You have been offered a full-ride scholarship to get a four-year degree in this field, specifically. Upon graduation, you will be guaranteed a job in this field at the 75th percentile of average salary for the field, with the possibility of further advancement as the years go on.
However, you will never be able to get a job in any other field.
so embarrassing when you finally get around to watching or reading some landmark piece of media well known for having a massive slash fandom and finding yourself completely drawn in by the homoeroticism as well like oh my god has anyone else heard of these kirk and spock guys? sam and frodo? sherlock and watson? anyone else seeing this?
The worst part about writing fantasy is being keenly aware that you’re writing fantasy, which means that you always have to straddle a thin three-way line between anachronism, cliche, and clunk.
Take money, for example. You can’t just have people in a fictional fantasy world walk around using Euros. You consider something generic, like ‘silver coins,’ but before you know it your world starts sounding like a shitty ren faire.
So you think about the world you’ve built and its needs and its history to come up with some unique and relevant terms. But if your terms are too unique and relevant you wind up writing “yarr, you’ll be ransomed for a hundred Trade League Silver Gyrblonks” and realize your worldbuilding is now getting in the way of basic readability.
The Lesson Of The Day is that all the names are already claimed by IRL, and all the almost-good-names that you could invent to get around that were used by some SFF author in the seventies e.g. I bet you can’t do Suns and Moons for your gold/silver coins, I bet some author did that already.
My fantasy nation uses solid gold coins marked by the dental impressions of the reigning king, as a sign of their purity and authenticity.
They’re called Bitcoins.
oh you can go the fuck to jail that’s what you can do, where you’ll be shackled to a chain gang hitting the blockchain with a pickaxe
so I read the article and the story is both less and more insane than it sounds.
basically, there’s been an ants’ nest near a vent shaft of this abandoned Soviet bunker for decades. the nest spilled over into the bunker itself at some point once it was abandoned and there was no way for the ants to make their way back up to the nest, no queen but a constant supply of new colony members raining down from above, and no source of food in the bunker other than the corpses of their fellow ants.
fast forward to some scientists looking for bats that stumble on what’s basically a post-apocalyptic ant society. they go “holy fuck” start studying, and observe that, all things considered, the ants still pretty much act like regular ants doing regular ant things.
fast forward some more, and the scientists feel like they have enough data from observing the colony as-is, so they decide to try an experiment. they put a little walkway between the bunker colony and the og colony in the vent shaft so the bunker colony members have the option of leaving and rejoining the og colony.
spoiler alert: every single ant in the bunker immediately nopes the fuck back to the colony in the vent shaft. within days the bunker is completely empty. the scientists leave the walkway in place so when more ants inevitably fall back down the vent shaft they can just climb back up instead of starting up the cycle anew.
tl;dr it’s not “oh noes evil ants are on a rampage”, it’s “ants forced into a horrible situation to survive get to go home”
