astra ⋆˚✿˖°

It's perfectly reasonable that I have decided, based on ambient cultural information, that Ready Player One will not be my jam and I'm not going to read it. What that means, though, is that I have very little information about Ready Player One. I am not an authority on Ready Player One. If there's a discussion of the character development or worldbuilding or plot structure in Ready Player One, I can listen, but I can't really contribute, because I have not read it and thus am missing quite a lot of information about it.

I know a lot of people are just having fun, and that's all well and good, but there's also a reason that Grace is so aroace-coded, and it's intentional.

Spoilers for the book and the movie below, proceed at your own risk. However, this is a very important discussion to have imo, because I've seen a concerning rise in amatonormative responses to this story.

he even writes a huge pamphlet about it

meaning now, when a fool says you’ll be left behind for not using chatgpt, instead of talking to a wall about data centers and mental health you can now speak their language - regardless of your faith - and reply “AI is against official religious doctrine 😠☝🏼 purgatory for you, architect of babel!” which goes incredibly hard (first uno reverse card)

That's wrong, because I do, but for me, it's seen through the lens of Queerplatonicity. My romantic(????) attraction is replaced(????) with Queerplatonic Attraction I'd say.

I'm a yearner, like DEADLY. LIKE I'M MISERABLE.

Fictional characters are objects.

Stop telling people to encourage the cop inside their head.

How you treat fictional characters, given they are entirely objects of fiction, does NOT necessarily speak to your own character, and you do not need to be "careful".

It is not dangerous to imagine dark things happening to fictional characters. It does not mean you are secretly a bad person. It does not mean you unconsciously want to hurt people in real life. It is not a "slippery slope" to doing bad things to people in real life. You cannot damage your brain or turn yourself into a bad person by consuming "dark" fanfic.

Ok class, art literacy time. This image "Ceci n'est pas une pipe" (This is not a pipe) is meant to illustrate this exact lesson. A pipe is paraphernalia, a tool used to consume tobacco and drugs. Some places make it illegal to carry one on you. But this is AN IMAGE, not a pipe. It is art depicting a subject. You can have feelings about pipes and their use and risks but when you begin censoring art, you begin to surrender your freedoms as a human being.

A fictional story about a fictional person being abused is not abuse of an actual person. As uncomfortable as our society has become with so much as using the words for uncomfortable subjects is indicative of our society's slide towards fascism and puritanical repression. Art depicts life and, whether we as a society like it or not, abuse, domestic violence, rape, suicide, incest, child sexual abuse, addiction, homelessness, sex work and murder are all actual things that actually happen and most real life villains are never caught by the legal system. Burying discussions, censoring depictions and silencing artists only helps these villains.

@roanokemunson

Gather a bunch of titanium (about 200, but this will vary depending on how elaborate you want your bases on either end of the corridor)

Also gather a good supply of quartz for glass if you want windows so you can see out the corridor at intervals

Choose the starting point of the corridor carefully, since once you place the first building, that establishes the grid that the rest of the corridor will follow. I positioned it aiming for the Alien Ruins HUD marker, about 93 meters down.*

Make sure all your building materials are stored in lockers in the starting room, and make sure your base is powered for oxygen (I used two bioreactors, but if you build near a thermal vent or a current, you could use those.)

From inside the starting room, start building the corridor pointing in the direction you want to go, walking forward to build more, piece by piece. No need to build from outside in the water!

I ended my corridor about 100 meters away from the Alien Ruins icon, which put me right next to the Observatory tower and outside of the Collector's (current) range.

I didn't time it, but I estimate this process took about 2-3 hours, prepping and building from one end of the canyon to the other. Fully furnishing and decorating the bases at both ends took extra time/resources. And, yes, if you want a Tadpole on the other side, you will need to build a second Tadpole.