I found a group of people very passionately talking about how much they hate it when writers base their fictional worlds on the real world, and how horribly lazy they think it is, and how any writer that does that is a loser, and so on and so forth, and all I can think is “okay. so?”

to be clear, I do think truly original worldbuilding is wonderful and I always love to see it. I just don’t understand at all how someone could think of that as the bare minimum when:
A: it’s as difficult as it is even for the most creative of people
B: even the most alien worlds are still always tied to reality one way or another, whether or not the writer intended it
C: the real world is as ridiculous and sometimes unbelievable as it is anyway
and D: there are so many great stories that reality never told, and telling those stories often works best in a world resembling our own

you know what I think is lazy? fiction that’s just straight up in the real world. why would you ever want to write what is essentially fanfiction of reality? are you so uncreative that you can only imagine things when it’s feasible that they could have happened outside your door? and on the other hand, why would you ever want to read this kind of fiction? are you so unimaginative that anything that you don’t immediately recognize and could point to on a map makes your brain short circuit?

I jest, of course. everything I just said sounds ridiculous, right? I think that group I encountered sounded equally ridiculous

though there was a grain of truth there, I personally really don’t enjoy real-world fiction very much. I want things that are new and interesting, but I also appreciate many aspects of the real world, and I think worldbuilding that uses reality as its base of inspiration is a great way to play with that

my own world is (currently) inspired by parts of the real world, and I don’t feel lazy for doing that, I feel that it’s given me many opportunities to learn things about some world history and cultures that I never otherwise would have, because I put a lot of thought into this thing so I could create something unique, believable, and recognizable, all at once. it’s still my world, after all. I built it, I didn’t just take it

I can foresee certain types of people hearing me say this and responding with something about escapism, so I also want to point out that this is specifically not about escapism. if I, or anyone else interested in this type of worldbuilding, wanted pure escapism, we would be writing high fantasy or some such, stuff that’s completely detached from reality (on the surface anyway). I specifically don’t want that though, there are things I want to say and perspectives I want to explore here, in this world, and I don’t think trying to do that in a completely disconnected world would be the same, because that clear, grounded recognizability is part of the message, and it would be missing that way. if the only two acceptable kinds of fiction to you are 100% realism and 100% escapism, then you have a skill issue, writers and readers alike

there’s one thing I can probably agree with that group on though. it is lazy to just copy and paste something from the real world wholesale and change nothing but the name. but that’s not what they were talking about at the time

@theking and yeah Zachtronics solitaire is fantastic. I’ve played both of the ones in Last Call BBS, plus the one in Shenzhen I/O and love all of them

@theking omg they made a whole collection of them? I honestly love the really “basic” games like solitaire and minesweeper lol. one of my favorite game collections ever is the Simon Tatham Portable Puzzle Collection

“ugh that’s enough solving messy computer problems for today. time to relax with a nice Zachtronics game”

@OctaviaConAmore I’m really glad to hear it! I was worried that it was only working for me tbh

@emberquill I’m so glad it’s not just me. to be honest I genuinely thought that every DNS address was going to work equally well? I had no idea that duckdns could actually be worse than some other DNS address for any reason other than just the aesthetics of the domain name. but ugh, at least now I have what is hopefully a much better DNS setup

@tempest woah wtf? how does this work? I’m guessing this is an abstraction that Nix puts on top of the NGINX config? this looks so much nicer though @_@

I want to get isekai’d to a world where all the boring shitty parts of computer-touching are really easy but all the fun parts are just as hard. and configuring NGINX looks like:

proxy_to: 127.0.0.1:8080;
also_use_ssl_please;
thank_you_bye;

administrating a Linux server is worse than CSS and JS combined

related, but I’ve been having DNS issues with duckdns and others have been reporting the same, so you can now also access #GAGSProject through https://gags-search.xyz/

so if you’re having problems with https://gags-search.duckdns.org/ , try using the new URL instead. it should be faster and better

@ShadowJonathan I will never not boost Tom Cardy

#PSA: You are more interesting than your job.

#Tip: When someone asks "what do you do?", tell them about your weird bug collection, or your last hike, or that cool series you pirated recently.