Off World Building

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

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!

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

It is important to note that this isn’t because there are less people. In fact, the dems in charge fully admit that they had just as many people in late april as in early march, but the Biden administration took emergency measures to solve the problem and massively expanded the facilities to ensure that there was enough space.

What’s more, they got the average processing time down a huge amount, and didn’t just settle for the mandated maximum. For minors, the average wait time went down from 133 hours to 28 hours, with the federally mandated maximum being 72 hours. Immigration cases are being processed in record time and numbers with a strong focus on humane treatment and ease of immigration. Plenty of moderate democrats are genuinely angry about it, claiming that the Biden administration is letting thousands in with a rubber stamp approval process. “It isn’t how it is supposed to be!” complain moderate democrats over Biden’s far left approach to immigration reform.

Now, these were just temporary emergency measures throw together in roughly three weeks to deal with a massive, record breaking influx of migrants. It could easily be suspected that the administration was just acting good as long as the nation was paying attention, except the Biden administration continued working on immigration reform even when the news cycle moved on, steadily making major changes for immigration reform and continuing to do so even now.

DACA was re-opened to new applicants.

Temporary Protected Status has been reinstated and expanded

DACA-like status for domestic violence victims and other crime victims, allowing victims of crime a green card and a work license during the years long waiting period.

People can wait in the US for court hearings, allowing families to reunite and waiting to happen under humane and safe conditions.

There are a ton of things the Biden administration has massively improved over the last 4 months or so, and I am not going to list them all out. And they are still making changes in a positive direction. Here is an article that lays out some of these things written by an immigration lawyer. It was written two days ago, and there is no sign that the Biden administration is going to stop chipping away at immigration reform within their capacity to do so.

Remember, as long as it is the law Biden has to enforce it, and all law making is on deadlock as republicans refuse to cooperate. He literally cannot change these laws without every single democrat senator signing on and at least 10 republicans jumping the fence. He is not a king. If you want to be angry at someone focus on the one or two democrat senators that refuse to get rid of the filibuster, specifically Joe Manchin.

What Biden can do on his own is restructure and reform the DHS and ICE to be much more humane organizations through rule changes, executive orders, administrative policies, and putting pro immigration reform people in charge of the whole process. And that is exactly what he has done and continues to do.

If immigration reform is an important issue to you, and it should be, consider where we were a year ago and where we are now. Many leftists will have you believing that virtually nothing has changed, that people have moved on due to their bias that democrats are better than republicans. They are wrong.

This is why “both sides are bad” political opinions are so dangerous. In six months we have gotten better immigration reform from Biden than we have in 30 years and he doesn’t even have the power to make laws about it. All that effort we made to get democrats (and better democrats) in is paying off.

Please don’t get discouraged now, we are actually making serious progress for the first time in years! Don’t let your preconceived notions of a “moderate democrat” president cloud your judgement!

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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