currently writing a short story about a time travelling microbiologist (cambrian noctiluca my beloved <3)

Through deep breaths, Farah explained, “Getting enough hydrogen ions was the limiting factor. Why did we not put them through CRISPR?” She gripped Cambrian’s shoulders in return. “Make the mitochondria and enzymes resistant to acids and put them in solutions with high ion concentrations. The enzymes go into overdrive and start producing way more energy than before. It’s enough to power the machine, Brie. I went back in time.”

i apologise to the biologists who know things. i wanted my time machine to be powered by mitochondria and by god theyre powered by mitochondria because the plot wills it

stargazing on some distant planet

Uncredited art for Larry Niven's The Ringworld Engineers

yippie another ref, space cat this time!!guess i might be on time before art fight hits art only ver

as for the trivia stuff, when i mean he forgets hes not in zero g its inspired by this video of astronauts doing exactly the same thing like lmao literally him

wow i can't believe zeb and kallus are officially husbands!!! (mr filoni told me so!!)

yes i have a ship type.

homage to one of my favourite books ever

I love the universal concept of Big Worm In The Desert; if youare making ANYTHING set in a fictional desert it is seemingly IMPERATIVE you put a worm of considerable size in there. Be it friend or foe, simply large or absolutely ginormous, all that's important is it is a Big Worm or Wormlike-Being In The Desert

David Tennant as the Fourteenth Doctor (and his Sonic Screwdriver)

for Tennant Tuesday (or whatever day this post finds you)

I probably should have just stopped talking, but I didn’t want to hurt Amena’s feelings.

Network Effect, pg. 182-183

“Jason? Is there a reason you’re dragging that man?”

“He’s unconscious. Makes walking hard.”

love that jason is a pedantic lil shit in every universe

Errors, “Errors,” and Sci Fi

@strawberry-crocodile

tvtropes calls stuff like the wolf example "science matches on" which I think is a pretty fair shake

This.  This is what’s got me thinking so much about errors.  There’s a certain danger, here.  A certain way that this particular effect — delicious dramatic irony — tempts the mind when reading old stories, even true ones.

What do you know about R.M.S. Titanic? I ask my class every year, and the first hand rises.  “It was unsinkable,” the student inevitably says, and everyone is nodding, “or so they thought.”  I write the word UNSINKABLE on the board, underneath my crude drawing of a ship with four smokestacks.  It will be crossed out before the end of the hour, but not for the reason they expect.

“I find no evidence,” Walter Lord, preeminent biographer of the ship’s survivors, wrote, “that Titanic was ever advertised as unsinkable. This detail seems to have entered the collective mind so as to create a more perfect irony.”  Indeed, historians’ examinations of White Star Line documents show the shipbuilders themselves worried it would be so large as to risk collision; they stocked several more lifeboats than 1910s regulations required.

The War to End All Wars (deep breath, satisfied exhale), also known as World War ONE. Chuckle.  Shake of the head.  What if I told you that this phrase, used primarily in American newspapers after the fact, wasn’t meant to be literal? Nowadays we’d say The Mother of All Wars, or One Hell of a Fucking War, but we wouldn’t mean literal motherhood, literal intercourse.  What if I said the armistice and the Lost Generation and the Roaring 20s were all braced for another outbreak of European conflict, and yet we still failed to prevent it?

Did you know they were so confident in the safety of the S.S. Challenger that they put a civilian schoolteacher onboard? I do, because I’ve heard that one repeated many times.  Only, see, it’s got the cause and effect reversed.  Challenger launched on a day the shuttle’s engineers knew to be dangerously cold, because the first civilian in space was on board. And NASA knew its shuttle project would be cancelled entirely, if they couldn’t get that civilian’s much-delayed entry into space in the next two weeks.  So they launched on a cold day, and killed her instead.

These are all what cognitive science calls Hindsight Bias on the personal level, what sociology calls Presentism on the cultural level.  Social psychology’s a little of both, is primarily interested in why you’re sitting on your couch in a Colonize Mars shirt watching PBS and chuckling at the fools who believed in El Dorado.  It wants to know why the mind flees straight from “marijuana will kill you” to “marijuana will cure cancer” without so much as a pause on the middle ground of its real benefits and drawbacks, its real (mild) risks and rewards.

And they can paralyze the sci-fi writer, if you think too much about them. Jetsons is futurist one decade, retro the next.  “There are no bathrooms on the Enterprise,” the creators of Serenity say smugly, as if Gene Roddenberry should’ve simply known that decades later it’d be acceptable to show a man peeing in full view of the camera, nothing but the curve of the actor’s hand to protect his modesty.  “No sound in space,” the Fandom Menace says, “No explosions in space,” and “A space station can’t collapse in zero-G.”  Only then NASA burns a paper napkin outside of atmosphere, transmits music using only the ghost of nearby planets’ gravities, and logs onto Reddit long enough to point out the Death Star would implode in its own gravity field.  And now we’re the ones pointing, the ones laughing, at those earlier point-and-laughers.  Self-satisfied, smug in superiority.  As if we did the work to find out ourselves, instead of just happening to be born a little later than George Lucas.

I never forgot Hugo’s description of his first contact with a train:

“The gave me Watt entirely naked, when I’d rather have him clothed by Benvenuto Cellini”

1) I agree, I love useless ornament. (although 19th c trains are beautiful to me xD)(and if he thought 19th c needed more ornaments what the hell would he think of contemporary architecture/design) 2) i wish someone would write about the quotidian with this much visionary power nowadays

make me choose: @meduseld asked Gothic Horror or Sci-fi Horror?

Vampyr (1932)

Interview With the Vampire (1994)

Bride of Frankenstein (1935)

Crimson Peak (2015)

The Orphanage (2007)

The Church (1989)

The Uninvited (1944)

The Masque of the Red Death (1964)

One of those "shortstack of a man" characters I created in the past

I named him Galactic Maintenance Dan (or just "Galactic Dan" for short) but I redrew him more stockier for that full shortstack man effect

For those wondering what a "Tingler" looks like...

The Tingler (1959) // dir. William Castle

wish shem-ha stayed with them