The Inevitable Singularity Cover Reveal

I'm extremely happy to share the cover of my next novel, an epic space opera titled The Inevitable Singularity, with you. This beautiful cover is by @rachelgeorge. The Inevitable Singularity will be released as an eBook, Paperback and Hardback on November 21st by Desert Palm Press. Preorders will be available in the next few days.

I feel like theodicy is the place that (post-Plato? post-Zoroaster?) Abrahamic religions tend to really fail as systems of thought.

Like, spiritualism in general tends to be unpersuasive as a question of fact- there's simply no real empirical support for it, even though the construction itself is often powerfully evocative and beautiful. But the matter of evil in Christianity, Islam, Mormonism, etc. is something else, a place where this subset of religious doctrines just has visible and painful problems on its own merits. It's not just that I don't accept the factual claims- it's that the arguments don't add up at all. Theodicy is the crux where you have to fundamentally choose between doctrinal fidelity and the pursuit of truth, because it's where the doctrine is facially, deductively inconsistent and wrong.

At the end of the day, you just can't propose a flawless and omnipotent designer of the cosmos while simultaneously making evil a centerpiece of your analysis. You can be Manichean, and have evil arise from not-God or from some limit God has. You can assert that evil doesn't exist, though that can be tricky: Plato's evil-as-absence thing was largely unsuccessful as an attempt, both because positive evils like pain are regular features of human experience, and because pure deprivation as an ontology of evil still doesn't solve the theodicy problem. But what you cannot do is assert that the foundation of the cosmos is a perfect and all powerful entity incapable of error, and also that evil exists. The toddler's hand is well and truly caught in the cookie jar.

Most forms of modern Christianity and Mormonism try to use free will to thread the needle; mainstream Islam I think is a bit more Leibnizean, though it still leans hard on human culpability. But you can't actually do this! The claim, of course, is to say that the setting of the cosmos is perfectly good, that human volition itself is also perfectly good, but that volition has the special quality of sometimes (though not intrinsically) producing evil, which we all then have to deal with. But there's nothing in free will that actually makes it a suitable solution to this problem. The deity is necessarily extratemporal, and in that frame, volition lacks the special properties it would need to hold this weight; when you can flip to the end of the book any time you like, there's no such thing as indeterminism. Every human choice has one and exactly one result, just as with any other domain of reality; free will, like gravity and electromagnetism, is a process with wholly knowable outcomes. Hence, 'free will' is (in the context of monotheism) a purely linguistic construction that means only 'the consequences of this process are not God's fault.' It has no properties other than the shift in culpability itself, no proposed mechanism or relationship to other phenomena, no inherent virtues that can be explained in terms of any moral system. It's an entirely circular argument, a way to credit God for very tall apple trees but blame somebody else for the invention of applesauce.

Aloy in the Zenith base when Tilda called Beta "an inferior copy"

the. the cookie that didn't like puppet shows. (pure vanilla)

OH MY GOD??

today i had this Vivid memory flash through my mind of kissing my ex boyfriend (this was like 2018) and i felt so viscerally fucking revolted and I gotta say. it is truly impressive that I didn’t realise I’m a lesbian sooner than fucking half a year ago

Love how Yikes was like "We should put Lovino in the O'Connel household and torture him by fruitlessly observing his cousin's life, but maybe gaining a better fondness for said life" and I'm like "We should scare him shitless with Republicanism. We should make this man not come out with net zero knowledge of how the world works, but tear apart what he knows."

currently trying to avoid becoming obsessed w dc comics. if you see me rbing anything dc related please just send ur thoughts and prayers

it'll be a year without her in less than an hour & i don't even know how to grapple with that. we're so strained from stress we've been nauseous & shaking for hours. on the cusp of throwing up but with nothing to release. just a gutted heart & a bleeding soul.

she told me she'd haunt me a long time ago. but, she didn't linger for long. which makes sense w stuff, but... it hurts. the emptiness is so hollow. the ringing is so loud. the darkness has never been blacker. the cold has never bitten so hard.

i just wanna skip to the part where im with her again. the world without her is muted, dull & bleak. i resent it.

One Zenith OC is already one too many but still. Slightly tempted to take the idea of that glitched out Oseram Zenith and just make it into an OC of its own

all I care about atm

I kinda hate that it’s pretty common to insist that anyone who hates the color pink only hates it because they hate women. For me, personally, I have a dislike for pink because it is and has been constantly forced upon me because “I’m a girl”, my actual color preferences always being disregarded.

The Inevitable Singularity By Molly J. Bragg An Epic Space Opera Coming November 21st From Desert Palm Press

When Caila, a Paladin of the Republic, is sent to mediate a dispute on the planet Ptolemy, her bodyguard Sean goes with her, but it quickly becomes clear something more is going on. With few allies, and only imperfect visions of the future to guide them, they work to prevent a disaster, but as they do, Sean receives a warning that will have to choose between saving Caila or letting the entire Galaxy burn.

Pre-Orders Coming Soon

wouldn't be so bad if the setting wasn't also feeling more and more stale lol

All things

I have learned that most things die. Sometimes the grass, a forest, a landscape. Sometimes a building, a use or a need and its place in the city. Sometimes a thought we thought to be eternal and, sometimes a word that decays and dies forgotten. Sometimes we replace the things that die with other things that also die. Sometimes we think that we can replace things that have died with other things…

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Me watching Doukyusei in 2016: *cries blood*

Me watching Doukyusei in 2023: *cries blood but this time the blood is gold*

also warning ignore this post it's a vent to get my undeniable rage out of my body. just because i have to share my body with other bitches doesn't mean i have to share it with the unquenchable thirst for bloodshed and the insatiable anger my soul is filled with (<villain monologue before i kick a rock and huff like a 4 year old over literally the most trivial shit ever)