#lgbt sci fi

[featureenvyproductions]

happy new year time for me to bother you with a TRAILER for my short animated film about a mars mission 🎉

surprise I have cobbled together shots I have done from my [traditional] animation I'm working on along with a TEST recording (which is why it sounds like it's being recorded in a toilet that is also a cathedral) of some of the music clips. I tried to edit it like a Real TM Trailer but the pacing is a little weird bc it's a silent film sorry

OK LOTTA BACKGROUND INFO UNDER THE CUT

So if you haven't seen my other posts, I sort of have this thing for doing projects I know damn well shouldn't be done by Just Me however if there's 3 things I enjoy it's exacerbating my wrist problems, traditional animation, and social isolation so last year to get my mind of the trash fire of an election season I bought a bunch of cels and paint and started working on this short film. It's gonna be maybe 10-15 minutes when done and, aside from a handful of tweaks*, it is all traditional 2d animation - hand drawn AND painted (which is why the frame rate makes even the recycled clips in 80s he-man cringe) .

Anyway if you didn't gather from the intertitles, this [a FICTIONAL STORY WHERE EVERYONE IS FICTIONAL PLEASE NO ONE SUE ME] is about the US and Russia collaborating on a mission to Mars where they're gonna send some folks up there to hang out and do research indefinitely until another mission happens. While the crew - comprised of an astronaut Adam and a cosmonaut Yuri - is in transit, war breaks out between the US and Russia back on earth, snapping the ever tightening rubberband of willing cooperation between the countries. Everything goes to hell, and in this case it also threatens to compromise the mission, meaning an uncertain future for the crew, who have to choose between loyalty to the death cult of blind nationalism, or loyalty to science and each other.

I am aiming to finish this in 2025...The story has been in the works for a while, but I only recently felt like "huh I kinda wanna animate this"

Im sorry the music is so....Like That lol. I wanted to get this done today before I go back to work and like I don't think anyone who follows me really minds if it's not perfect rn. See I only have a keyboard at the moment and I was trying to do an aux cable from it to my laptop to keep from recording the UNMANAGEABLE CLOMPCLOMPCLOMPITYCLOMPPP of the keys but it just made the sound toilety uhg oh well. Anyway I am writing some original stuff for the eventual whole film, but for this trailer I arranged some snippets of Tchaikovsky's sleeping beauty for piano (the score is in the public domain fyi...My arrangement is my own...). I've got some other bits of that in the works as well which will also show up in the full film.

Oh another thing is, most of the technical stuff should be fairly grounded in science (maybe aside from some Artistic License Engineering for story/ease of animation reasons, but....). So there's that. I don't think it makes much of a difference for the trailer but IM TELLING YOU BECAUSE I DID SIT THERE AND PAINSTAKINGLY RUN A FUCKING ORBIT PROPAGATION ALGORITHM TO BALLPARK WHERE THE SHIP SHOULD BE AT CERTAIN POINTS IN THE NARRATIVE AND YOU WILL KNOW I SUFFERED. FOR YOU, THE AUDIENCE.

*full disclosure by tweaks I mean stuff it's barely noticeable to you but impractical for me bc cels are REALLY expensive, so stuff like blinking and mouth movements I drew in photoshop because that's probably 100s of mouth-or-eye cels I can't really afford to waste, and you can only scratch paint off and reuse a cel so many times before it looks like crap. Some of the panning I also did by scanning the hand drawn cels and then changing the subject position in photoshop for each frame because I'm compositing frames essentially by sticking them face down in a stack on my scanner bed and haven't found a good way to do it yet. I've attempted to built a little track before but can't get it flat enough for the cover to make contact with the frames and smash them into the glass. If you have a solution for this, let me know.

anyway the target audience of this is people who liked Apollo 13 but wished it was worse quality and was more gay and anarchist so if you are vaguely that please enjoy and follow for updates on this costly and questionable venture

[the-breath-in-air]

i'm curious. i've made a poll. as always, please reblog for a bigger sample size. etc.

Seeing Indira Varma in the new Doctor Who trailer is what got me thinking of it.

[b-a-pigeon]

Interest check: would any of you all participate in an online queer SFF book club??

Fell & I have discussed this as an option for our (inactive & mostly empty) Discord server that we made for readers/patrons and I will actually start organizing if we get any interest!! Interact with this post or I guess just join the server now & I'll make it happen if enough people seem down :)

[bubbleybrain]

This Pride Month...

"I need LGBT books with ROMANCE."

How many aro/ace authors here are not feeling seen, raise your hand?

[midgeonsmidgeon]

[haveyoureadthistransbook]

The Javelin Program by Derin Edala

goodreads

When Dr Aspen Greaves signed up for the Javelin Program, humanity's first foray into colonising deep space, they expected to wake up to life in a thriving colony on a distant planet. Instead, they find themself five years away from their destination on a broken spaceship full of complex mysteries, dead astronauts, and a very unhelpful AI. Aspen wasn't trained for any of this. But if they can't keep themselves alive, get the ship in working order, and find out what went wrong by unravelling a chain of mysteries leading all the way back to distant Earth, then neither Aspen nor the five thousand sleeping passengers in their care will ever see a planet again.

Mod opinion: I haven't heard of this book before, but I love trans sci fi mysteries, so I'm hoping to check it out some day!

[minuit-blanche]

No no the best ship dynamic is actually the sweetheart who learns to be ferocious x the monster who learns to be gentle

[skeletonmob]

Second attempt at trying to advertise my game! More details under the cut.

Old Haunts

Old Haunts - DEMO

For the past few years, Hunter Greene has been saving money for his transition. But his dreams are dashed just as he approaches the finish line, when the powers that be block the biotech company that he was going to transition with. All hope is not lost however, as his manager, a robot named Aster, has been brewing something behind the scenes for quite a while now . . .

Old Haunts is a choose your own adventure style visual novel set in an alternate, cyberpunk-esque present. There are a total of six different endings, each route taking about 3-4 hours to play through, depending on how fast you read. I wanted to do multiple things with this project. Including commenting on the current wave of transphobia in our society and also try my hand at making a proper choose your own adventure style game. Something that didn't boil down to 'do you want to be a good person and rescue the puppy? or do you want to be a bad person and murder the puppy?'.

[else-creates]

Nobody Can Help You: Chapter 26

[bones-clouds]

favourite books of 2023:

“the atlas six”

olivie blake

“we are empty and trying to fill, lighting ourselves on fire just to prove that we are normal—that we are ordinary. that we, like anything, can burn”

[queerasfact]

We have to be really clear on the fact that the rigidity that we face in present times, from relationship to gender, is a modern construct that comes very much from the colonial forces primarily through religion. That rigidity reflects more so that colonial imprint than it does any historical accuracy, because historically many indigenous cultures left room for much more than the binary.

-Saul Williams, director of Rwandan sci-fi musical Neptune Frost

We had such a wonderful and illuminating time this week watching and talking about the Afro-futurist movie Neptune Frost, which explores the journey of genderqueer Neptune and coltan miner Matalusa, and their blossoming relationships amongst a Rwandan hacker commune.

If you're keen to watch more sci-fi, or more African cinema, I'd definitely recommend it. We were able to get it free on Kanopy through our local library!

Check out our podcast on the film if you'd like to hear some more in-depth background on its creation.

[papenathys]

Thank you to my friend @ripley-stark for sending me this very insightful essay about the rise of cozy SFF in late 2010s-2020s Western publishing. The author discusses the differences between cozy aesthetics in earlier examples of Anglophone genre fiction and the targeted marketing of books in present day-publishing, and also critically examines the implications of conflict-free stories that do not challenge, or worse, assimilate into existing oppressive structures. Who has the privilege to be comforted by such stories? Escapism for whom? "Cozy" fiction for whom?

[rotten-whispers]

Do YOU like queer protagonists in books? Dystopian horror? Silly sci-fi novels?

Or supporting your local queer indie author?

THEN consider delving into Tales from a Mall, a wacky sci-fi novel where ferrets have mechanical attachments, snails have legs, and there is something sinister going on in the 22nd century Fresh Malls. Perhaps something to do with the rats. Lots and lots of rats...

Only $10!

https://www.amazon.com/Tales-Mall-future-become-ridiculous/dp/B0BK6PVMX3/ref=sr_1_1

Or consider exploring the dark world of Boxes, a sci-fi horror novel following the journey of nonbinary Baxley through the Complex. Monsters roam the halls, stairs descend endlessly into the earth, and a sweet madness has overcome the denizens, turning them into something else entirely. See trigger warnings if necessary!

Only $16!

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0B8BPW3P5/ref=dbs_a_def_awm_bibl_vppi_i0GJhNzA3ZTZmM2I2NGY5ZDVmNWQ1NSwzNzdhNmM0ZGIwMTBiMTg2Y2FmNTZiNDIxZDI4YjA0MWQxMWM0NGY5&ts=1660371335

Not into novels? Try one of my silly sticker designs on Redbubble!!

https://www.redbubble.com/people/molespignoses/shop

Please check out a copy or reblog this post to support my work :)

[bubbleybrain]

I was told by my publisher to not ask for reviews in my book. Now that I'm self-published, I can do a ton of things that they would have considered tacky. Like: Asking for reviews/ratings, putting in trigger warnings, a no-AI clause, telling the bigots that this is a LGBT novel and to fluff off, and the fun one... a shout out to the official single/soundtrack and CD for my book series (done by Kaioh of Eurobeat fame; think the music they use in memes of cars going really fast. "DEJA VU!!!")

I'm absolutely loving the freedom!

[thoughtsroamguy]

IT'S HERE! THE BULLETS & SPELLS VISUAL NOVEL IS HERE TO DOWNLOAD!

Get it now for the low low price of free dollars, and nonety none cents.

This has been a labor of love, but I love my readers, so here you are!

There is a pc and mac version. Enjoy!

If you don't want to download from itch.io, you can download from this google doc folder

[st-jinx-art]

Some recent Sci-fi art 👽