There are many really specific types of worldbuilding I wish we had a name for just so I can search for it more effectively. For instance, when people make alien psychologies for their aliens or come up with alternate human evolutions like what the novel Blindsight does with its vampires.
https://youtu.be/Tr2FBsNijdc
am maked a yoo toob video :D
Borzoi White Mohair with zipper (box for pajamas), glass eyes
I want to be the first person on the moon to shoot a sniper rifle at earth and hit a wasp nest. my whole life so far is leading up to that moment
giant bomb literally arent going to review fallout 76 just because no one on staff wants to play enough of it to give it a score afsfjhlskd
hii, i wanted to ask what you didn't like about ringworld, i was going to start reading it, but now i'm wondering if i should just not lol
I didn't like.. most of it, tbh.
It's very misogynistic and has a weirdly lukewarm/probably for the best :/ stance on eugenics, the characters are either complete cartoons, or truly awful people. The protagonist is just a vile person, but in that author self-insert way where he can only be validated, Teela is written like a precocious child and cocksleeve for the protagonist (and when she disapears, a new cocksleeve immediately replaces her.))
The aliens are also really stupidly written, the carnivores are warlike meatheads and the herbivores are pathetic and cowardly. The exploration of the ringworld isn't even fun because when they get there they mostly run past all of the inhabitants because they determine theyre just stupid savages and need to keep looking until they find civilized people, which was very jarring and frustrating after finishing several of Le Guin's Hainish books.
The scale of the ringworld is cool, and they way puppeteers look is cool. That's about it.
I can't believe home depot literally produced a wildly successful science fiction musical and we all just pretend it didn't happen. on one hand yes it had a boring white guy main character but like.... home depot just... Made it? And it had shit ton of box office sales? and no one even talks about this. this is like avatar (2009) all over again
I think a lot about manufacturing processes because they’re the most impressive things humanity has ever done and injection moulding wacks me out the most. I was looking at the toy keyboard I bought a while back and it got me thinking about how much of what we consider to be the look of The Modern Era is down to injection moulding.
I hold that injection moulding is one of the pillars of modern society and technology. Can you imagine a world where you couldn’t use injection moulding. It’d look completely foreign. Like looking into an alien world. When you consider it you have to conclude that injection moulding has shaped our culture as much as the development of the camera or the invention of the piano or the creation of glassblowing. If archaeologists had to name our culture in the style of the Corded Ware culture or the Funnel Beaker culture, we’d be the Injection Moulded Plastic culture.
Injection moulding is how we get, oh, almost every plastic thing you’ve ever seen. The keys on your keyboard are injection moulded. Your phone case is injection moulded. Unless you’ve got a fancy milled metal laptop like a macbook then your laptop’s chassis is mostly injection moulded plastic. Your lightswitches are injection moulded. Plastic water bottles are injection moulded. Injection moulding is how we can produce extremely similar objects at breakneck pace for almost no money.
Now it’s important to rememeber that injection moulding isn’t cheap, or, well, injection moulding is only cheap for mass production. Every single unique piece of plastic needs a mould, and each mould will cost somewhere around thousands to tens of thousands of dollars EACH, depending on how tight the tolerances are and how complex the geometry is. Look at how many unique plastic pieces there are on that keyboard. Each one represents an investment of like $7000 into making this toy that gets sold for about $20, so there’s no way this would get made unless the company had plans to sell literally hundreds of thousands of these things.
(This mould can spit out one chair every 30 seconds and it probably cost twenty thousand dollars to make)
Once you learn to see injection moulding you can’t unsee it. It’s like learning about kerning, or musical intervals, or disability compliant designs, or the pantone colours, or about how many insulator disks are needed on different voltage power lines. You start to see it everywhere, you realise that everything in your life relies upon our ability to jam plastic through a heated screw and into a mould reliably, hundreds of times per day, all day, every day.
Unless you’re wandering alone in the wilderness (and even then, maybe: check your clothing), look around and see if there’s something injection moulded near you. I can tell you the answer, there definitely is. It’s inescapable.
What would a world without injection moulded parts look like? It’d be weird. Everything we think of as cheap and easy to make is suddenly expensive. Complex curves and slopes like you’d find on a one dollar potato peeler now require hours of work to form. Every budget consumer item would be like those cheap sheet metal PC cases that have drawn blood from everyone who build a PC in them. Everything now has the aesthetics of a Sun 3/280 system:
Heck, even this sheet steel cube has a dozen injection moulded parts visible.
All the chunky plastic housing of the 90′s and 2000′s, all the sleek curves of the 2010′s, all the cheap plastic knick-knacks, the plastic toy horses, the snugly-fitting appliance chassis, the stacking plastic chairs. All these things now cost ten times as much and have to be formed from heavy steel, or milled out of chunks of cast plastic, or replaced with formed sheet metal.
Our culture, artistic sensibilities, and sense of value has been irrevocably shaped by our ability to squeeze liquid plastic into a metal die.