I don't have any clever title ideas

"blue dye is rare" is a world fact that could be a plot obstacle (character is a dyer and needs blue cloth, of the right shade, for a festival); a clue (main character notices someone wearing blue and realizes that they're in disguise); a way to inform character (main character sees a blue banner and thinks its owner is showing off); and any number of other things, from small to large.

and if the rarity doesn't serve any of those functions in your story, then the existence of blue dye is not important enough that you, as the author, need to consider it.

I don't care where they get their common blue dyes if it's not relevant to the story, but I do care if the narrative's handling of clothes and their color reflects a 'pick out entire readymades from the mall' relationship to wardrobe in a technological and social milieu where that is not logically an option, and there's no sign they're going for one of those surreal modern-pop fantasy settings.

You really do see this quite regularly, coming from writers who just haven't thought about it; they haven't noticed their own cultural framework is historically contingent and actually super abnormal.

'Who domesticated wheat' and 'where does the blue come from' are very handy as sort of shortcut checkpoints to make sure you're making regular contact with material worldbuilding at all--if you know where the blue is from you don't need to decide where the red is from also; you've done the important bit of aligning your thoughts about clothing color with premodern dyeing practices. Other details will tend to accrete on that surface now as they arise.

#look rags are kinda the plastic bag full of plastic bags of the premodern era#only they're useful in a much wider variety of ways#and much more expensive#i threw out the rags because they were stained is like. i threw out your socks because they were stinky.#normal people don't *do* that#disposable fabric has made us insane

Just to give you some idea of why even rags were very valuable in any pre-industrial setting, here are some facts about fabric production throughout history.

In the Viking era, when drop spindles and vertical looms were the height of technology and every step had to be done by hand, it too about seven hundred hours to make a blanket big enough for one person. First you had to harvest the fiber that you were going to use, then you had to clean it and prepare it, then you had to spin it, then you had to weave it and then you had to finish it.

To support a household of five, and keep them supplied with a bare-minimum of fabric needs (so they weren't naked or cold), took approximately 40 hours of work per week just on textile production. In a reasonably prosperous family, everyone would have two outfits (one for every day work, and one nice one, and when the nice one became too worn or stained to be "nice" it would be your everyday outfit and (if you were lucky) you would make a new one to be nice, and your old everyday outfit would be either passed on to someone or (if it was in too bad a shape for that) would be cut up for various other uses.

As technology progressed, all of the steps in fabric production ended up taking less time; for example, the spinning wheel spins thread much more quickly than the drop spindle does. But it was still a hell of a lot of work.

In the 18th Century, here's the life cycle of bed sheets:

They start out as sheets (flat, both top and bottom) and are needed because they are MUCH easier to wash than your sheets than a blanket. As sheets get used, they develop worn patches to the middle. Those get darned. When even darning is not enough to save them, you cut them in half down the middle, flip the pieces, and sew the edges together so that what had been the edge is now a seam down the middle and the worn parts are on the edges (where the fact that they're worn doesn't matter much). When the new center gets worn out, you cut the fabric apart and turn the usable bits of fabric into pillow cases. When the pillowcases get worn out you turn the usable bits of fabric into handkerchiefs.

even worse is when fine fabric is torn up for emergency bandages or a lady is very careless of blood getting on silk or velvet outer skirts, and this is shown as noble and generous and nothing is ever said about who is going to deal with the material mess after our brave wounded hero survives. like getting blood out of velvet? in regency times??? laundering ruffled silk? good luck! AND SHE WOULD HAVE HAD PETTICOATS. LINEN OR COTTON. not to mention a handkerchief! it drives me nuts.

I wouldn't use an adblocker if ads were just banners on the side funding a website I enjoy using and want to support. Ads pop up invasively and fill my whole screen, I misclick and get warped away to another page just for trying to read an article or get a recipe.

Every app shouldn't be like every other app. Instagram didn't need reels and a shop. TikTok doesn't need a store. Instagram doesn't need to be connected to Facebook. I don't want my apps to do everything, I want a hub for a specific thing, and I'll go to that place accordingly.

I love discord, but so much information gets lost to it. I don't want to join to view things. I want to lurk on forums. I want to be a user who can log in and join a conversation by replying to a thread, even if that conversation was two days ago. I know discord has threads, it's not the same. I don't want to have to verify my account with a phone number. I understand safety and digital concerns, but I'm concerned about information like that with leaks everywhere, even with password managers.

I shouldn't have to pay subscriptions to use services and get locked out of old versions. My old disk copy of photoshop should work. I should want to upgrade eventually because I like photoshop and supporting the business. Adobe is a whole other can of worms here.

Streaming is so splintered across everything. Shows release so fast. Things don't get physical releases. I can't stream a movie I own digitally to friends because the share-screen blocks it, even though I own two digital copies, even though I own a physical copy.

I have an iPod, and I had to install a third party OS to easily put my music on it without having to tangle with iTunes. Spotify bricked hardware I purchased because they were unwillingly to upkeep it. They don't pay their artists. iTunes isn't even iTunes anymore and Apple struggles to upkeep it.

My TV shows me ads on the home screen. My dad lost access to eBook he purchased because they were digital and got revoked by the company distributing them. Hitman 1-3 only runs online most of the time. Flash died and is staying alive because people love it and made efforts to keep it up.

I have to click "not now" and can't click "no". I don't just get emails, they want to text me to purchase things online too. My windows start search bar searches online, not just my computer. Everything is blindly called an app now. Everything wants me to upload to the cloud. These are good tools! But why am I forced to use them! Why am I not allowed to own or control them?

It starts with a great big war in the Old World that leaves everything there fractured and shattered, cities bombed out, people at each other's throats, horrors of magic and technology unleashed at scale. The war sputters out like a knife fight sometimes does, with two people having cut each other to ribbons, neither actually winning. Civilization has collapsed, and maybe it will recover, but by the end of the war the fields were poisoned and there was a sickness in the water.

But our story takes place in the New World, in a country that's like the United States, but not. It's a federal republic where the federal government has very little power and is always scrambling for more, beaten back by the states. They were on one side of the great big war, but mostly in terms of sending shipments and giving cover, without actually sending any troops. They escaped the calamity of the war, and were well positioned to become the tiger of the world, but they have a northern neighbor, and a second war happened in the wake of the first, this one across a long border between two young nations. This border war is spurned by economics more than anything else, and at least part of that is because the republic was looting from the Old World. Maybe it's not literally theft, but it feels like it: scientists, engineers, wizards, and aristocrats have been taken in, often with boatloads of valuables.

The border war is long and tense, threatening to escalate into the same kind of calamity that happened the next continent over, but it stays restrained, and "only" involves the death of millions before finally drawing to a close. The republic declares victory, but their coffers have been drained, and the army is swiftly disbanded, putting thousands of discharged soldiers onto the streets with little support.

The republic was always weakly federal, with many rights reserved to the states, but in the wake of the war, the cracks have been widened. The first major problem is a race to the bottom between the states, as the large corporations and millionaires are fought over with ever-lower tax burdens, a situation made much worse by high corruption and the fact that many of the most wealthy were those who escaped from the Old World with their riches intact. There's probably a word for them, I'll get to it later, but they have no loyalty to the states or the republic, only to themselves, and more generously, they're the scarred and traumatized survivors who were willing to do anything to escape.

The second major problem is the uncontrolled waves of immigration coming from the Old World, refugees who fled from the destruction of their country, a burden that can't be borne. There's a glut of labor and a shortage of housing, and some of the same national issues present themselves, since the immigrants are coming in such numbers that they're forming their own enclaves in the major cities, and there are old national tensions from the very recent war.

In terms of specific tax policies, there's a regressive consumption tax on food and housing, with an exception for luxury goods, which has created black markets and gray markets. The special economic incentives in the fiscal war between the states have meant that some companies have moved factories, decimating the labor market in some regions and not actually giving money back in others. Public services have been privatized under the rationale that this will reduce tax burden on everyone, and in some cases the privatization has been partial; it's widely agreed that the police are useless and that private security is the only way to go, but this is beyond the means of even the lower class, who are getting squeezed from every direction. Economic insecurity has led to exploitation and abuse, because jobs are hard to find, and regulation has become spotty. The rich are becoming ever more disconnected from the poor, and it's the rich that shape the laws, in part because democracy is on the verge of collapse.

In the original Ultimate Universe, the gag surrounding Hulk- and much of what went into The Ultimates should be understood through the lens of a gag- was that his uncontrollable rage and homicidal toxic masculinity made him a millstone around the necks of the rest of the roster, their first major deployment being to get him under control after he loses his shit and kills 800 people in New York while trying to kill and eat Freddie Prinze Jr- an embarrassment that gets hushed up after the fact. In the grand finale of the first volume they barely, barely manage to get him aimed at the invading aliens by telling him the aliens called him gay, and then he still nearly eats Hawkeye before the tranqs kick in. He's less a part of the team than a barely directable bomb, emblematic of the fact that the Ultimates, collectively, do not have their shit together-it's a rotten idea to the core.

In the New Ultimate Universe, he's the one member of the classic Avengers lineup who's thrown in with The Maker, again standing in opposition to the rest of the team, but for the complete opposite reason. He's very visibly a road-not-taken of the Ultimate Hulk- same color scheme- but he worked his shit out, he found a self-help book, he became less insecure, less self-absorbed, altogether more functional. And it turns out that a "functional" version of that hulk comes out the other side as an Adrian-Veidt style of holier-than-thou Compassionate-enough-to-Kill-thousands-for-the-greater-good kind of figure, who callously tests the mutagenic effects of gamma exposure on isolated indigenous populations on the side. Fucker built nukes for the army- were we expecting a saint?

🔥the birdcage (worm)

The Boys: I get the impression that the tide is beginning to turn against The Boys due to whatever went down in the most recent season, which I have not yet seen. But I'm holding the line that the first two seasons and change are really really good superhero fiction.

The rat guys think fast and talk fast, but they're incredibly conservative and like to cover all the angles before they take any action. This comes with being a prey species: their ancestral environment had lots of clever traps and devious hazards, so you get rat councils wisely working the problem.

The tree dudes speak and move slowly, but they will propose and then do the most insane things you can imagine. They can slot together a rocket in an afternoon and will then use it without so much as a test fire first. They test new potions by quaffing them down, sometimes not even waiting for it to cool (though they're tree dudes, so I guess quaffing a potion just means pouring it over their root legs). This comes from the ancestral selection process too: the tree dudes that won were the ones that took big risks, that grew faster, stronger, and tried new things without worrying about consequences. The tree dudes evolved in an era when they had no natural predators and their only competition was each other.

An author doesn’t have to info dump all of this in the first chapter. But there’s a helluva difference between a small agrarian village one bad harvest away from starvation, and Picard ordering ‘Earl Gray, Hot’. (Although the local blacksmith and the annoyed personnel in Engineering being asked to fix another replicator after an irate captain kicked it may share a certain common spirit lol.)

And again, the grain is a metaphor. Except for when you very much should figure out the design of your fictional country. I find designing societies from their food source up interesting. Others won’t. But there should be something that a writer finds interesting about their fantasy that they want to explore. Find your grain.

Terry Pratchett read an interesting fact about clowns and eggs once, and decided to make that everyone’s problem. He famously read constantly, always looking for interesting things to put in his books and in some cases build his plots around. Your writing would benefit from the same mentality. The reader doesn’t need an entire encyclopedia thrown at them. But you should put thought into your setting and how it interacts with your culture, history, and society. If you don’t, or even worse if you aren’t sure how all of these interact, then it doesn’t matter how interesting you make your characters or plot. Readers will identify situations in your story where the characters and plot are in conflict with the setting you didn’t pay attention to. 

It’s not that you need to fill out a hundred page questionnaire on your worldbuilding. It’s that your intellectual curiosity and eagerness to explore how things work will enrich your story for the reader. GRRM is absurdly good at the things he’s good at, a list that includes great character arcs, deftly controlling the reader’s sympathy, and intricate plots. His worldbuilding though is abysmal.** In contrast, elements of Anne Mccaffrey’s writing didn’t age well. Her first published book looks like a debut novel, her prose and characterization could have been improved on, and the pacing has issues. But she thought about how her world worked in ways that GRRM simply never bothered to. The effort she put into designing a society that would incorporate dragons into it’s structure, and the consideration she put into the needs of these dragons and their riders and how those would put stress on the social and political systems, is phenomenal. I do genuinely enjoy GRRM’s books lol. But if you wanted to read a novel that had dragons as a feature then Anne Mccaffrey’s Dragonflight is what I’ll recommend every time. Her characters actively use the clues given in how their society is designed to figure out their response to the overall plot, in a way that’s so much more rewarding then having GRRM pencil in years-long winter and then just ignore the implications. 

Absolutely get invested in your characters and your plot! The reader will enjoy them all the more for the passion you bring. But your writing will always benefit from your curiosity in how the world you design works, and in how the characters and plot are actively informed by the setting. That’s the larger point. Cultivate that curiosity and willingness to explore and experiment, because that’s what will keep your plot, characters and setting from coming into conflict with each other. 

*No it’s not, figure this out lol. Get Tim’s number. Has he figured out grain can be fermented yet. Is he free on Saturday. 

Okay, that’s not entirely true. They did have wheeled toys for their children, like tiny little oxen you could roll along the floor. But they never invented the wheel as a means of transport.

You might think this is odd. The Inca were a very advanced people with cities, elaborate art, temples, and a “writing” system that actually involved using knotted cords and has changed our entire definition of “recorded language.”

But now I’m gonna show you something, and ask…

Does it make a little more sense now why they never bothered with the wheel?

If you were writing a book about people who lived in steep, inhospitable mountains, would it have occurred to you that “a series of terraces, via which things can be manually lowered or raised” would make more sense than wheels?

The Romans, technically, had steam power, in the form of a little gadget called the aeliopile. It was basically a party trick to demonstrate the laws of physics, for them– as far as I know, no one made a serious effort to use it to power locomotion.

This was partly because The Tech Just Wasn’t There Yet ™– even in the early days of steam power, boilers tended to explode, because it takes a huge amount of metalworking knowhow to make a boiler that can hold enough steam for thousands of tons of metal.

But it was also partly because… it wasn’t necessary. During the Pax Romana, when communication between different parts of the empire was easiest and collaboration between scientists would be most possible, the best way to send things from point A to point B was by ship. Sailing was, by the standard of the day, easy, fast, and safe. Sure, sometimes you’d sail into a storm– but there were no pirates, because the Roman navy took care of them.

Steam power only made sense as a technology you’d even want in an age where the ocean was too dangerous to travel. No one ships goods overland, pre-steam, if they can avoid it– it’s a lot of danger and effort for not much benefit. But in the early 1800s, when the steam engine was invented? The oceans weren’t safe to travel anymore, and hadn’t been for centuries. Piracy was rampant, both from independent bandits and agents of various European countries. Wars were constantly breaking out between great naval powers. It would be easier, and safer, to transport goods overland, if there was a good way to do it.

Someone in the thread floated My Hero Academia; while I haven't read it, my understanding is that that's not really an accurate read of what's going on with Stain's neurosis about All-Might being the only "real hero," that the point of that arc is that Stain's got an insane and unreasonable standard and that taking an endorsement deal, while bad, isn't actually grounds for execution. My own contribution to the thread was Gail Simone's Welcome to Tranquility, where a major part of the backstory involved the faux Justice-League's Superman analogue having a little accident because he's the only one who thought they were morally obligated to go public with the secret life-extending macguffin that the rest of the team is using to enforce comic-book time on themselves and their loved ones; while only a couple members of the team are directly in on it, the rest are conveniently incurious. And Jupiter's Legacy gets tantalizingly close to this- The Utopian, a well-meaning stick-in-the-mud, ultimately gets blindsided and couped by his scheming brother who creates a superhero junta staffed by a Kingdom-Come-style glut of third-gen superheroes, who are framed as fundamentally self-interested because only came onto the scene after most of the situations you legitimately need a superhero to handle have been neutralized. (The rub, of course, is that the comic is also highly critical of the Utopian's intellectually incurious self-righteously 'apolitical' approach to superheroism- if for no other reason than that it left him in a position to get blindsided by a coup!) While Jupiter's Legacy gets the closest, all three of these are only loosely orbiting around the spirit of the original idea, and there's something really interesting there- particularly if the Superman figure isn't hopelessly naive in the same way as Utopian. Because first of all, if you're Metaman or Amazingman or whatever brand-name alias the writer goes with, and you really earnestly mean it, and you put together a team of all the other most powerful heroes on earth in order to pool your resources, and then with dawning horror you gradually begin to realize that everyone in the room besides yourself is a fascist or a con artist or abuser or any other variant of a kid with a magnifying glass eyeing that anthill called Earth- What the hell is your next move?

No-bones physics damage immunity

New mouth for each of 73 languages (all over your body, including your feet)

Can only breathe dirt

Time travel sneezer

Weather controlled by your emotions (introducing lava rain)

Music that emanates from your body based on what the next five minutes will be like (good luck sleeping)

Split yourself, but split becomes a voice in your head when you reassemble

All of your thoughts are whispered to the person you last spoke to

One of your limbs is randomly regenerated and turned into one of the pure elemental metals every day. The limb and element switches when you fall asleep.

All images become real portals when you're around

i have neither direct knowledge nor (even casual internet) research knowledge of gangs, so i can't really speak to that

Picture this:

Taylor is the Robin: The group's emotionally stunted leader-not-leader of the group. She is the one everyone trust but are also always complaining of because she has bugs all around the loft

Lisa is the Cyborg: Cheeky, smart and confident. The brains of the group who likes to tug on people's nerves

Alec is the Beast Boy: Immature funny guy. The comic relief with the heart of gold (That's literal. He killed a guy with a golden heart and keeps it in his closet. His heart is a pit of darkness) and he's the one who tugs people's actual nerves

Brian is the Raven: Broody and moody (That's just his face, he's so normal guy that it goes all the way around) . The muscles of the group. Lives in a separate place but Noone has seen it and if they have, they are traumatized about IKEA furniture. You would think he's the one with the heart of gold but no. He has the heart of a chicken: He gets jumpscared by his own shadow

Rachel is the Starfire: Fish out of the water. She is the team's powerhouse. Taylor and her have an intense sexual tension. Nobody notices it. She's the one with the actual heart of gold. She has an entire language made of grunts

The episode structure would be simple:

-The Undersiders hang around at the loft

-Conflict arises

-Coil calls

-They go do a job

-While in the job, a hero or rival villain shows up and they have to beat them While solving their conflicts

-Episode ends with them having a stronger bond

Some aspects of the show would be:

-Parian is a secondary character who always ends up as an unwilling participant of the Undersiders antics

-Flechette appears In every episode Parian does and always throws around every type of logical gymnastics to get her crush out of trouble

-Aisha is always popping up in the background and there's a running gag of something eating Rachel's ham and Alec having an imaginary friend

-A lot episodes are about the Undersiders being broke and having to come up with ways of getting easy money

-Coil's phone call scenes are like the ones from Inspector Gadget's villain (can't remember his name) with him only appearing in lowlit rooms from the shoulders down with Dinah on her own seat at the corner doing homework (Telling Coil the results of Golf games)

-Coil is comically evil and the show keeps making him appear in weirder places than the last

-The Protectorate keeps popping up from absurd spots and ways

-The Wards have a vendetta against Rachel's dogs because they pee on their front door

-The Empire are not nazis because "Think of the kids!"

-Purity is a Karen

-Lung gets defeated within seconds of showing up on screen. Every time

-The Undersiders have 'Anti Bakuda earphones'. They are just fluffy earphones (Taylor's have antennas)

There are episodes focused on the Wards and their dinamic is something like this:

-Aegis is constantly taking damage

-Vista is never taken seriously

-Clockblocker pulls up stupid pranks

-Kid Win can't focus on one thing for shit

-Shadow Stalker is hated by everyone

-Gallant is the only sane person in the room. Always

-Armsmaster is the overstrict dad with the worshipped bike

-Dragon is the sweet mom

-People hate Piggott more than SS

-Victoria is always being reckless

-Amy is a shell of what used to be a person with hopes and dreams