domain:badcyber.com
Earendil
Then over Middle-Earth he passed
1d ago
I await your strident objections over tomorrow's chapter.
Earendil
Then over Middle-Earth he passed
1d ago
A test reader described the tone as 'sublime horror' and while that's not per se what I was going for it seems apt.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
1d ago
Values are fundamental. To a first approximation, no one actually wants values diversity, whether in their fiction or anywhere else. Good things are good, bad things are bad, more bad things are not good.
I think this is more true today than it used to be. Zoomers seem incapable of enjoying a story in which a character has values different from theirs, and furthermore they are prone to assuming that the author is endorsing those values. (This is a generalization and I hope I'm not right, but it's what I gather from most young book reviewers nowadays.)
You say you enjoy the Epic of Gilgamesh and the Pentateuch because of "values-consonance" but how similar are those characters' values to yours, really? Sure, they fit into the general Western monotheistic tradition, but Bronze Age heroes really weren't much like you and IMO the gap between your values and theirs is probably greater than the gap between your values and the average Blue Triber's.
Conversely, do you not enjoy the Iliad and the Odyssey? The Tale of Genji? The Ramayana? Even though they express very different values? Or, if you want to get Jungian, because they express archetypes that aren't so very different after all.
To the original point, though, yes, it's not just modern writers who cannot conceive of characters (especially heroes) with values different from their own. The Victorians were definitely guilty of this. Probably Homer was guilty of this. But here and there we do so some writers who stand out for trying.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
1d ago
Re #1: I have tried Russian and Chinese litrpg and Wuxia, and honestly, maybe you don't like reading about people inappropriately spouting progressive values, but a world of power-hungry psychopaths that read like if KulakRevolt were given super-powers is even more depressing to me. What is there to root for? Why would I want any of these people to win?
Re #2: Agreed that the John Carter movie was good and tragically mismarketed, but (seconding @WhiningCoil) the books are fun but if you've read the first couple you've read them all, and this is actually true of a lot of the old pulp stuff (like Tarzan, Conan, Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser, Lensmen, etc.) They all follow a very predictable formula and the writing is often not up to modern standards either. Even some of the more modern classics (Robert Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, Larry Niven) don't really stand the test of time, IMO.
Re #3: I see ranting all over the Internet that "No one is writing books (men) want to read" when there is in fact an entire ecosystem of indie-published authors doing just that. Now a lot of what they write is awful, and a lot of it is marketed with not much more of a hook than "This will really trigger blue-haired progs!" but apply Sturgeon's Law and you can still find gold amidst the dross. (Devon Eriksen and Travis J Corcoran come to mind- also plenty of right-wing trad published authors like Larry Correia and John C. Wright).
anon_
1d ago
It could. But I predict it is extremely unlikely in any given chance.
So much so that I think any parent gambling on "I'm gonna defy the court and get a media shitstorm that causes it to reevaluate in my favor" is making an extremely irresponsible bet.
zPvQINBQvfFR
1d ago
It could also draw media attention to your case, cause a shitstorm, and force somebody to actually look into it and fix the problem. The martyr strat sometimes works.
anon_
1d ago
I have an extremely strong prior that courts very reverse custody agreements in favor of a parent that violated their previous order. In fact, there is standing caselaw that violating of a family court order is unfit.
I'm also kind of shocked. The statement "if you violate a custody order you are more likely to be judged unfit" is so much the default presumption that I think the burden really ought to be on the contrary of "the court will not construe violating an existing custody order against the violating party".
In any event, there is sufficient citation to it in existing caselaw.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
1d ago
I think you underestimate the degree to which many of these communities (e.g., trans, disabled, "neurodivergent," etc.) simultaneously regard themselves as oppressed and in need of unlimited support and validation, and totally valid and not in need of "fixing" and any suggestion that magic or sufficiently advanced technology would basically "cure" them is equivalent to suggesting genocide.
I am not exaggerating; I've seen disabled activists, for example, when it's pointed out that medical technology that could grow new limbs and organs would eliminate blindness, deafness, paralysis, and many other defects, respond that this is ableist and instead, such an advanced society should reconfigure public infrastructure to be more accommodating to "differently abled" people.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
1d ago
As a known steadfast supporter of my feminist idol, JK Rowling... it really doesn't bear thinking about too deeply. I am actually an unironic fan of the Harry Potter series, but it's absolutely not the sort of world in which the author spent a lot of time doing the kind of "worldbuilding" that engages with the real world and considers how magic would actually affect it. The Potterverse is less plausible than any superhero universe (which is saying something). It's meant to be English boarding school drama, with wizards. Rowling invented spells because they were clever, funny, or solved a temporary plot hole, and then forgot about them. "But why don't wizards just...?" is a question that will drive you crazy if you let yourself ask it once.
JarJarJedi
1d ago
As a context/reminder, here's what kind of "journalists" Al-Jazeera is hiring: https://nypost.com/2024/06/09/world-news/gaza-journalist-held-3-hostages-in-his-home-with-his-family-israeli-military-says/
jake
1d ago
Nice. I'm a bit of an architecture nerd, especially for houses. Within the last year or so I came across Cliff Tan, aka "Dear Modern", famed internet feng shui expert. I had no opinions on feng shui before watching his videos, or the closest I had was Frank Lloyd Wright's epithet against interior decorators as "inferior desecrators." But watching Tan redraw floorplans, or make perspective drawings of rooms he then modifies to have harmonious feng shui, the work speaks for itself and I'm a believer. I wouldn't say in energy flow as such, but energy flow as a phrase to describe the ineffable feeling of a living space that's just "right." And it's repeatable, anybody can follow the rules of feng shui to rearrange their living spaces. I'd already mostly arrived on it intuitively, but those slight touches work, and I did it for the sunroom at my parents' house and my dad immediately said it was better.
I have a couple MagicaVoxel models I worked on just for fun around the time I started watching Tan's vids. The first was an idea I had before that I'd gone through a few versions of before starting over with some of the ideas of feng shui. The kitchen is both too open yet claustrophobic, I was thinking of it as something like an architectural challenge. I had the idea of you having to enter a courtyard to even reach the main entrance of the house, and I wanted a kitchen on the courtyard, but as you can see I weigh symmetry heavily so that resulted in me putting the kitchen as the main entrance, and that's bad. The rooms on the other side of the courtyard are bedrooms, the halls on them have slightly better flow, though the bedrooms should be like a sitting room and an office, and the blue rooms on the halls are bathrooms and should be flipped with the doors beside them for best flow, and then the doors to the left and the right of the kitchen removed in favor of windows. Of course what would be actually best is for the courtyard to open to a small foyer, then a sitting room, then I'd personally put another courtyard with halls on either side to reach kitchen/dining . . . if I return to this it will be to start over again.
Which I kind of did back then, when I realized I'd modeled myself into a corner, was go to just modeling a room.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
1d ago
I've tried a few LitRPGs and web novels and find very few of them readable. Most are badly written fanfiction-tier slop that could (and soon will) be pretty easily generated by AI.
Your genre complaints are, IMO, applicable to the majority of SF&F today in general.
That said, "Hefting his mace, he swung at her as hard as he could" is not great writing (and noticeable when the author uses that construct over and over, which unfortunately I have seen even some better writers do) but it's neither switching tenses nor ungrammatical. It's a present participial.
anon_
1d ago
The health and welfare of the child is not served by having the only responsible parent thrown in jail and discredited in the eyes of the court.
So I agree with the standard that it's the health and welfare of the child. But unless you have a strong predictive reason to think you can beat the law, it's extremely unlikely that disregarding the court order meets your first rule rule.
JarJarJedi
1d ago
There's no snark there. By USSR laws, a lot of minor acts were criminalized - like being late to work, or any unauthorized usage of kolkhoz property (which was just forcibly taken from the farmers) - e.g. the infamous Law of Three Spikelets so a lot of people that were convicted under supposedly "criminal" articles weren't actually bandits, rapists or bums - they were average citizens trying to survive in the hellscape of total terror. "The data" (which btw you neglected to support with any evidence) can't tell you that, you need a little knowledge about what actually was going on.
FtttG
1d ago
You're dead right. In Ireland and the UK, there's something of a tradition of watching Love, Actually every Christmas, a movie I loathe. My girlfriend was curious so we went to see it in the cinema. On Christmas Day we ended up watching Bridget Jones's Diary, and even though I'm not a romcom dude, it was head and shoulders above Love, Actually. It's legitimately funny, and there's actual chemistry between the three leads.
hydroacetylene
1d ago
What's available to you is being an employee of a plumbing company and that makes little money and is phisically draining on top, hence nobody wants to do it.
Plumbers make a lot more than the members of the social class they're recruited from typically do.
More to the point, I think, in the Potterverse and in most pre-Millenium British fantasy magic has an implicit moral understructure. For example, the love of one person sacrificing themself for another is a powerful protective force against evil. Dumbledore makes it pretty clear that there are far deeper forces in the world than the paltry stuff that wizards usually throw around and regularly criticises Voldemort for fundamentally misunderstanding how magic works. You cannot feed yourself on magic - you cannot transfigure food. There is literally a room full of Love in the Department of Mysteries that is so terrible and dangerous that his lock-pick melts when he tries to enter.
I suspect that part of this moral superstructure is the implicit rule that you cannot magically hide your true self for long. Voldemort literally becomes ugly as he mutilates his soul. Harry’s father has an inherent nobility and his Animagus form is a stag, where Wormtail becomes a rat, and it is not possible I think for that to be reversed.
Trans people then seem to be ruled out. Even if you believe the trans identity is the reality, then I would think that spells would work better.
hydroacetylene
1d ago
Or, more likely, they'll declare war on sparrows and lose. This is the CCP approaching a task that's legitimately difficult.
Corvos
1d ago
Have you ever watched Primeval? It was made in the early 2000s with the tech from Walking With Dinosaurs and broadly follows that premise.
Fan-trailer here: https://youtube.com/watch?v=JLir0TDJ3GY?feature=shared
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
1d ago
Oof, I wasn't aware of that. It's just such a failure of imagination, to me. In a world where magic exists and can change you in all kinds of ways, nobody would be trans as an identity! They would just be a woman (or man) by virtue of magic, and nobody else would ever know who didn't know that person before. If anything, these writers are missing out on some interesting material - in a world where you can change sex as easily as putting on a magical girdle, what do gender roles and the relationship between sexes look like? Surely, nothing like our world, and that could be really interesting to explore! But no, instead people have to waste interesting material by forcing it to be a morality lesson about our world instead of letting the fictional world be its own interesting thing. It's so aggravating. :(
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
1d ago
baited breath
ABigGuy4U
1d ago
His post MCU run isn't exactly a Pattinson/Radcliffe-style rush to stretch himself.
Neither was his pre-MCU career.
Some of the LITRPG genre is famous for having Russian writers. Reading some of their stuff made me feel downright progressive at times.
I await your recommendations with bated breath.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1d ago
I mean in most circumstances sure, but I think the thing gets a bit complicated when you know your kid will be horrifically abused raped etc. every day he remains with the custodial parent, you don’t have the months to years a court process can take. A kid getting pimped out nightly to men so mom can afford drugs doesn’t have years. The environment is much too dangerous, and leaving them there while they languish is unsafe for the child.
First rule is the health and welfare of the child. The second rule is follow the law if possible.
"Funny" Anecdote about SW - they have (had?) one of the most sociopathic and dysfunctional IT departments I've ever worked with. One of two clients my firm has ever fired.
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