the PLOT.
*Premise, unless you want to be spoiled on everything.
I just remembered that this was a thing that was HILARIOUS in 2006 and apparently that was ten years ago now.
Old people: join with me in remembering how funny we found this on LiveJournal.
Young people: look at this lolrus, it’s so happy, it has a bucket.
And then they stealed away the bucket and we realised we had fucked up a perfectly good elephant seal and given it anxiety.
listen this vintage meme is high quality and i will hear nothing said against it
20 years. I am not happy about this.
You know, one of the most shameful consequences of scifi/game authors not knowing shit is cyberpsychosis, or Essence, or whatever in-universe asspull for a mechanical limiter on how much cyberware you can cram into a character sheet.
There is an easy excuse in real life! You may not be able to get both a pacemaker and a DBS device because they're both pieces of sensitive equipment that could theoretically interfere with each other, and nobody engineered them not to. Trivially you can extrapolate this to all cybernetics. If your various augs weren't Specifically designed not to mess with each other (and of course the various megacorps might take things a step further, making their shit actively hostile to mix-and-matching), you might have problems; and obviously, the more pieces of hardware you've patchworked yourself with, the worse things get. You'd have to be one real crazy motherfucker to tell a back-alley doctor to load you up with whatever they've got.
It's more grounded and more realistic and less shitty and it actively enhances the atmosphere of cyberpunk in a way that "losing your humanity" does not. we are missing out on much because none of these writers know anything about how medtech works
CS Lewis when he's got one page left to wrap up his book.
As a Tolkien girlie with a resistance toward the fictional approach of CS Lewis, I have never read or fully watched any of the movies except was was pushed on me by my family....
So, genuinely, I must ask: WHAT?????
Yeah so, Lewis spends most of the final page of The Horse and His Boy talking about how the main character Prince Cor and his brother Prince Corin fought like cats and dogs and grew up to be great warriors and how Corin was such a master of unarmed combat that he was able to fistfight this misbehaving bear and cause it to change its ways.
Then in literally the last third of the page he’s like ‘oh yeah by the way Prince Cor ended up marrying the girl who he spent most of the book on an adventure with’. The end.
Hey now, that's hardly a fair characterization!
What he actually says is that the two characters who'd been in a "well excuse me, princess!" dynamic for most of the book only to have a genuine heart-to-heart after a near-death experience continued on that way indefinitely, bickering (and even fighting) and then making up afterwards, and indeed got so good at it that they eventually got married so as to go on bickering and making up in a more convenient manner.
A fair amount of Lewis's writing was done the way it was done not just because he liked it, but because he liked it and it was a good way to annoy his good friend Tolkien.
Also, it was hilarious. 10/10, no notes.
Also there is a literal martial arts movie, if not a franchise of them, called Karate Bear Fighter. Fistfighting bears is a noble calling.
man come on. it's colours
THIS IS OUR RADIUM. you're absolutely right
How it feels to use any tool, app, or website right now
Worse, it's our asbestos. It's being put into things we're going to have to keep using long after everyone has to finally accept it was a bad idea, in such a way it will be almost impossible to remove.
Radium suppositories and asbestos might both be in museums but the radium's in the exhibits, the asbestos is in the walls.
please stop writing "viscous" when you mean "vicious", it produces the weirdest mental images ever
"a viscous murder" yeah i don't want to know what that could look like
it looks like the Boston Molassacre of 1919
#and vice versa btw#i don’t know what a vicious fluid would be like#and i don’t want to find out
it looks like the Boston Molassacre of 1919
to pretend that horrible people cannot make good art is another way to conflate beauty and talent with integrity and morality. the works of monsters are best examined with knowledge of the author in mind but art is not inherently reflective. human beings are creative, and habitual liars- it'd be stupid to pretend art must always be a portrait of its creator
Like I always say, the fact Michelangelo supposedly chased his ex-girlfriend’s new boyfriend down the street with a knife, doesn’t affect your assessment of the Sistine Chapel.
Ayoo just to preempt the inevitable dumb takes we’re about to start seeing;
I am PRO-WOOL
I am PRO-LEATHER
I am PRO-BEES
Fuck the idea of replacing durable, sustainable animal products with cheap, flimsy plastic that doesn’t bio-degrade. Agave nectar and other artificial sweeteners are expensive, labor-intensive, and destroy the environment to be farmed.
Do not buy into pernicious marketing campaigns pushed by dickhead organizations trying to stay relevant, like PETA.
“but the industry-”
listen there is a huge difference between an industry with problems that can be made sustainable and more humane, and an industry that cannot, given current technology, continue to the present degree without destroying our planet
Wool - Contrary to what bullshit mongers like PETA would have you believe, wool is one of the most ethical materials humans have ever worked with. Happy sheep make better wool, experienced shearers seldom nick their sheep, and older sheep produce more wool, meaning its best to keep them alive and treat them well for many years.
Leather - one cow makes SO MUCH leather. One deer makes SO MUCH leather. Well-treated leather lasts almost FOREVER. Even animals with small skins like rabbits, a pair of well oiled rabbit leather gloves will last decades. Every animal usually made into leather is also a meat animal, so it’s more sustainable to get more than one product from a single ethically butchered animal (humane kills make less punctures in the hide!) Leather can be tanned with natural resources like brains and doesn’t require treatment with chemicals that seep into the groundwater!
Cotton: Cotton is a fucking plant, it burns. The growing and harvesting of cotton is rather water intensive but it IS possible to sustainably harvest and reuse the water spent in the cleaning process to reduce the ecological footprint of the crop. It burns clean, it cuts clean, it’s sturdy, and there are 1000 ways to weave it to change its properties.
Bees & Honey: yes yes, the european honey bee is an invasive species, we know that. But honey has been cultivated by humans for just about as long as there have been humans, and they 100% choose to be cultivated. Like bees can and will leave if they’re not treated and maintained well. They understand that humans protect and clean the hives, and often become familiar with their keepers, choosing to walk on and investigate them instead of acting defensive. If animal welfare and consent are your concerns, honeybees aren’t the animals to worry about. If you, like me, are worried about native bee species, instead of creating hives you can strip an area of grass and leave an open area of clay and sandy soil to attract mason and digger bees to nest in the spring. They will happily coexist with honey bees as long as you plant the native keystone species the native bees rely on (like indian blanket flower, partridge pea, native violets in my area) as well as the high nectar plants that honeybees prefer (like roses, sunflowers, bee balm and cone flowers). Nature is actually really adaptable and accommodating of the human urge to cultivate plants and animals, and the idea that nature is ‘dead’ rather than ‘neglected’ is something that corporations want you to believe so you don’t oppose them spraying pesticides every 15 feet.
The leather one really pisses me off.
“You’re killing animals for their skin!”
No, Becky, we’re killing animals for food. What do you want us to do with the skin after wards? Throw it away? Do you think planting dead animal skins in the ground grows new animals?
Maria Skłodowska-Curie's notebooks are crazy once you think about it. They're so radioactive they have to be sealed in a lead box. Imagine a world where atomic theory is forgotten and a dude just goes "yea there's a book that details the secrets of the universe, the machinations of the creation of existence down to its barest essentials, but if you get close to it you fucking die. The more you read it the more your body slowly disassembles into mush." like wat excuse me
Rejoice! Both Sideways and Ryan George have returned from the war / the gas station with milk and cigarettes / the dead!!
one of the most boring lessons I’ve learned is that when a task feels overwhelming, you just have to start doing it. Even if you’re not sure how to do 90% of it, look for one small component that seems close and start there. Sometimes it’s reading one article on the topic, or searching one related term, or literally just googling how to do the task. Do anything other than thinking about it. The process of working on a thing inherently makes it less scary.
Loid Forger is up to his eyeballs in PTSD and masking the hell out of it, gets stress ulcers, and is playing 5 dimensional chess with every interaction, figuring out and counteracting both people's individual and collective motivations and weaknesses. But he's also like "ough how do i maintain a healthy and respectful fake relationship with my beautiful stacked superhuman goddess wife who misses 40% of all social cues and wears backless sweater dresses all the time. This is really tough." The character of all time.
While also being like "oh no, my totally fake, super cute daughter got into trouble because she was acting weird again, I gotta make sure she has the best childhood in a loving home because even though I am using her to fulfill my mission, she shouldn't cry because of me, in fact hurting her like that would be my 13th reason"
Arthur Conan Doyle really said "This is my OC Sherlock. He spends his time going on walks around london taking soil samples so that when a criminal leaves behind a footprint he can tell you what street the dirt came from. He refuses to learn how the solar system works because it might overshadow his knowledge of obscure poisons. He has a gun. He doesn't even need the gun to kick your ass but he has it anyway. He plays the violin. Everyone who knows him thinks he's the coolest person in England and they're absolutely right. When he doesn't have a mystery to solve he gets so bored that he does coke about it."