• 1 Post
  • 20 Comments
Joined 5 個月前
cake
Cake day: 2026年1月26日

help-circle


  • I read a lot of scifi and it’s by far my favourite genre of anything.

    I’m on a bit of a reading roll this year so far and have been averaging a book a week, I haven’t been consuming books at this rate since I was a teenager!

    I finished Children Of Time last week and managed to get in The Scar (China Mieville) before my copies of Children of Ruin and Children Of Memory arrived, and now I’m about half way through Ruin.

    The ‘Children Of’ books are fantastic, we all know this by now, but only read The Scar if you can deal with a vast 800 page anti-epic with an utterly unpleasant anti-hero at its helm. And the ending, while very fitting thematically, otherwise sucks. There is no catharsis and the anti-hero clearly doesn’t learn anything, despite (again) writing otherwise in their letter.

    The world building in The Scar is stunning though (albeit rather puissant…), and the characters, despite being nearly entierly all awful people*, are very well written. Plus there’s a very clearly lifted from The Matrix fight scene at once point which got a giggle out of me when I recognised it.

    *Tanner is a good man, and so is Doul, probably. Doul is also quite funny, but the humour of his actions mostly lands in hindsight once you’ve got a better idea of his character/motivations

    .

    Favourites wise though (the rest of this comment is copied over from a previous one I made elsewhere but I feel might be appreciated here more), I reread Year Of The Flood by Margarete Attwood every summer lately. Toby and her little rituals are very comforting.

    YotF was the first one I read of the Oryx And Crake trilogy too, but it doesn’t make for quite as good a username with all those christian connotations.

    I’ve read all the books in the correct order several times since then, but I far prefer reading O&C after YotF, it makes Maddaddam feel so much more cathartic and deserved and it really improves the pacing. The slow build up in YotF, leading to all the action and exposition in O&C and then winding down in Maddaddam and the story coming back to Toby, flows so much better as a three book narrative. Also piecing everything together with this order is much more interesting too imo.






  • they lose attraction because they were never attracted to the person. they are attracted to the fantasy of the person.

    and once you become too ‘real’ you destroy the fantasy and they have no more interest.

    All of us who were Manic Pixie Dream Girl-ed are reading this thread and rolling our eyes so hard it hurts.




  • Anyway, congrats on blocking me dumbass and if you’ve actually managed to read and take in any of the pages I’ve linked, have you now got a slightly better understanding of how monumentally fucked we are?

    So, what are you going to do now?

    Are you going to protest? Do you think that will do anything? Lmao, maybe you’ll make some friends and have a nice little solidarity about the state of things with them. I hear prison sucks though, and climate protesters keep getting jailed these days.

    Are you going to go vegan? That would be a huge positive impact you could make of as it would reduce the carbon emissions and soil degridation impact slightly from animal agriculture. Most people though, even climate scientists and climate activists, won’t go vegan. So probably not that either.

    Maybe you’ll forgo procreating, each human produces a trully staggering amount of carbon (I’m just guessing that you’re in the US, look up your country if not). That would be very kind to your potential offspring too as the upcoming droughts and famines are going to kill billions globally.

    Who knows, maybe you’ll even live out your angry edgelord dreams and drone strike a billionaire.

    Or hey, maybe against all odds you’ll wake up one day and realise that somehow, you’re suddenly some kind of god-wizard capable of rewriting the laws of physics! How exciting. You could really make a difference this way.

    You’d probably need to fundamentally change human nature too though because there’s no way our species isn’t going to do this again if you’ll let them.

    Personally, as I don’t believe in the power of duex ex machina and am not interested in doing something profoundly stupid to land myself in prison, I’m just going to keep being vegan and childfree, and I’m going to try to enjoy the last of the abundance till the food runs out and/or these tumours kill me.

    P.S. If you really want our species to survive 4.5c by 2060 and not go extinct by the end of the century, you should aim for god-wizard.





  • Year Of The Flood is one of my favourite books, I reread it every summer now. Toby and her little rituals are very comforting.

    YotF was the first one I read of the trilogy too, but it doesn’t make for quite as good a username with all those christian connotations.

    I’ve read all the books in the correct order several times since then, but I far prefer reading O&C after YotF, it makes Maddaddam feel so much more cathartic and deserved and it really improves the pacing. The slow build up in YotF, leading to all the action and exposition in O&C and then winding down in Maddaddam and the story coming back to Toby, flows so much better as a three book narrative. Also piecing everything together with this order is much more interesting too imo.


  • Ok, go fix the world and be the hero everybody needs.

    Despite your behaviour here, I do wish you well in spreading this message of more labour and ignoring climate science and resource depletion, amongst your likely already overworked and under paid friends and neighbours.

    Nothing says “We CAN fix this!” like naive optimism, but hey, who knows, maybe you’ll get really, really lucky before the top soil and fresh water reserves run out and find a wizard capable of rewriting the laws of physics and reversing all those tipping points we’ve passed. Or a time traveller who can go throw a spanner 8nto the works of the industrial.revolution maybe?

    Either way, you’ve got 25y at best there before the soil and water run out, and that’s if, if we don’t have a blue ocean event before then.

    You should start now if you haven’t already, that wizard might be pretty hard to find and time travellers are notorious for it.


  • Revolution against capitalism isn’t something I think is possible, they literally have all the money and power in the world and that is not a fight we can win.

    Plus they aren’t spending any of their trillions to fix climate change (not that they even could at this point), so what’s the point in fighting for, or even dreaming of, a better future, when the rest of this century is going to involve the deaths of multiple billions of people to drought, famine, technological collapse, bad weather and run away heating.

    So instead of spouting hollow platitudes about beheading billiomaires and needing revolutions, I’ve spent my energy elsewhere, mainly by studying climate science and enjoying what little health I have left.