why do i have to find an actual job instead of being the apprentice of the old witch who lives in the woods?

can you stop making kissy noises at the malevolent entity, please. you’re scaring it

I think an important instinct you have to build up when you read/watch sci-fi is discerning which things are givens. If Arrival tells you that the alien language is atemporal, it is, that's not a puzzle for you to pick apart, it's a prerequisite to getting the rest of the story. When I talk sci-fi with people who don't consume a lot of it this seems to be a thing they get hung up on.

“But why—“ because it make story go. “But I don’t understand what—“ because that’s how the society works. I told you the important parts, the parts that are relevant to the story. I’m not interested in writing a 200-page speculative history Re the entire course of galactic civilization to explain why it’s rude at dinner time to eat before the ambassador eats. “But I don’t understand how (whatever) works—“ it works because it’s science fiction and that’s how it works. The propulsion systems work because the story requires interstellar travel.

I am more interested in the people and the events and the weird ideas. The weird ideas are just weird ideas, this made up fiction story isn’t a thesis statement predicting why cockroaches will be skilled surgeons 10,000 years in the future.

I think this is really important for writers, too. I know I get hung up on worldbuilding details and it's good to have a reminder that I don't need to reinvent DNA just for an alien to have green skin.

This reminds me of learning about mathematical axioms - I had a very strong impulse to find out Why they were axioms and why they were True. And that's kind of the opposite of how axioms work - the whole point of them is that they don't get justified, and they can be entirely arbitrary. The fun thing is the system of rules and theorems you end up with if you assume they're true

And that's basically how I think about worldbuilding in spec fic - sometimes the most fundamental bits don't have anything supporting them, because they're what supports everything else. (Unless it's turtles all the way down)

It would be funny if nuclear waste warning messages become an attraction for future historical linguists.

I mean look at this thing:

A parallel text in 7 languages, with 4 different scripts between them! And pictograms! All designed to be preserved intact!

maybe nothing of value to you is here

That is legitimately a massive problem that the nuclear waste warning projects are aware of and trying desperately to counteract.

Like, every post about them on tumblr going “lmao let’s be real, if I saw this shit I would stop at nothing to explore it” is highlighting the central conceit of the yucca mountain project.

The project is VERY aware of humanity’s tendency to explore, and the people involved are tormented constantly by the fact that ANYTHING they do to indicate “this specific place is extremely deadly and there’s nothing valuable here, GO AWAY” is going to become a fucking MAGNET for treasure hunters, explorers, adventurers, mystery enthusiasts, conspiracy theorists…like, the MOMENT it’s discovered, people will flood that place.

That’s what makes the project so fascinatingly difficult! There’s so much they have to convey, but at the same time, they have to do so without making the site itself interesting in any way, and without making it significant. Many possible warnings don’t incorporate a message at all, focusing instead on simply making the site as ugly, inconvenient, and unimportant-looking as possible so that it’s just never disturbed because nobody is interested in getting close. (It’s why seemingly crazy ideas like the color-changing cat priesthood are actually more viable than the seemingly “practical” example above, which still depends on written warnings guaranteed to be extremely interesting to future humans AND depends on the idea that those future humans will be able to decipher any of our languages. The most viable ideas focus on exploiting superstition and the subconscious, rather than LITERALLY trying to communicate “This place is not a place of honor” etc in as many words. Those are general ideas to be gotten across, not a script.)

The impossible catch-22 of the nuclear waste warning projects is that they absolutely MUST communicate the level of danger and the importance of keeping your distance…while also being acutely aware that warnings on the walls of ancient burial sites about the horrible curses that would afflict anyone who disturbed them did jack-fuck all to dissuade archaeologists.

Anything we do to make the warning seem important will guarantee it’s disregarded, but if we fail to make the warning unmistakable enough, we’re responsible for whatever happens to the humans ten thousand years in the future who suffer from our mistakes.

growing up reading fantasy books was such a bust cause your whole life you’re left wanting more from life and like there’s something missing and you’re just waiting for that missing part to begin but it’s never gonna come

what if 😱 we kissed 👩‍❤️‍💋‍👩 at the area 51 raid 🥴👩‍🚀👽🥰

send me  💖 + a fandom and i’ll tell you my fav character  

part of me wants to write a post about cryptids and settler-colonialism, but then i think about how incredibly broken my blog is thanks to kardala meta and change my mind

basically there is a difference between “fun weird thing we made up” and “actual being from an Indigenous culture we appropriated as part of the process of destroying their culture” and that’s an important distinction to draw. like, some of the beings that get called cryptids have important cultural context that gets stripped away when they’re shoved into pop culture will-nilly. Navajo skin-walkers are beings that shouldn’t be talked about, unless you want to draw them to you (and you don’t). on the other hand, telling stories about wendigos helps us understand traditional Cree (and Anishinabek) legal orders and customs. b’gwus/sásq'ets (sasquatch/bigfoot) stories have been told up and down the coast of the pacific northwest for thousands of years and now tourist traps run by settlers repackage culture and sell it for a profit that never makes it way back to the people they’re extracting stories from. i’m not expecting people to stop playing with “cryptids,” but i do kinda want everyone to be aware of the places and people these stories come from and that, for us, they have meaning.

Don’t let your confrontational Internet personality get your ass beat in real life