NO, GOOD

FRONT PAGE OF DREAMWIDTH: 5 DIFFERENT AUDIO FILES PLAYING AT ONCE.
Thanks a lot, Dreamwidth cunts.
I really need to see and hear your ignorant opinions.
Google just needs to get smell-o-vision together and I can enjoy you on all channels.
Maybe a plug in the base of my skull so you can just inject how much of a fucking cunt you are right into the core of my brain.
A little deep gray matter suppository.
Awww yeah lemme ride that I/O.
Anyway I pulled this blog basically at random just to stop the Dreamwidth front page so let's see how this goes.

And... Hm. I think anyone who reads my academic blogging knows by now that I don't hold with the idea of anything not internet-related being more "real", and when people get all smug and self-satisfied about time spent offline - whatever that even means - I want to punch their eyes, but it's frankly been weirdly nice the last few days, being generally not here. Having solid reasons to not write or read things or work on books or do tags. Just fucking unpacking and cleaning and listening to audiobooks and being in our place. 

>The internet has caused us to subtly redefine what we consider real
>this issue has serious ramifications for how we perceive reality
>this dumb slut's solution is to threaten to punch people in the eyes
YOU CAN BUY
NON-REAL THINGS IN VIDEO GAMES WITH REAL MONEY.
HOW DO WE DEFINE VALUE?
BEING A SMUG SLUT ABOUT THIS IS NOT THE RIGHT ANSWER.

It has nothing to do with online vs offline, really. It's just that so much of what I do is digital in nature. So when that aspect of my life is gone, everything gets much simpler. I'll be getting back to work on all that shit soon, and it's not like I DON'T MISS YOU INTERNET, but yeah. In some ways the last week has been beyond exhausting. In others it's been a recharge. 

She talks like she's some big web presence. Like she manages the most popular website on the internet or she's some kind of Youtube celebrity.
You jerk off to Dr. Who fanfiction, probably. Don't act like what you're doing online is somehow more important than what you're doing offline.
Protip: your entire existence is irrelevant.
You are a temporary collection of atoms that will soon disperse for eternity back into the ether never to arrange themselves in that same pattern again.
Every single atom in your body is recycled every five years.
What defines "you" is an increasingly tenuous, retreating idea the more thought you put into it.
Or we could talk about sexism in video games.

Finally, this week I got really annoyed about sexism and video games. Partially inspired by a Thing That Happened in Bioshock Infinite but by no means confined to that. 

OH NO.
AN ACTIVITY NOT CATERED TO MY TARGET GROUP DIDN'T CATER TO ME!
Have you wahms ever considered it's the games you play and not sexism at all?
The typical games you play include such heavy hitting issues as:
colorful color matching
what if you could race mix with aliens or have gay sex on demand?

 the games I play include such heavy hitting issues as:
what is the true nature of man?
what does it mean to be human?
what defines a memory?
You know when I was going through teacher school the most common argument was that "why" was a deeper question than "what".
The more I think about shit the more I realize if you can actually define "what" in an intelligent matter you've already answered everything else.

My proportions are perfect. Perfect is a slippery term; rest assured that there have been teams and focus groups and more focus groups and round after round of men with impressive cars making comments and more teams and redrafts and here we are and here I am, exactly as we have determined you want me.

If I’m not perfect, you can mod me.

If only real life were that simple.

You always say I when you do something. Never he. I killed a bunch of zombies. I got a wicked combo. I jumped a goddamn ice cream truck over a plane. I punched a dragon to death. I was so close to the next checkpoint and then I got sniped in the fucking head. It’s always you.

They’ve gotten a lot of things wrong over the years. Being – sometimes quite literally – a feature of the landscape, I’ve seen it all. Most of us remember Columbine but that was an old story even then. But there’s something else there. It is, indeed, you. You do these things, you make choices, you control – to the extent that the design will let you – and you kill and destroy and possess. You are the subject in this sentence. Not he. Not they. Certainly not her.

You.

What the fuck are you talking about?

Somehow my talk about defining yourself through atoms came out more coherent.

You need to reevaluate your writing ability.

The outcome—a not-guilty verdict for Zimmerman— suggests that Zimmerman did experience a dangerous situation, and his actions—fatally shooting 17 year old Trayvon Martin—were justifiable. To be fair, the verdict technically says that there is a “shadow of a doubt” surrounding Zimmerman’s actual threat level, but the fact remains that 1) Trayvon did not get the benefit of any sort of doubt, and 2) Zimmerman’s innocence necessarily implies a degree of guilt for Martin. This is not to say the verdict was legally wrong. Rather, it is to say that the law needs to be examined in a more critical light.

Not really. You had two options: fuck with him in some capacity (jail, execution, whatever) or let him go. The law states that you can only do the latter if it is beyond a shadow of a doubt that a crime has been committed. 

Two people were party to the event and one of them is dead.

There was no further evidence of foul play and it apparently looked like a case of self defense.

How can you examine the law in more critical light?
What possible steps are there you would rather take?

4000 years of legal code is wrong?

This isn’t fair.

Since when was life ever fair, child? Life is cruel. Life is a mad bitch who spits you into the world, bloody and screaming and drowning in air, and then never forgives you for it. Life is a ravening demon that eats you, cell by cell, and grinds your bones between its teeth. Life drinks your hot blood until your veins crack like dry riverbeds. The greatest lie you have ever been told is that life and death are different things.

And life is also your dear mother, who loves you and wants to see you grow. Growth is painful. But we must all do it anyway.

You are strong enough for this. You are stronger than you know.

Is that fucking dialogue in a book you're writing?
For serious? 

Here let me rewrite this scene for you:

"This isn't fair"

"Sucks shit, huh?"

There you go.

I have fixed your dialogue.

The reduction of complex human identities to sex acts is essentializing. It’s dehumanizing. I’m guessing that most of us have heard someone at some point say something like “I have nothing against those gays. I just don’t want them flaunting it or anything.” Which really means I want them invisible. I don’t want to have to confront the fact that they exist because they threaten me.

If you’re okay with two gay guys walking down the street together but you freak out when you see them making out, yeah, I’m going to call you homophobic. Doesn’t mean you’re an awful person, but you do have some homophobia going on there and maybe you should look to it. By the same token, if you find lady parts viscerally icky – to the point where you say you want to be warned about it, to the point where you call it things like shocking – I’m going to go out on a limb and say you have some internalized misogyny happening.

>writing sex scenes at all

Protip: greatest living author William Gibson spends on average two whole sentences describing sex! 

Oh yeah that's right: the author whose work is sometimes described as "oversexed" barely even talks about it.

You see when you have actual talent--

that is, you're good at something and not a pretentious, whining cunt--

you can imply a lot with a few words.

When I write about drones, I’m not writing about the MQ-1 Predator or the RQ-4 Global Hawk or the Wasp III. I’m writing about that archetype, that nebulous concept that can accommodate any number of assumptions and ideas about what a drone is. That’s why, in my Clarkesworld story, I write:

Hovering over your bed, all sleek chrome and black angles that defer the gaze of radar. It’s a cultural amalgamation of one hundred years of surveillance. There’s safety in its vagueness. It resists definition. This is a huge part of its power. This is a huge part of its appeal.

I think one of the reasons why we find drones so powerful as a concept is that vagueness, that potential for massive accommodation. It’s also one of the things that makes a drone powerful as a literary device. It’s something that can be written about, but not directly; one writes through it in order to write about other things.

Are you fucking stupid?
No, dummy, the reason people like/fear/whatever drones is because they'd be everywhere.

I'm almost 50k words into this thing, which means we have - according to my calculations - reached the approximate halfway point. I know it's slightly risky business to talk about a book in progress, especially given that it may look very different by the time it's published, but I do think there are some things I can say about it with a particular degree of certainty. Which is... pretty certain.

Apparently I'm the only person who says "it's over when it's over."

What'd authors do before you had electronic word counting?

It's much darker. The body count at the end of Line and Orbit was pretty high - we're talking about something like a thousand people or so - and not as many people have died so far in Fall and Rising, but I think by the end Line and Orbit will have been beaten. 

Lol confusing body count with darkness or edginess. 

Quick, pop quiz: what does 1000 people dying look like?

Protip: most people haven't even seen one person die violently so throwing a big fuck off number like 1000 out there makes it sound especially stupid and like a guarantee you'll lose your audience.

I was watching Star Wars: Episode One the other day - yes, I realize that it was a very questionable decision, but hey, we had the Rifftrax - and I noticed something I hadn't before. (By the way, Episode One is actually a great and massive lesson on how not to write a story. I learn new things every time I watch it. I strongly believe that every writer should.) Anyway, what I noticed was that, although this is a movie that ostensibly deals with some Very Serious Themes - themes like slavery and the privation of massive numbers of people and war and death - you see hardly any of the characters really suffering. Nothing truly bad happens to any of them,

>nothing truly bad happens

>10 year old kid gets separated from his mother possibly forever

>guy gets stabbed in the chest with a light saber

>guy gets cut in half and thrown down a space mineshaft 

yeah you're right nothing bad happens.

Just because the writing sucks and they weren't written with any emotion or feeling doesn't mean nothing bad happened.

and you have fucking Jar Jar Binks running around being a racist clown in the middle of a battle where people are dying so when something like the death of Qui-Gon Jinn happens, it has no narrative weight. Nothing does. Everyone is basically safe. You never see anyone really suffer, so you never get the sense that anything meaningful is at stake.

Of course, Lucas also can't write suffering for shit. Watch the other two prequels if you don't believe me. I'm telling you, they're a giant storytelling master class.

So people need to suffer. People you care about need to suffer. Otherwise there's no point. And we're working up to a pretty big climax in the third and final book. So people are going to be hurting.
If the primary theme of Line and Orbit was ecology (and how family kind of sucks sometimes) the primary theme of Fall and Rising appears to be terrorism. 

It appears to be terrorism.

You're not sure.

It's a story you're writing and yet you're unsure of the themes.

And you're lecturing me on how to write?

Also gee a dark scifi/fantasy kinda story with a strong air of mysticism and its main theme is ecology?
Wonder where I've heard that one before, dipshit?

Protip 4: if you're going to rip off scifi you might want to make sure the words "best selling science fiction novel in the world" don't appear in the Wikipedia page for it.

The trees thinned out around her, the path widening, and then they fell away entirely and she came out into the fields, the grass whispering in the breeze and carrying the sweet smell of heather and the bracken that grew at the edge of the wood, mixed with the headier scent of honeysuckle. The light of the sunlamps was deepening into afternoon, and for a moment Nkiruka stood, breathing it in. She tilted her head back. Far above her, through the transparent ceiling, the stars shone in the night that went on forever.

She had not been born on Ashwina but on Suzaku, where the High Fields were drier and faded into patches of red desert, and the Arched Halls were--strangely--lusher and more humid, more like what people described as the equatorial jungles of Terra. She had grown up in those Fields and those Halls, had carried their dust and drifting pollen within her when she came to Ashwina to learn how to fight, to dance the death dances, to pilot an escort fighter. It had been an adjustment but she had made it. She would never love these lands the way she loved the lands that rested at the top of Suzaku’s great bulk, but she had grown to love them all the same.

Anything growing. Miracles in the black.

Brilliant.

I especially liked your description of the ecology.

The ecology of an alien planet that is apparently directly analogous to Earth.

Sort of makes you stop and wonder why the story isn't just set on Holy Terra in the first place.

It could have been going from that.

Also what the fuck does "miracles in black" mean?

okay so I had a great Christmas and then Publisher's Weekly gave my goddamn novel a fucking starred review

Moraine (In the Pale Moonlight) and debut author Soem collaborate on a deliciously fulfilling gay sci-fi romance...Readers will fall for the engaging dialogue, wonderfully fleshed-out characters, a sexy and realistic romance, fully realized world-building, and a genuinely interesting science fictional core issue to work through. This phenomenal novel marks Moraine and Soem as authors to watch.

OKAY SO THAT HAPPENED

"Gay scifi romance"
Basically if you like a little more queer in your SF this is probably something you want to buy.
Well count me on board then HAR HAR HUR
fuck blogs.