been stuck in a state of limbo between being too tired to work and being too awake to sleep for a few hours now and honestly, this is probably the absolute worst possible state of existence to live in that doesn’t involve sickness, injury, or threat to life

https://e926.net/posts/904858
source: https://www.pixiv.net/artworks/54948594

Hover to show content

@vivi this post made me squeal from how cute you are

bluetooth headphones that report 100% battery with medic tf2's "i am fully charged!"

settling down to a nice homecooked meal of one Ultra Vice Guava Monster ™ and 6 saltine crackers after a long day at the long day factory

@aronia while trying to read this post: “listening to dis comfort song” wait what? “listening to my discount song” … wait, what??? reading very intently the third time ohhh

@vivi i care so much

ouh

'ouhh' is pronounced /ɤ͡uː͡ɯː/ btw if you even care

@arrrg People absolutely still make zines. I get new zines all the time.

Make it about anything you are knowledgeable on, that the fun! Some stuff I have seen and read recently: an art zine about being turned into a humming bird, a zine about trans rights, a surrealist horror zine, a decompression and mental health guide for street medics and activists, a surveillance camera guide, one about veganism, a lot more, but these are just some ideas.

Love zines. Physical zine culture still lives!

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

@kit as one who often writes their own worlds and spends a lot of time doing so, yeah absolutely agree. especially with point B (though all 3 are spot on) – i want to say it’s almost definitely impossible to create a world that is entirely divorced from reality. even if it were possible, i’m not sure if it would really be that interesting because it’d be so foreign and unrelatable that i’m not sure we could get much out of it as creatives or readers.

and to be honest, i think that one of the best elements of writing an alien world is that it is able to speak about our reality better than a story purely about reality. i once had star trek explained to me as “reframing real world issues in a way that makes them unfamiliar so that it’s easier to gain a new perspective” and i think that’s a powerful tool

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

A woman walks up to a librarian and asks, “Do you have the book on Pavlov’s dogs and Schrödinger’s cat?”

The librarian replies, “It rings a bell, but I don’t know if it’s here or not.”

@gothdactyl @vivi moss infected our brains because i have the same reaction. every single time