Hey, I realize this is aaaages after you replied (sorry), but I did eventually dig up that fan-read The Hobbit version and holy crap is it ever something. I’m blown away by it. Thank you!
I’m going to give the Thrawn trilogy a go soon via audiobook, too. :)
A lot of people in rural areas find themselves in situations like being 10 minutes from a walmart and an hour from any other option. So then anything besides walmart costs gas and time, on top of the product cost difference to begin with.
Nobody wants to drive extra after 8 hours of shitty minimum wage work and/or taking care of children.
Not like other grocery stores are any good for workers, either.
This may add a longer pause than is wanted in some situations, like in the middle of what’s supposed to be a speech or a breathless ramble. I think sometimes uninterrupted paragraphs of dialogue are warranted.
But otherwise, yeah, action beats with the dialogue is a good tool to have in the box, and to use often.
It’s also handy for people who don’t want to write “said” all the time, since you can indicate who is speaking with an action beat followed immediately by otherwise unmarked dialogue, or by context alone (e.g. there are only two people in the convo and they’re taking turns.) It can add variety to your sentence structures.
Attempted example:
He sat back and sighed. “That’s quite a story. But I can’t say it’s an especially believable one.”
“Well,” she said, pulling a sheaf of papers out of her purse. “Have a look at this.”
He took the papers and shuffled through them slowly, frowning. Halfway through the pile, he paused. Reread something. He looked up and met her eyes.
She held his gaze, then nodded. “I think you can see why this might be a problem for both of us.”
It’s important that the action means something besides just the pause, imo. You can use actions like that to show something about the character or how they’re feeling - like, in OP’s example, a character leaning back and looking up like that would imply they are relaxed and casual. If you had them in a different situation or wanted to show a different personality, you might have them do a similar but different thing, like leaning forward and steepling their fingers, or fiddling with a knife (will there be stabbing?!), or taking a slow sip of water, or interrupting themself to make a comment about the food, or clearing their throat. It can be a way to multitask and show something about the character even while they’re having a conversation about something else. Whereas not thinking of it as anything but a pause in dialogue might lead to accidentally implying something about the charactee you don’t intend to, like making them appear relaxed when they’re supposed to be tense, or interested in a conversation when they’re supposed to be bored or distracted.
This feels very similar to me to businesses freaking out and trying to prevent their employees from wearing rainbow flag or pronoun pins. Or rainbow masks, for that matter.
I think employee uniform requirements should be just enough to make employees identifiable so they can do their jobs (e.g. answer customer questions about where the lettuce is or whatever). Just a mandatory hat or shirt is enough to do that. Beyond that, they’re humans. Let them be fucking humans.
It’s like they looked at Wizards of the Coast’s fuck-up with the D&D license and decided to copy it. What the hell?
Years upon years of being told this cannot make me not taste metal from stainless steel cups/canteens and forks, even brand new and/or freshly scrubbed to hell and back. I can’t use stainless steel tumblers because of this - even if I keep my tongue well away from it, and it’s the cleanest dish in the world, it makes the drink taste metallic. No amount of youtubers just insisting I don’t/can’t taste a thing can actually compete with a lifetime of experiencing this problem. And I have, multiple times, tried all the things they say to do to fix the “real” problem - but no. Steel tastes like steel, always.
Hypothesis: this is one of those things some people can taste and others can’t, like how there’s a whole group of “cilantro tastes like soap” people and everyone else is like ???
You’re close. Not the tilt of its axis, but its rotation around its axis (day) is slower than its rotation around the sun (year).
Earth’s axis is tilted at about 23 degrees, which causes the seasons. Venus, by contrast, is tilted only about 2.6 degrees, and thus basically doesn’t have seasons in a comparable way.
Earth’s axis does very slowly wobble around (precession). Over long enough time scales, this affects the seasons, and it means the North Star has not always been aligned with Earth’s North - once, North pointed at a patch of black sky and the North Star was just another star appearing to rotate around that arbitrary point.
I’d imagine Venus’s axis might also wobble at least somewhat, but I haven’t actually looked into this at all.
Thinking about this sent me down a rabbit hole because the day and year lengths are so extremely close to each other, and Venus rotates around its axis clockwise (unlike the other planets) while spinning around the sun clockwise, and its tilt is so slight… so as it spins around the sun, it rotates just enough to keep one side facing the sun almost all the time. I ended up googling whether it was tidally locked, like the moon is to Earth (such that we only ever see one side and it never changes) - and apparently it would be, but its atmosphere is so wild that it prevents tidal locking. But it almost is. It kinda has a dark side, and a light side, like the moon, but there’s just enough mismatch between the yearly rotation the axial rotation that the side facing the sun changes slowly. This is the first article I found.
From that article, it seems like the daylight hours you’d experience standing on the surface of Venus would be 117 Earth days of light, before it got dark again. So the sun would rise, and then you’d have about half a Venus year (aka about half a Venus day, too) of daylight before you’d see night again. And then it’d be night for the rest of the year. But still scorching hot because atmosphere.
Anyway this is blowing my mind a bit. I feel like I should have known this - I used to be obsessed with astronomy when I was little. Maybe I knew it once and forgot. I don’t know. But dayum. Planets are cool.
Primarily, library receipts!
I recommend Ken Liu’s translated Chinese scifi short story anthologies, which include some stori3s by Liu Cixin. The books are called “Invisible Planets” and “Broken Stars”.
Mother of Learning by Nobody103 - free webnovel, complete now I think. Wizard student gets stuck in a time loop and uses this opportunity to become OP and solve the mystery.
Diane Duane’s Young Wizards series, if middle grade is okay.
I second Earthsea.
Spellwright seems like it might be good but I haven’t got far in it yet.
The Black Magician trilogy by Trudi Canavan. It’s been a long time since I read this, but Canavan is one of those authors who’s popular and has a lot of books out but is weirdly never mentioned online.
Also try L.E. Modesitt Jr. If you haven’t. Either the order mage series, or Imager maybe. Most anything by him will have a lot of studying. They’re very good if you like his specific flavor of writing.
Edit: Vita Nostra being described as just “magic school” is very funny to me, although I do see where it comes from lol.
Edit 2: I remember the Charlie Bone books being good, but again those are middle grade and it’s been ages since I read them. No idea if they hold up.
The Young Wizards series by Diane Duane if middle grade is okay.
Spellwright also seems promising but I haven’t finished it myself.
If you are willing to venture into fanfiction, there are some tags on archiveofourown.org - like “humans are space orcs”, " earth is a deathworld", “earth is space australia” - for fics that feature overpowered humans relative to the aliens. Most of these are so AU that you don’t need any knowledge of the ostensible source material. The trope seems popular particularly with My Hero Academia and Minecraft youtuber fandoms, for whatever reason.
Generally, the scifi worldbuilding is usually really light, including names “made alien” by adding apostrophes and that kind of thing - but they scratch and itch that almost nothing else does. And they’re free! So maybe worth a try at least. Just make sure to filter by kudos.
Fuzzy Nations is a retelling of Little Fuzzy by H. Beam Piper. Having read both, I can report that I liked Fuzzy Nation 300% more. But if someone likes one they may as well try the other.
Little Fuzzy is kind of hilariously western, with everyone smoking and gun-toting :P it’s also decidedly more sexist and less interesting in the way it handles the aliens and the legal fight around them. Very dated. But it can be fun anyways.
There isn’t an unbiased metric in existance, not when intelligence is itself so ill-defined and nebulous.
You can’t reduce it down to a number or set of numbers without making judgements about what intelligence is and isn’t, or what the numbers represent specifically, or without making judgements about how to take the measurements. These judgements cannot be made but through the lens of the culture and individual life experience of judge(s). And when it comes to research on topics like this there is simply no way to truly isolate any measurable quantity out as being inherently caused by biology vs external factors. Humans are messy and hard to sort neatly.
If anything, the comic more-so reflects what happens to kids who grow up getting told they’re gifted and praised for being inherently smart rather than for working hard or other such things that they can actually exert any control over, thus producing kids who are terrified of not being as smart as they’re told they are or as “successful” as they’ve been expected to be, who grow up to fret about their failures or perceived failures. Or to kids who have or believe themselves a great deal of potential but cannot realize it for other reasons, be they economic, geopolitical, familial or whatever.
What if fish looked like this in their natural state, so people figured out a way to cook them to make them look like whole fish 🐟 because then the whole fish would look like food whereas the sliced salmon would look like a dead animal. Opposite world.
I did, when I tried going over there. The discussions definitely felt… redditier, in a bad way, to me. More immediately jumping to rage and personal insults.
But mainly the problem as I understand it is that lemmy.world has open sign-ups, whereas beehaw.org has strict, admin-approval sign-up. Beehaw.org was getting flooded with users from lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works who got in through their open sign-up and were then coming into beehaw, being assholes, and creating too much moderation work for the tiny volunteer mod team - they couldn’t moderate such a large and unregulated influx well enough to preserve the safe space or community feel of beehaw communities. Especially when banned individuals could just make new accounts and come right back again.
There was another post though where they said they’ve talked to the sh.itjust.works admin and are likely to work something out with them in the future to allow for re-federating, though not yet. But that the lemmy.world admin (at the time of the post) had not responded, iirc.
Raccoons have hands. Close enough!