Me, watching science fiction: Of course I side with the basic humanity of the robots, I'm liberal in good standing Me, reading the news: Of course half the people on earth won't be AI, those fucking clankers aren't /people/

Oh, hey! My novel does this! A heist using a time machine and the attendant benefits (and surprising difficulties) of being in two places at once!

My Star Wars Rankings hot take is you're not putting The Phantom Menace high enough. It is one Lucas's most thematically coherent, visually stunning, and ambitious movies and he very much executed on all that

The Unification War was swift and terrible. The Empire came from the future, they had superiority in numbers, weapons, and intel, and they quickly consolidated rule over the planet

Bigger than this, I think people should be more skeptical of online leftism that says, "Actually, under capitalism I don't owe other people anything." Oh, your communal philosophy says you can be interpersonally vicious and steal from other people? How convenient!

Probably not in Minerva's case. She is trying to have him executed! Not in a fun "lovers to enemies" way, but in a "this is a horrifying authoritarian government" sort of way

Time travel being time travel, the events of the uprising in the 11th Century are *tecknickly* the future for most of the characters, but they all know it's there on the timeline and it looms over everything

I am, I'm sure to the chagrin of some of you, a "the dog can die" author

*wise voice with an indeterminate /foreign/ accent* You can tell a lot about an author by whether or not you believe the dog can die

Who is your most online character---either as a literal fact of having the internet or equivalent to be online about or as a matter of personality

My roommate has been doing a TNG rewatch and I've been joining on and off and we just got here

Character who is not sure the Old Magic works, but is the first to burn sage the moment anything seems even slightly ominous

Continuing my habit of /not/ answering Kira's literal question in this series, a cool thing about the Time Empire is that it has exactly 1 Emperor over its ~11 century reign because, like, he can time travel. Why would he need a successor? So there isn't a long lineage of dead kings to look at

Stretching "ancient" here, there is the era before time travel and the era after it In true time travel fashion, the date of invention is in the *middle* of the time travel era, but due to resources and technology, they can only go so far back

When Stalin had his stroke, his personal physician was otherwise occupied. With what? The torture following his arrest. Why was he arrested? Well, for suggesting that Stalin might need some rest lest his health fail

Christian Lit is...look, I'm a gay atheist with Pagan tendencies with several vices that would arouse an Evangelical pastor to anger, or perhaps something else, so I'm really not the audience there

Given how repressed the entire Empire is, I think it's safe to assume all the characters are weird about touch, especially where others can see them. But I think Pericles and Persephone would be more okay given the chance

I'm *very* familiar with the limits of this so I'm going to pedal back from the really strong form of it, but there is something to, "You don't have writer's block, you need to sit down and write" But if the foregoing post about depression didn't clue you in, no, sometimes you really don't

Treating my depression

Pericles: Eyes the phone with suspicion, does not answer. Ajax: Eyes the phone with suspicion, does not answer. Persephone: Eyes the phone with suspicion, does not answer. Minerva: Eyes the phone with suspicion, does not answer. Has the caller disappeared to a black site.

I don't think it's deniable that racism, sexism, and homophobia underwrote the Disco backlash, but also every time this comes up I can't help but note that a big piece was the market was oversaturated with some of the worst music ever made, and flooded with mainstream artists selling out

The best writing community I was part of did regular meetups and write-ins. (It was NaNo adjacent, but year round.) I don't know that that spirit has to look the same for everyone, but encouraging each other to make time and be social in their writing creates a lot of momentum

Apropos of something elsewhere, it was a mistake to tell the internet about the informal fallacies I think of this because there is nothing inherently fallacious about a personal attack, and more people should hear what conclusions people are drawing about their conduct

"It's always been me. Who else could it have been?"

"Users hate the new interface on day 1" tells you users hate learning new things, and while I do wish tech companies would take that more seriously, we probably should not have frozen the web in 2010 either But, in fact, sometimes it really is worse!

Were "AI" like other things, I would put my seasoned end-user hat on point out that adjustments take time and users hate changes even when they are better Yet, every time I get a spelling and grammar update to my browser or phone, it makes and suggests *more* errors, not fewer, which seems bad

Beau from The Mighty Nein is Trans Sokka (laudatory)

*pounding on my desk* JUSTICE FOR MAURA LABINGI!

If I think about this too hard I'm going to do an unnecessary round of conworlding 😂 They aren't from Earth and it's not a colonized world so...maybe, maybe not.

Me, on the floor sobbing: Please, just be normal about Twilight, please

squirrel: *points gun* me: what do you want me to do? squirrel: *gestures at sign* me: alright, i get it *opens book drop* squirrel: *makes hurry-up motion* me: NOT A SQUIRREL! squirrel: *disappears into book drop* me: *whispers* forgive me, keith

Creature in the dark Hungering for its next meal Lunge---femoral crunch

I'm currently writing on a waterworld: MC's parents are algae farmers, first scene is on a pleasure boat, and every meal features seafood. Might be easier to figure out what parts of the economy the oceans don't touch!

It's funny when you start to recognize your own writing habits. I have introduced a character who is careful, controlled, and calm. He will come unhinged in some way in the final act

Turning over a new leaf (I wrote 500 words today and deleted a forum reply that contained the sentence, "I am sorry all of your interactions, where you are the common denominator, have been unsatisfactory")

I did not get A Wizard of Earthsea. The most frustrating part, for me and probably you too, is that I don't know that I can totally justify this. It was fine, but it did nothing for me

If you put the days of the week into your worldbuilding and we didn't have them I'd think you were nuts. They don't make any sense and their history is, frankly, not very believable

The cows perform for the cellists.

Apologies for politics posting, it will happen again, but if Donald Trump really is out there sucking cock (rather than his friends making homophobic jokes in emails 🙃) it's one of the better things I've ever heard about the man

I see that bsky dot app, bastion of progressivism, is falling down on the "talk about men who give fellatio like they aren't lesser people" test again

"Oh so two straight guys can't be friends who sing a love song in the second person with each other without perverts like you thinking they are banging?" Yes! Actually yes!

A new entry into one of my favorite genres: Songs that somehow aren't gay duets despite all internal evidence to the contrary

Anyway, this---the travelling, not the absurdity of taxiing---is a good chunk of why I've been quiet

I have been travelling lately and planes just keep getting funnier to me. Jets are a miracle of modern engineering, capable of going fantastic speeds in the air at altitudes the ancients could only speculate about and at the beginning and end of a flight they become the world's dumbest busses

And we're back! My computer blue-screened, derailing #Prosetober and everything else I was using it for

The change was slow at first, little tears opening in reality, ghosts in the night, strange dreams haunting learned people, unease in the poorer parts of town, growing into corporeal terrors like a voydoch beneath the midday sun, selkies grabbing men from the shores at dusk, [cont]

#Prosetober Day 9: Climax Another tool you doubtless reach for without too much thought, but it can give your writing a real sense of forward motion, accomplishment, or conclusion when you take the time to consider its uses

#Prosetober Day 8. You probably don't need an introduction to metaphor. But I think it's often overlooked how much room there is for subtlety, and you may find a reintroduction makes you see your acquaintance in a new light

Incredible work by the Thinking Machines. (I am fully pro-Butlerian Jihad now)

#prosetober hot take 🔥 Filter words have their place. You lose an element of voice if you press yourself to get rid of every last one of them. Same with adverbs. Same with telling rather than showing.