Very Serious Art

"society that allows polyamory, but only in certain very specific arrangements" is so underrated as a spec fic concept. the only examples i can think of are troll romance and sedoretus. theres something i find deeply satisfying about it

black romance is just hating someone and wanting to fuck them at the same time its not that hard

Ooh! Another example of that concept is in the people of O in Ursula Le Guin’s Hainish Cycle. TVTropes seems to sum it up pretty well: “O, whose society is divided into the immutable moieties called "Morning" and "Evening." A marriage on O consists of a Morning man and woman and an Evening man and woman, arranged so that each person has both a husband and wife of the opposite moiety, both of whom they're expected to be sexually involved with, and one additional spouse of the opposite gender (but the same moiety) with whom they're forbidden to be sexually involved.” It shows up in three short stories, and I’ve only read one of them, but I get the impression this system is always described in half-detail, with some things specific enough to be engaging but big parts left vague.

Double-decker buses. Less scary for sure, but there’s nothing like having a machine shaped like a small social housing block, with the mannerisms of a gigantic metal cow, sidle right up to you on a busy city street.

Stars fell on Livaniana

It does look kind of like a vampire squid, though, and that’s at least moderately based

The following is based on some half-remembered architectural history classes (so anyone with more knowledge than me please jump in!), but I believe giant round domes were basically an extinct technology in most of medieval Western Europe. Medieval European intellectuals were *painfully* aware that the Roman Empire had been much richer, more high-tech and generally cooler than they were, and so they based much of their grand architecture on Roman aesthetics and Roman technology. This is most noticeable in the early medieval style called “romanesque”, which does indeed have domes and barrel arches. However, the Roman method for building domes was to build a vast wooden cast of the entire building, then cover it in concrete. This required: a) pretty advanced concrete technology, b) tons and tons wood, cut into complex scaffolding, which doesn’t even end up in the finished building! c) loads of labourers. Medieval cultures lacked all of those things, so their romanesque domes and vaults just weren’t very big or impressive. European stonemasons gradually solved this problem with the invention of the rib vault: basically a thin stone ribcage which gets built first, and can stand up by itself while you lay the rest of the vault or arch on top of it. This uses much less wood scaffolding, and much less labour. Sure, it takes longer –sometimes centuries– but medieval Christians didn’t have a lot going on except for farming, warring, and worshipping God, so they were game for it. The rib vault became the backbone (ha ha) of ecclesiastical architecture, and the signature look of what became the Gothic style. As Western Europe developed its own distinct aesthetics separate from Rome, the “tree canopy/freaky batwing membrane” look of gothic cathedrals became the fashion, instead of domes. Meanwhile the Byzantine & Persian traditions of building brick domes seems to’ve carried on uninterrupted in Eastern Europe & West Asia.