finnanbeaton

[finnanbeaton]

problem: the only nongendered characters who show up in sci fi and fantasy are aliens/robots/hiveminds/other entities without a human concept of gender, where the whole joke is how them not understanding our norms makes them weird

solution, part 1 (the actually important part): write more stories about characters who do grow up with our gender binary and still choose to reject it

solution, part 2: This Swarm Of Insects Has Reflected Long And Hard On The Nature Of Identity And Personhood, And Decided He Still Identifies As A Man

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It's a day late for world building Wednesday, but this is the stuff that's going on in Spindle. Access to tech is behind a citizenship wall, which is proprietary tech that gets dicey in places. Biomodification is de rigueur, same goes for cybernetic augmentation. However, you've got a combination of a) prosthetics are commonplace/disability gets an overhaul b) depending on who contracted you when you lost said limb they might own your arm/leg/eye if you decide to quit or try to change jobs. How else do you keep a stranglehold on cargo and shipments when 3d printers are stupid cheap to make and are being used in many places.

While it’s important to recognise where early cyberpunk literature is coming from with respect to its skepticism of body modification, it feels like a lot of folks are basically using that to excuse the ableism of modern cyberpunk.

Yes, it’s true that much of the chrome angst in first-wave cyberpunk literature is explicitly tied to the corporate state’s efforts to abolish personal bodily autonomy, and to the extent that having a robot arm is construed as dehumanising, it’s dehumanising because a corporation owns your arm, not because prosthetics are evil.

However, it’s equally true that the “prosthetics eat your soul” horseshit of later cyberpunk lit is something that popular cyberpunk authors were very much complicit in. They wanted to retain the chrome angst as an aesthetic trapping while dialing back its political dimension in order to better appeal to mainstream audiences; to this end, the idea that having cyborg parts is intrinsically dehumanising was enthusiastically embraced. This isn’t a pop-cultural misunderstanding at work – it’s a shift in attitude that’s present in the literature itself.

Furthermore, that transition happened relatively early in the genre’s history, and was probably the norm rather than the exception no later than the mid 1990s. For those keeping count, that was 25 years ago, which is considerably longer than first-wave cyberpunk managed to remain culturally relevant. Basically, cyberpunk sold out, and it sold out early!

The fact that literary cyberpunk had some interesting things to say about bodily autonomy in 1984 – and that the chrome angst is a core component of that commentary – doesn’t give the genre a free pass for all the subsequent “prosthetics eat your soul“ stuff, and it certainly doesn’t mean that the two thirds of the genre’s entire history can be excused as “not real cyberpunk” on that basis. If you want to constructively address that shit, first you’ve got to own it!

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I always hire my guests to help me with ‘chores’ (if they’re willing!), the kind of task that’s fun at first but less fun when you have to keep going for hours (burning all the broom bushes in the pasture, picking many kg of berries to make syrup, carrying a mountain of logs into the wood shed and building stable log piles so they don’t come cascading down later…) And every time I’m amazed by the way humans can make the most tedious tasks genuinely fun through… group dynamics? just the way people start interacting and bonding with each other when everyone is focused on the same repetitive physical activity. It’s hard to find examples because it’s always so specific to each situation; but I mean things like

people spontaneously specialising and developing a feeling of expertise and pride in their subtrade, no matter how silly (putting away firewood involved one Log Selecter outside going back and forth delivering logs to two Pile Builders who piled them up in the shed, and each rapidly created their own well-oiled System and became convinced it would be hard to replace them now that they had mastered their craft)

new vocabulary being coined and immediately adopted (the Pile Builders came up with nicknames for logs of different lengths and shapes so they could ‘order’ them from the Log Selecter more efficiently—”I’ve got a One-Armed Bandit here, I need another one to fit next to it, but with an ‘arm’ on the other side” “Here” “The arm is on the same side!” “Just turn it around and the arm will be on the other side”)

songs emerging almost by themselves (a song about fishing mussels was repurposed into a song about picking plums; a whole new song was invented to encourage weirdly-shaped logs to fit in with the others as we tried to fill all the gaps)

stories being told. Weaving a trivial task into a complex imaginary plot and context to make it more entertaining and meaningful

the extremely human compulsion to write down our knowledge to share it with future generations (I was told to take note of the best & quickest knot to tie up foliage when making tree hay, for the benefit of whoever does it next summer)

beliefs as to the Right Way To Do Things quickly solidifying into myths or superstitions, as we forget what drove us to do things this way in the first place, but trust that we had good reasons so now it’s the Way It’s Done

I always tell people to help only if they feel like it and we can stop anytime and I’ll finish later by myself, but what usually happens instead is that they want to come back at the same time next year to do this exact chore again because of how they’ve made it theirs in just a few days (or in one afternoon!) Give a group of humans a banal task and while they’re at it they will come up with a whole new inside slang, a few work songs and a handful of founding texts and myths, until it feels special and important. I love seeing the way these miniature folklores just emanate from people doing things together.

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[finnanbeaton]

I love hopepunk.

It is action of the gentlest, sweetest and toughest kind and it takes all of that pain, all of that suffering, and forces it into something better.

No sacrifice. No dashing yourself to pieces because the world is dark and cruel and hard. Instead you scream back at the world and demand that hope also exist.

So then you have it, this thing that hopepunk has made. And it’s battered and patched and frayed but it’s also something good, something fought for. Something bright.

And this thing moves you to dream, to stare into the darkness, to say “I see you and I acknowledge you and I have felt you, but I am making my own light now.”

[finnanbeaton]

It occurs to me that sometimes I put the same effort into my world building for something that might get mentioned once, that someone else might put into an entire story.

Like, this is a self drag, because holy shit.

Prompt two of summercamp is about a disease process. I named it red rot and the idea itself would probably make a decent horror sci fi short or full story on its own.

This morning I just added some history to the article referring to what I'm now discovering is an intentional contamination of a space outposts entire water supply and without the intervention of a group of dedicated bots to fix the source all the humans would have died and Earth **cough SpOre cough** could have stepped into a fully equipped and running City that would have connected earth to space without the need of Mars.

Like I am not even sure if the bots are sentient or just following their protocols to the point that they knew it was necessary to save the city. Or if the act of helping the city is what unlocked the access to their own sentience.

Okay so, robots and androids do have sophisticated neural learning with as much human bias removed as possible - actively anti racist and gender affirming policymakers made a point of looking through coding for hidden bias to keep it to a minimum, not perfect but working toward a ideal that under all operating systems kindness is key - and I have an idea that sentience is not a one and done philosophy that each robot has the potential to achieve self awareness through their own actions. You're a real boy Pinocchio you never needed the feather it was in you the whole time!

So you have these weird shaped boxy outer space robots doing a complex refit of the water system and realise that people are dying and independent of each other several of them break off from the refit and start helping people in the city. I don't have much else other than my go to rag tag found family of robots find self awareness and understanding in the act of kindness.

Did I just make care bear robots? And why am I emotional over a tiny robot gaining sentience as he curses his way through trying to get a medical system back online because the contaminated water caused a full shutdown of the whole system and he's the only one small enough to get into the middle of the system and fix it.

I want a teeny tiny robot shaped like one of those idogs of the early oughts have his first real human word be "fuck"

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Prompt two is finished! Describe a medical condition that some people fear. This one is a gross one folks, if you're squicked by diseases and blood, I would skip this one.

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Prompt one finished!

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Greetings Traveller! Welcome to the Spindle 'Verse, I am your host, Finn, and I'll be sharing with you the many delights this world has to offer. Over the course of July I'll be sharing articles and updates for the Spindle as I participate in Worldanvil's yearly summercamp.

This is the main information for the challenge and what summercamp. It's a super cool challenge and I'm really looking forward to it.

This is my pledge article. There's not much in the codex yet because I'm pretty much starting from scratch on it and using summercamp as a way to fill it all up.

Wish me luck and I really hope you'll cheer me on!

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For Spindle, gender identity is as varied as it is now only a lot more open and accepted depending on where you are. There are a few places that still enforce a gender binary but they're few and far between, and the places that do are also against any kind of cybernetic augmentation or biohacking in general, and are extremely anti AI.

For Aruinnbith, and the Dhuadhain in particular have many genders the nine main ones are prima-fem, prima-masc, prima-neutral, tempor-fem, tempor-masc, tempor-neutral, tertia-fem, tertia-masc and tertia-neutral. Prima is first it's usually the description and gender used up until puberty or to discuss children during their formative years, while children are not assigned a gender at birth, natural inclination and pronoun preferences as they get older indicate gender. Tempor gender/tempor sex is the temporal state and flux that happens during high magical influxes the Dhuadhain get first during puberty and then during their magical syncs as they age. During puberty the Dhuadhain magic overrides a lot of the systems as it were and young Dhuadhain's will spontaneously change sex for periods lasting a few hours to a couple of years depending on the magical strengths and influence.

It's accepted and common practice to switch pronouns and test out the various phases that happen during this time to see what is comfortable to the young Dhuadhain. As they go through puberty the magic settles and and the switching between settles down - in some, others will remain fluid throughout their entire life cycle switching beyond even the times when magical syncs happen.

Tertia gender is any gender beyond the temporal state. Pronouns usually settle in this area when the Dhuadhain reaches about 600-800. Often this is the gender they'll be referred to, even if they continue to switch sex with their magical syncs as those switches are less intentional and are a response to handle the overwhelming magic that is overloading their systems.

Tl;dr gender is not just based on presentation but age as the Dhuadhain spontaneously switch physical sex many times throughout their lives.

Open question for WBW:

How many gender identities exist in your world? Is the concept of gender different from our world, if so, how?

@worldbuildingwedasks

[finnanbeaton]

Finn's OC's

Yoinking from Raev. Each like and I'll update this with a character from my WIPS. It has been a full year since I stopped writing and I want to do something fun to get the juices flowing again. As Raev mentioned it's better to repost this than reblog as it will get very otherwise.

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OC Fact Swap: Pride edition

Just like the normal fact swap game, but gayer :P

Reblog this if you want someone to send you an ask with a random fact about their LGBTQ+ OCs, and you answer with a related fact about one of yours.

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Ads in the Spindle 'verse are obnoxious and overwhelming without some kind of adblocker or paid service. Instead of taking up actual real estate, they are the worst kind of computer ads but in your brain.

The test rollouts for some ads went spectacularly terrible. Imagine a music ad with a tab you can't turn off because you've run out of your "free skips" for the month.

The home decor app lets you test or try out some things for 24 hours but it comes with a banner ad at the bottom of your vision every time you're in your home.

Some pop up blockers and ad blockers are viewed by your immune system as viruses and have landed folks in the hospital with seizures. At least that's the rumour.

The latest ad is for Spindle Dating. An app that matches your "profile" (age, prospects, dna, debt, etc) against the rolodex of other Spindle users for the perfect companion.

Beware of some of the apps you download, one of the "free adult" ones carries a trojan that overlays all folks with nude images and hijacks the visuals to play out some really raunchy stuff.

World-building Wednesday 3/31

Are there any advertisements in your world? If so what are they like, if not how do people sell produces then?

@worldbuildingwedasks

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^_^

For Reasons, I pulled a full archive of the skype convo between me and @mephestopheles​ in order to retrieve a lengthy plot through I wanted to expand on. In it, I found a very on-brand moment for both of us.

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😻

I’m making new tag lists (mostly because I’ve been really unorganized about them so far which makes following through difficult) so if you want to be tagged in things, just comment on this or reblog with the corresponding emoji(s):

🌏 World-Building Wednesday

🖋 Ditch a Glitch Friday

📚 Storyteller Saturday

7️⃣ 7 Up

🖐🏼 Last Line Tag

😻 Tag Me in Everything