I’m Ashamed To Admit That It Was Only After I Finished Watching The New Venture Brothers Movie That

Millennial Sisyphus keeps entering all the information from his resume into the web form, only for it to delete everything when he tries to move to the next page. He just goes back and types it all up again, over and over again, forever, and he never gets a job.

I don’t know much about opera in general, but I always thought stories about power struggles in the Kremlin in the days of the Soviet Union would make good opera fodder. Larger than life personalities, plots and counterplots, occasional bloodshed; how could it miss?

Hey, there’s an opera about Nixon’s visit to China; anything’s possible nowadays.

Weird Operas

What are some things you think would make good opera plots?  Pull from whatever source- anime, pro-wrestling storylines, telenovelas, whatever.  What’s the season program for the Martian Opera House?

And yes @dumnhpy​, that is indeed Charles Napier, who returned to Trek with the DS9 episode “Little Green Men” as Lt. Gen. Rex Denning.

What a difference twenty six (or negative twenty-two) years makes.

TOS costume design really said “men in thigh highs with tits out”

Not gonna lie, first time I saw this post I immediately thought of that scene in Prometheus where Fifield splashes the hammerpede’s blood onto his helmet and his visor just melts onto his face which, while not the most horrific way to die, is definitely up there in the top 20.

Geode (x)

This has become something of a critical issue for sf/f writers in the past few decades. Way back in the early 2000s, when blogs were still a thing, the British author M. John Harrison caused something of a tempest in the online genre community criticizing the concept of “worldbuilding” as detrimental to the creation of literature. The original posts are long gone, but there is a Reddit post copying Harrison’s final summation of his thoughts on the matter.

Even though I’m not a “proper” writer yet, this is an issue I’ve worried about over the years. While I don’t have the philosophical background of Mr. Harrison, my own objections to the primacy of worldbuilding stem from a key complaint Harrison makes: the idea that worldbuilding “literalizes the act of creation.” The essay talks about Harrison’s interpretation of the matter, but here I’ll quickly over my own.

The problem with believing that worldbuilding is all is that it changes the reader’s relationship to the text. If a reader believes that the mechanics and details of a setting are the most important part of a story, they will end up seeing stories not as stories, ambiguous creatures of metaphor and meaning, but as documentaries of alternate worlds. When this happens, the reader both forgoes the suspension of disbelief required to make any story work and unknowingly imposes their own worldview on the story under the guise of “objective reality.” Rather than developing a symbiotic relationship with the story wherein the story is accepted on its own terms, the reader instead becomes an anthropologist in a duck blind scanning the story from afar, compiling a list of points observed. This is how you end up with situations where people complain that characters don’t act “logically” without considering the thematic reasons for their motivations. Obviously no one will ever be able to suspend their disbelief for every part of every story, but some level of acceptance is always required. Without it, the forest just becomes a big bunch of trees.

This attitude also poses problems for the writer, who is no longer expected to be a storyteller, but a God who dreams up and fashions every aspect of their creation from the wings of an aphid to the greatest supergiant stars. Needless to say, this is an awful attitude to have as a writer. Rather than having the reader accept your story and go along for the ride, the entire burden of creating the world falls on you, and the sad fact of the matter is that most of us aren’t God. A few of us out there are polymaths and Renaissance men that can shoulder the burden, but most of us, myself included, aren’t. What happens with most of us is that we develop the belief that we must understand everything before we can create something, which often leads to writers putting their stories off to research things they don’t really need. I’ve been guilty of this myself with things like starting work on a fantasy novel by working out the layout of the solar system and worrying about getting myself up to speed on introductory economics (so much economics in fiction these days...I’m sick of it). Some of this would have been important thematically, but my problem was that I was doing in first instead of figuring out what I actually wanted to tell a story about. I’m sure many of you have similar stories to share.

In short, if you’re the sort of person who loves creating all this intricate background for their fantasy settings, knock yourself out, but just remember that for the sake of both you and you reader that they can’t be everything.

(As a final note, I have actually seen some people drop traditional narrative entirely and write what are essentially fictional textbooks. It’s something you tend to see in the online alternate history community, where the primary attraction is seeing the raw mechanics of historical change play out over centuries across nations filled with millions upon millions of people, the scale of which the human-focused modern novel has some difficulty capturing. They rarely appear on bookshelves because they don’t fit in with the publishing industry’s classifications of genre, but you sometimes get odd anomalies like Robert Sobel’s 1973 work For Want of a Nail: If Burgoyne Had Won at Saratoga.)

I think the best writing tip I can give (this is untrue, I can probably give many writing tips, but this is the writing tip foremost in my mind at the moment and I needed a good hook to start this post) is that not everything that is read as Lore needs to be important or explicable to what you’re writing. Often times you need a detail or a character to appear to make another detail or character sound more convincing or to appropriately place it in the world, people will latch on, but maybe that’s not the story you’re telling or what’s actually important to you. For me, for example, it’s not important to detail say, the histories of Nochtish tank design bureaus. It’s enough to know that they exist and what they’re making, but the staff and position of Rescholdt-Kolt are not actually crucial to the story.

I think because of wiki culture and general curiosity we want every capital letter noun to be drawn out to us, but some things just exist solely to be a cool name.

I’m a tad late but hey, first drawing for the Lin Beifong week!

Day 1: Youth

She must have been a lot to handle, but a hella cute baby

Picard: “...well, fuck me, I guess.”

He has special eyes.

At first I was kinda confused as to why no-one said anything about Jonathan’s eye situation but then I realized that people know him as the night shift doctor…

I’ve been playing Vampyr lately and despite it’s flaws I think it’s a good game. I’m currently on chapter four, so, about half-way there! Also, I just noticed that I misspelled Pippa’s name, but oh well, I’m too lazy to fix it.

I’m not going to say it again: #bertie wooster deserves to win first place.