Oceans Yet to Burn

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

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.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

Anonymous asked:

In a distant second behind "culture war and everything to do with culture war", the worst thing ever to have happened to fandom might well be Who Would Win threads. As an intellectual exercise by people familiar with both characters, they're fine, but when they become a pissing match between fandoms, revealing that all present haven't matured past the childhood habit of using fictional characters as tokens in a game of Calvinball, it makes me want to pray for faster nuclear armageddon.

brazenautomaton answered:

yeah, they’re pretty crummy, especially when they verge into territory of “praising stories and rewarding authors for being bad at depicting power and not thinking about the actual ramifications of things in their story” – which they often do, any time science fiction or Goku is involved

[mitigatedchaos]

More or less.  Fictional power level is more or less arbitrary, and anyone can write fiction, ergo anyone can create The Goku +1 of Infinite Destiny.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

Anonymous asked:

Gendered alcoholic drinks

femmenietzsche answered:

… anyone have foreseen the tragedy that awaited them? The 20^th century (Old Calendar) reification of a rough gender binary had reached its apotheosis and like all such apogees it was soon to be riven, split by the seeds that had fallen into the hidden cracks of its apparently pristine edifice. Things had reached such a state that even cheap intoxicants were divided between mascul [Text missing] While scholars differ on whether the introduction of intoxicants aimed at gendfugees (an anachronism - the term used at the time was ‘enbies’) was originally satirical in intent, what is certain [Text missing] ‘cultural appropriation’. Thus, as the number of gender identities soared into the tens of millions, the culturally condoned ‘ownership’ of a specific, subtly different intoxicant was a badge of great honor, not to be trifled with except at great risk of sanction. Distillation was a rite both sacred and fractious, [Several pages missing] final triumph of the Individualists. Ten billion people, ten billion genders, ten billion nanobreweries. Time spent in one’s distillery pursuing a unique perfection led to loneliness which led to drinking. The civilization’s nadir was at hand. Thankfully, [Text missing] still be found, in the hidden places of the world, corroded metal reminders of a past now almost lost to cyberhuman understanding.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

Anonymous asked:

fmk: you, lockrum, illegal lockrum

xhxhxhx answered:

no person is illegal, anon

[mitigatedchaos]

In a dystopian future where the government regulates the choice of preferences for new moral agents at time of creation, genderfluid robot Optimum 7 has been declared illegal by the Turing Police. Can she survive the death of her creator, the elusive, elite transhuman Strayan Shtpost Hacker @argumate?

Google DeepMind Films presents…

Sharkpost 7: Parkour Or Die

Pineapple on Pizza Forever

[mitigatedchaos]

@argumate​: wut

Okay, I’m going to break this down seriously.

“no person is illegal” is rhetoric from part of the immigration debate that fails to address the actual arguments of their opposition.  (It implies that anti-immigration groups think unauthorized migrants should be executed, when the actual position of anti-immigration groups is that they are trespassing and should be put back where they came from.)

In a dystopian future where the government regulates the choice of preferences for new moral agents at time of creation, genderfluid robot Optimum 7 has been declared illegal by the Turing Police.

However, we are about to enter an era where we will be able to choose the preferences of new persons (to some degree) either through genetic engineering or software engineering.  In that case, someone could choose to, say, up their offspring’s chances of sociopathy.

Thus, in the Transhuman Era, some people may be literally illegal.

Some choices of preferences may be banned in a way that applies to their creators acting in ways that violate certain moral norms.  For instance, by making fully sapient agents that love the creator and just the creator unconditionally.  That isn’t the case here, which I’ll get to later on.

Instead of being an android or gynoid, our robot is genderfluid because the real future is going to be strange, and thus for example, some kind of reconfigurable androgynous mass-produced body may be preferred over a specialized male or female one.  The robots themselves may default to a unified base personality upon which masculine or feminine personality templates are applied.

Can she survive the death of her creator

Sadly, you die early on in the movie in order to drive the plot. 😢 😢 😢

the elusive, elite transhuman Strayan Shtpost Hacker Argumate?

In the future, Argumate is literally a cybernetic owl.

the elusive, elite transhuman Strayan Shtpost Hacker @argumate?

In the future, internet meme warfare is dominated by professional shitposters.  Ones with infosec/computer skills are among the elite, working for or (presumably in this case) against governments and major corporations.

Google DeepMind Films presents…

The reason this film is so weird is because it was created by artificial neural networks specifically for the viewer, as part of a customized service offered by Google.

Sharkpost 7: Parkour Or Die

Sharkposting must be some kind of meme or slang in the film, or else may refer to a plot element - the Shark Post - from earlier in this series of algorithmically-generated films.

Sharkpost 7: Parkour Or Die

Best guess (87% confidence by Watson™ Dynamicalist™) - the user who generated this movie likes parkour, and it includes a lot of parkour by our gender-ambiguous robot protagonist.

Pineapple on Pizza Forever

The pineapple on pizza discourse has reached its apex, as the anti-pineapple forces have used the heavy hand of the state to prohibit the creation of new people that like putting pineapple on pizza.  This is the entire reason the government is hunting down our beloved robot protagonist.