Snail is the bombdiggity

There's a recurring online tendency to aestheticize consensus itself. The imagined future village is full of emotionally compatible people who enjoy communal gardening, conflict resolution circles, acoustic folk music, mutual aid potlucks, and repairing bicycles together at sunset. Which is nice for the people who genuinely enjoy that lifestyle. But plenty of humans are solitary, prickly, obsessive, urban, nocturnal, sensory-seeking, technologically attached, contrarian, novelty-seeking, private, or just plain difficult. Those people do not evaporate after the revolution. They do not get Left Behind while you are Raptured into the Utopia. They become your neighbors.

The part about it being envisioned specifically as a "village" is relevant, I think, in that these kinds of people romanticize small rural villages as this ideal form of close-knit community to which we must retvrn, in contrast to the hard, alienating city life. But I'd argue that sure, dense urban environments can be alienating in certain ways, but they're also in many ways more utopian simply in that they force people to learn to peacefully co-exist as a community with others very different from themselves. The rural village appears to live in idyllic consensus because everyone who did not fit in has either been ostracized away, worn down into conformity, or has voluntarily fled to the nearest big city as soon as they were old enough.

the utopian character of the city is not only in that it teaches coexistence but also in that it fosters the development of communities within its community. a city is a thousand villages you can visit and join and leave without abandoning the comforts of your home and the stability of your lifestyle and the fundamental sense that you still ultimately belong. you can have even more tightly knit communities of maximally compatible people when more people have the opportunity to self-select and be accepted into them, and to self-select out of them without the coercive force of exclusion from your entire societal context. you can also have looser communities that benefit their members without them having to holistically get along with each other! people can be in multiple of both of these at the same time!! social butterflies can flourish to the greatest extent their own bodies and brains can handle, and the most closed-off self-sufficient loner in the world can still benefit from cooperation without it being predicated on connection. the community of the city itself is simply that of sharing space, but sharing space means sharing the myriad resources and opportunities that occupy it

Yet another person building the Torment Nexus after being inspired by the novel "Do NOT build the Torment Nexus"

Just saw an AI generated image of a leaf sheep sea slug with AI generated information on it, don’t you dare AI generate my beautiful daughter ever again

all the “peer pressure is bad” education we give kids is practically useless because all it cares about is telling them that Drugs Are Evil rather than the much more useful lesson of ‘the person who responds to you saying you don’t drink by telling you they’ll find a way to get you to is also going to be shitty about all your other boundaries’.

god forbid you teach kids that their consent should be respected rather than about the inherent immorality of all the sinful actions of their peers

i want someone to put this into writer’s blocks now

Writer’s block means you need to relearn the whole alphabet. idiot.

@kanerallels

I found out relatively recently that it really helps if I write short fiction surrounding the novels I write. Like oh? I’m stuck for a bit? Ooh there was that section I wanted to explore but doesn’t fit in the plot really. There was that what-if that could never happen in the actual story but would be fun to explore. It keeps me in the characters’ headspace (tho that’s not always what I’m needing) but not right where they are exactly.

I joined a writing group that used journalling prompts to get through a bad case of writers block and it really helped

The sheer roundness of this kitten must be admired.