After a day of breathless speculation about whether or not Beyoncé was performing at the 50th CMA Awards, she showed up about two hours into the show to bring the house down with the Dixie Chicks and “Daddy Lessons.”
Concept: fantasy species where the ladies are nine-foot-tall horrors of teeth and claws and the men look like lithe twentysomething pretty-boys wearing body paint.
(Well, except for the Wise Elders. You can tell when a male is a Wise Elder because he looks mid thirties instead of early twenties and trades in the twinky underwear model aesthetic for a stubbly-yet-well-groomed Hot Dad vibe.)
Why does he think he’s hideous? I would imagine that he thinks that he is handsome and his sister is beautiful.
I suspect he’s well aware of how far askew his people’s beauty standards are from those of the humans he’s talking to, and he’s being deadpan sarcastic.
(Messing with humans’ minds is a time-honoured tradition, after all.)
Let’s get ready to TUMBLE… reblog it reblog it reblog it reblog it reblog it reblog it reblog it reblog it reblog it reblog it reblog it reblog it reblog it reblog it reblog it reblog it reblog it reblog it reblog it reblog it reblog it Tumblr Gets Deep: Next Page–>
my fav trope is like, nonhuman characters not understanding human needs/customs but still being super supportive of their human companion
“look what I found while exploring this planet’s surface!” “kilrak please I’m trying to sleep” “ah yes your human circadian rhythm. *stage whispering* I am supposed to be quiet during this time in your rhythm, yes?”
“the book I purchased on ragnok V says humans require physical touch when upset. therefore, I shall engage in a ‘hug’ with you.” *supremely awkward five-armed hug ensues*
*human sneezes* “OH MY GOD SIL'EEN GET THE MEDIC OUR HUMAN IS DYING”
“this pamphlet I received recently says that humans require companions and packmates in the form of small earth creatures. you should have told me this before we departed earth, but it is no worry. we will have to stop at the next trade planet to get you one of these ‘cats’ or ‘dogs’.”
imagine the aliens really purchasing a kitten for one of their rough and world-weary scifi badass human companions and watching in helpless wonderment what ensues
“she’s been cuddling that small animal for the past fifteen minutes just going ‘kitty, kitty’. did we - did we break our human?”
a more seasoned alien puts one of their tentacles around the younger one as the rest of the team gathers to watch their human make kissy noises.
“no, kilrak,” the alien says. “we did good.”
“Human-Steve! I have heard that today is the anniversary of your hatching! According to my human culture pamphlet, it is customary to set a sugary pastry on fire while chanting your species’ growth incantation and presenting sacrifices wrapped in shiny paper. I am afraid to ask, in case this ritual is sacred and this request therefor insensitive… but may I be allowed to participate? It sounds much more fascinating than molting.”
“Human Steve, I have read about your ritual dance called ‘The Hokey Pokey,’ performed mostly at mate-bonding celebrations after the guests reach an elevated level of intoxication. But Human Steve, how do I know WHICH left foot to put in, put out, and shake all about? I do not… Human Steve, why are you laughing?”
“Human-Steve, you are… you are eating, but it is not one of your ritual fueling times. Are you dying? Is everything alright? Have you not been receiving enough sustenance? Do I need to get you better things to eat? Human-Steve, why are you trying to hide that food?”
“Human-Steve, my research has informed me of a grave oversight in your care that I, as your companion, have made! Thus, I have gathered collections of fictional human literature to read aloud at the time of your bed. Which is more to your liking: “The Care and Keeping of Cacti” or “1001 Crossword Puzzles?” Human-Steve? Human-Steve, I am serious.“
So Facebook just informed me that it’s “Stress Awareness Day” and that seems sort of unhelpful because if you need to be made aware of the existence of stress you’re probably in a coma. Except comas are probably stressful too because you’re trying … Continue reading →
So, the new Ghostbusters movie comes out. Bill Murray wears "I ain't afraid of no goats" shirt at Cubs game. Cubs curse is broken.
Coincidence? Seriously?
The Cubs breaking their 108-year losing streak kind of threw a wrench into the plot for John Scalzi’s futuristic Old Man’s War sci-fi series.
The Cubs’ curse gets a few mentions from various characters in Scalzi’s series (the first book of which was published a decade ago), and it’s even a key plot point in 2013’s The Human Division. So, if you’re reading the Old Man’s War books as indicative of a future time, they either have to take place another 108 years from 2016 (to maintain the mythology about a century-plus-long curse), or exist in a parallel universe in which the Cleveland Indians won.
Or, you don’t worry about reading them as an accurate prediction of the future and just enjoy the fact that our society’s progress and its fiction are in a state where they constantly leapfrog each other. In fact, Scalzi writes, the cognitive dissonance that now exists reflects the fate that has befallen plenty of classic canon sci-fi:
But of course, with all those assertions above, it’s possible I might be rationalizing just a tiny bit. In which case, yup, it’s time to come right out and admit it: Now the Old Man’s War books suffer from the same problem as all the science fiction stories before 1969 that named a first man on the moon, or the ones that imagined canals on Mars. The real world caught up to them and passed them by, waving as it did so.
And that’s okay. This is the risk you take when you put a plot point in your books that’s contingent on the real world. It is the fate of science fiction books and other media to be continually invalidated by real-world events, or at least, to have the real world catch up to it and then have the work, by necessity, consigned to a nearby but undeniably alternate universe. This had already happened to the Old Man’s War series in a small ways (no one calls hand-held computers “PDAs” anymore, but the folks in the OMW series do, because that’s what they called them in 2001, when I wrote the first book), and in larger ways for other books of mine. Agent to the Stars, for example, has a plot point involving an elderly Holocaust survivor. In 1997, when I wrote that book, that was still a reasonable thing. Today in 2016, it’s a pretty long stretch. In another ten years, Agent to the Stars will undeniably take place in the past, in an alternate universe.
The real world catches up to science fiction. It always does.
What’s interesting is that only a generation or two from now, a Cubs team whose identity has never been tied up in the curse could pick up The Human Division and laugh at this now-alternate take on the World Series. How quaint the sci-fi writers of the early 21st century were!
Just as ‘08 and ‘12 Obama “evolved” on marriage equality, Hillary has recently been “evolving” on issues like TPP, student loans, & BlackLivesMatter. Not all there yet, but a start.
Trump wants trickle down economics, a reinstatement of stop and frisk, and conservative SCOTUS nominations to reverse our progress. He will not “evolve” for us no matter how much we lobby.
I know we all want and deserve more progress. Many young voters want to sit out unless a candidate has it all. Voter silence is a mistake that will hurt us. Staying home won’t “revolutionize the system.” The system is used to youth voter apathy. They ignore us because we won’t pressure them.
We have to use our voices, vote for the person most likely to listen, & shout & lobby till we achieve our goals. Please. It works. Apathy doesn’t.
#Hillary2016 to protect our progress from Trump. #Hillary2016 so the person we lobby for the next 4 years might actually listen. It does seem like she’s starting to, or we wouldn’t have seen this:
Pro tip: If you know someone has issues with their immune system, tell them if you get sick. If you have plans, let them know you’re sick (yes, even if you’re “mostly over it”). If they choose to risk it, then at least it’s their choice, and they can take extra steps to avoid catching your bug.
If they ask to reschedule, or do go but refuse to touch you or get to close, don’t get angry. Don’t be offended. They’re literally just trying to look out for their health.
Even if it’s a scratchy throat, or you feel a little stuffed up, and you’re not “really sick”, still say something.
friendly reminder that since a lot of people have decided xmas now starts right after halloween: not everyone celebrates xmas or wants to participate. don’t shame people for not participating in xmas traditions or blacklisting xmas. if people ask to not be wished a merry xmas, don’t wish them a merry xmas. don’t get upset if people express their frustrations with how christian normativity makes it impossible to escape this non-secular holiday for almost two months. if people want nothing to do with xmas, please just let them be.
“And democracy requires compromise, even when you are 100 percent right. This is hard to explain sometimes. You can be completely right, and you still are going to have to engage folks who disagree with you. If you think that the only way forward is to be as uncompromising as possible, you will feel good about yourself, you will enjoy a certain moral purity, but you’re not going to get what you want. And if you don’t get what you want long enough, you will eventually think the whole system is rigged. And that will lead to more cynicism, and less participation, and a downward spiral of more injustice and more anger and more despair. And that’s never been the source of our progress. That’s how we cheat ourselves of progress.”
If you think that the only way forward is to be as uncompromising as possible, you will feel good about yourself, you will enjoy a certain moral purity, but you’re not going to get what you want.
Welcome to the Tor.com eBook Club! November’s pick is Spin, the first book in a sci-fi trilogy from Robert Charles Wilson. You have until Monday, November 7th to get your FREE ebook copy—but first, here’s what makes this Hugo award-winning novel stand out from the pack!
In the first Superman film, our hero flies around the Earth with such speed that it alters the rotation of the planet and begins to turn back time. This scene wouldn’t leave me alone as I read Robert Charles Wilson’s Spin for the second time. The book begins when three children witness the stars disappearing from the sky. The Earth, now encased inside a bubble, is thrust out of time, slowed to the point that for every year on Earth, millions pass outside the bubble or, as they call it, the Spin.
Wilson grounds his phenomenon in scientific terms, but I could not help but think of the Spin as Superman, flying along the equator, slowing down time to a crawl. I can’t imagine that’s what the author had in mind, but such is the beauty of reading. We bring what we will to the text.
Although the science fictional conceit is central to the plot, which follows the unraveling of who put the Spin in place around the Earth and why, Spin is actually more a family drama than science fictional adventure. Tyler Dupree and Diane and Jason Lawton watch the stars go out from the sky together. Through Jason’s father, E.D. Lawton, the trio find themselves at ground zero of humanity’s response to the Spin and our climb to free ourselves from its clutches.
Spin is a tremendous novel that won the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 2006. I love it and here’s five reasons you will too.
The Creeping Apocalypse
The Spin shows up one day and the world ends, or at least it will. As time flows more slowly on Earth, the rest of the solar system races toward a dying sun. This is when the Earth, long since passed beyond the ‘goldilocks zone’, will no longer support human life. But that fact is a few generations off. How many no one knows for sure, but distant enough that the Earth ends not with a bang, but with a whimper, edging toward self-destruction in fits and starts. We elect continually more extreme politicians. We pursue continually more hedonistic choices. We don’t care who we hurt because it will all be over soon. Or will it? The humans in Spin know they will die, either when time ends or the Spin disappears and unleashes the sun to scour the Earth’s surface. And so, Wilson offers us a car crash in slow motion—the slow descent into anarchy. It is eerie and haunting and all together too real for comfort.
Following the Thread
Robert Charles Wilson has a knack for causation. The barrier comes down, decoupling Earth from the flow of time. What happens next? The entire novel is in many ways an answer to this question. How do we communicate without satellites? How would this change the economy? What kind of people would we elect? What sort of weapons would we bring to bear against the Spin? And, ultimately, how would we react to the rapid extinction of our species? Wilson finds the internal logic of his world and never deviates, fully immersing the reader in his carefully constructed reality with an unmatched verisimilitude.
Mission to Mars
As far as space colonies go, the one in Spin is extraordinary. Why? It all comes down to time. Interplanetary space travel is impractical, not necessarily because we lack the technology to make it happen, but because of the travel time involved. How do we support human life for such an extended period of time in the harshness of space and still have resources left at the other end to start a new life? Now consider that the Earth is moving at a fraction of a faction of the temporal speed as Mars. How does that change the timetable? I won’t spoil it here by spelling it out, but suffice it to say Wilson’s solution is clever, and the implications of a human planet with a few extra millions years of evolution even more so.
Family Drama
I opened this article with the idea that Spin is more family drama than anything else and boy, is it: the relationship between the twins—Jason and Diane—and Tyler Dupree, their dearest friend caught in the middle, offers a fascinating triangle. Jason, a once-in-a-generation kind of young mind, wants nothing more than to please his father. Diane wants nothing more than to distance herself from everything. Tyler wants nothing more than Diane. In addition to these three young people growing up beneath the starless sky, we also meet their parents, whose desires flit on the sidelines, charting the course for their children’s lives. Even as the world ends, the connectiveness of family never ceases to reign supreme.
Faith
If there’s a central argument in Spin, it is this: the only faith humanity should indulge in is faith in each other. Naturally, as the world ends, people turn to religion. End-of-days cults are scattered across the landscape. Through Diane we become privy to some of their machinations, and get a sense of the depths to which we might sink to bring about some misguided sense of closure. Jason places his faith in technology, in ingenuity, in the unseen hand that created the Spin. And what does Tyler believe in? He believes in Jason and Diane, keeping the faith of their friendship above all else. He is their confessor and, often, their redeemer.
These are my five reasons you’ll love Spin, and I suspect you all have your own. I’d love to hear them.
It’s usually done so humans are presented as “average”. In my conception, humans are the daredevils. The one thing a human loves more than watching another human do something horribly unsafe is doing something unsafe themselves.
It’s said that the stout and serious dwarves invented the first staircase, but it was a human who came up with the idea of surfing down the staircase on an oaken shield.
Elves have lived in the great Hometree overlooking the Mother River for untold ages. It was a human who first had the idea to jump out of the tree and into the river.
That’s the other thing - dwarves are stout and hardy, but like the stone they came from, once they break, they’re broken. Humans recover impossibly fast by the standards of other races. They’re also the first ones to get up after an explosion or cave-in, with a cheerful “I’m okay!” They can’t take as much as a dwarf, but nobody beats humans at getting back up again and again and again for more punishment.
The Hobbits appreciate Human vigor, their good cheer, and certainly their lusty appetite for food and drink, but the utter glee with which humans will attempt to harm themselves or their fellows in a misguided attempt at “fun” is horrifying. Their rituals and celebration - they let themselves be charged by bulls! - are seen as a testament to human ingenuity, creativity, and utter lack of good sense.
The humans who are most highly regarded by their peers are those who excel at SOMETHING. Dancing, throwing, singing, fighting - humans love watching other humans be excellent at things, even something otherwise pointless and wasteful, like throwing knitting needles into melons.
They are, to a fault, resilient. No Elves would DARE return to a failed settlement. The land is cursed and the dead walk there. Humans will rebuild the same castle over again with the same standing stones.
TL;DR - only humans would invent the X-Games.
Humans are Weird: Fantasy Edition
dwarf: my heart is strong as a mountain
elf: to hear the song of the trees you must cultivate stillness
hobbit: when you get right down to it, there’s no place like home
Also the Pro-life movement used his line “a person’s a person no matter how small” on their literature without his permission, and he made them stop using it an apologize because he was pro-choice.
“if you want to adopt kids at an older age, that’s just lazy and you’ll miss the important developmental years. you won’t be able to connect.” okay but consider this:
1. I will not be able to handle a baby, but I will definitely be able to manage and guide an older child
2. no diapers. hallelujah
3. As a foster child gets older, their chance of adoption plummets. Adopting an older child gives a late break to someone who would have otherwise had to age out of the system
4. my plans for adoption are none of your concern
PLEASE CONSIDER THIS.
“As a foster child gets older, their chance of adoption plummets. Adopting an older child gives a late break to someone who would have otherwise had to age out of the system”
I’m glad there are people that share this sentiment
People of all ages meet new people and find a variety of different types of love in them… familial, platonic, deep, romantic, anything. Age doesn’t change your ability to find family. There is NOTHING about an older child that makes them unable to ~emotionally connect~ with you as family. Will it be hard? Sure. Will it take a while? Sure. Guess what OTHER ages take a while? BABIES. TODDLERS. They’re shitting themselves and don’t understand family fully until they’re older ANYWAY. You can find love at any age, you can connect at any age. Give an older child a chance if you can. They can find a family in you as much as you can find a family in them.
OK, but what kind of monster puts nuts in muffins in the first place?
Muffins are easier to make than you might think, and even if you grab a boxed mix from the store, you can give yours a little something special by mixing in some candied nuts. The end result is a normally plain muffin with a crunchy sweet treat in every bite.
If the mean people in our lives were crappy 100% of the time, it would be easy to leave them. We would shrink from becoming friends with them or jump aboard the nope rocket in the early stages of trouble, and we would feel only relief when they are gone from our lives.
The problem is that very few people are evil all the time. They don’t wear villain costumes purchased at ForeverEvil. They don’t laugh maniacally and stroke their evil goatees while monologuing about their evil plans. They appear in our lives as People-Who-Would-Be-Awesome-Except-For-That-One-Glaring-Problem. They have potential to be awesome, and sometimes they are awesome, and they make us feel awesome, so we relax and let out that breath we’ve been holding in, and then BAM! They show their mean side, and we do a ton of mental work trying to reconcile the mean stuff with the awesome stuff.
Breaking up brings relief, as you lose the constant mental labor of managing the relationship AND the stress of being constantly disappointed and hurt, but it also brings grief. Shitty people who forget your birthday and give little backhanded compliments and gossip about your secrets sometimes give really good hugs, or presents, or are your favorite people to get drunk and watch figure-skating with, or were the sole witness to an important time in your life. The good times were real.
I cannot express how much of a lightbulb moment it was when I realized people did not have to be unilaterally awful in order for you not to want to be in a relationship with them
And now I’m imagining a thousand years ago, some women around a fire, and one of them’s all “And then Loki and
Angrboða had another baby, and this one was a massive snake.”
And the second is all “UGH, HILDA, NO. That sounds ridiculous. Loki would never cheat on Sigyn.”
And Hilda’s all “Whatever, Ingrid: no concrit! Don’t like, don’t read! But you write Loki completely OOC, he doesn’t care about Sigyn at all! She’s so boring anyway. He’s a trickster. He’s way too busy having sex to give a shit about.”
“NO WAY HE LOVES HER.”
“If you keep going on about your OTP I’m going to make him fuck a horse next time. And he’ll be the one having the babies!”
And Ingrid stomps off to write about Loki and Sigyn having beautiful, meaningful sex where they stare lovingly at each other.
And then a third woman is all, “Hilda all your fic is about Loki’s dick. Why don’t you write about women occasionally??”
And Hilda is like, “Ugh, Brigida, write your own.”
And then Brigida is all, “FINE, I WILL. AND I’M GIVING HEIMDALL NINE MOMS.”
