Anonymous asked:
I’m sorry, Anon-kun.
She’s too genre-savvy for that.
Anonymous asked:
Maybe not every community has to be the same.
Not everyone actually likes cities for what they are. Suburbs aren’t evil in themselves, they just have too much infrastructure per taxpayer… and particularly if we remove the need for large numbers of automobiles, the math on them changes.
you: Western culture is so uniquely stratified and structured, unlike non-Western cultures-
me: Confucius,
Founder of ancient Chinese philosophical school in hiding for over 2,000 years
Anonymous asked:
What if she likes grimdark deconstructions though.
Did you think of that?
You most certaintly did not, Monster-kun.
the most horrifying thing i can think of is waking up in a futuristic emergency room operating table and your whole body neck down is now translucent plastic prosthetics with madcatz logos all over
President orders evacuation of all territory east of Appalchias as experts predict debris from category 8 storm could land as far as Berlin
On the topic of shopping carts, try to guess without looking it up how much they cost
Hmn… $40, when ordered in units of 24.
bloomsxchneet replied to your post:
emotional wounds aren’t the only legitimate negative consequence of cheating; some people value playing it safe with their health
I don’t doubt this. But no one objects to cheating only because of health risks, and to frame the immorality of cheating as arising solely (or even primarily) from the health risks is therefore absurd.
Interestingly, when I first started poly-ing I had a couple friends who had really negative reactions. And they tried very hard to justify their negative reactions in terms of health and safety stuff.
But it was pretty clear that that wasn’t the “real” problem—they were trying to explain to themselves why it as bad, and that was the first idea they came up with.
Their instincts aren’t entirely wrong. There are issues of sex/gender demand imbalances, risks of financially unstable childbirth, emotions that can run high including jealousy (which evolved for a reason), lower exit cost creating a greater risk of being abandoned if a more desirable partner comes along… Poly isn’t only a high risk activity in terms of direct physical health.
Speaking of writing, one piece of advice stuck out to me from years ago. It went something like - “What is the most interesting part of your character’s life? Are you writing about that? If not, why not?” And there may be suitable reasons, such as that you already wrote that story, but…
I recently read another piece of writing advice where the author was talking about increasing her writing speed, and how she shifted from writing in the moment to graphing out scenes relatively quickly before writing them - but the interesting part was that if she wasn’t enthusiastic about writing a scene, it meant something needed to change in the pre-writing sketching out.
So I was thinking about this in synthesizing, and I was thinking, do we ever actually need an uninteresting scene?
Not to communicate setting information, or setup things we need for later, to lower or defuse tension (so we can ramp it up again later), or to create within the reader a sense of the passage of time. All those can be interesting, even if they aren’t viscerally exciting.
And I think sometimes we may think we need an uninteresting scene so that we can set things up for later - but I think perhaps we don’t. We can change the scene. If that doesn’t work, there are ways to include the setup information in one of our interesting scenes.
Do you ever see a “critique” of fiction writing that was pretty obviously pulled out of the critic’s ass just to complain about like “Why didn’t the author spend 500 pages explaining the selective breeding practices of this species of domestic dragon to create fireproof leather armor?” Because Jimothy I can’t find a reader with that many fucks to give.
So is it like George RR Martin complaining about Tolkien not explaining the tax system of his world?
Man, every time I see one of these posts implying something would be too absurdly boring and specific to include in a fantasy novel I’m like ‘hmm, that’s something I wish they would have gone into more, that would be something I’d find legitimately interesting’
To me, it feels like we should in some ways let the world speak for itself, creating a sense of natural depth of simulation and realism where larger amounts of information are implied by relatively few lines, and save the detailed discussions that talk directly about tax regimes for online bonus content.
Of course, I may not be the best source of advice on this. We’ll see how things turn out.
There are two ways, I think, to approach this.
The first is a sort of intuitive iceberg below the surface, where a minor interaction within the story communicates a much larger information load or general sense about the nature of the world. To take an example I already posted,
The adultery laws don’t apply to registered prostitutes.
It isn’t highly entangled with the plot, but it tells us that
So we don’t need to know the details of the regulation regime to get a sense of the world from it and feel a depth to the world simulation, assuming other aspects of the work align with the implications. We get even more out of it if we already know other facts about the government, like if it has popular support, in which case we can infer that the population itself has similar views of social conservatism.
The second is to entangle the fantasy mechanics with the plot.
In video games, there is an idea of tension between game mechanics and plot or story, and there is an idea that some of the best games really weave the two together in a natural way to create higher immersion as part of games as an artform.
I think we can view a fantasy book similarly, with a continuum.
At one end, there is this setting detail and there is the story, and they’re almost irrelevant relative to each other. We get a big long description of the Cow Tax, but our main character is a thief in a totally different province, and the Cow Tax not only doesn’t come up in the story but only impacts like 0.25% of GDP of the neighboring kingdom.
(Of course, some people can enjoy a book that is primarily about setting and not plot. Like a sort of fictional non-fiction book.)
As we move along the spectrum, the Cow Tax starts to become more entangled with the plot. Perhaps it interferes with the funding of the enemy noble’s army, or there is a rebellion in a province because cows were taxed too much.
We can move closer, too, and tell a story about a peasant suffering because of the Cow Tax, making its resolution the central element of the plot, or have the entire plot hinge on demonstrating the effects of the Cow Tax.
Under this approach, the more entangled something is, the more explanation it gets, unless we want to create an air of mystery or something.
(To some degree, “the whole plot is about demonstrating the effects of the Cow Tax” is a very classic sci-fi approach, where the whole book is a big “what if?”)
