The Wildest Thing About The Reactions On That Dinosaur Post Is That I Never Said It's Wrong To Point

The wildest thing about the reactions on that dinosaur post is that I never said it's wrong to point out inaccuracies, but made fun of people who point them out in an overtly rude way. Are these particular dinonerds taking offense to that because they feel that rudeness is justified, or something? It's important to them to be mean about it? Or did they just imagine I said "never educate people" because their defensiveness is that hair-trigger? I didn't have a negative view of them before at all. It was supposed to be more of a friendly ribbing of a post. Now in only hours I've come to feel that the internet dinosaur community may have some uhhhhhhhhhhhh mighty peculiar characters to say the least

I mean what is this. WHAT is this. Who is out here insinuating that inaccurate movie dinosaurs are a slippery slope to an ecological apocalypse. Good lord, calm the heckarooni down, that is not remotely how anything works, society's collective understanding of the environment is indeed dismal but I'd actually bet good money that it is not significantly impacted by the number of people who have an obsolete mental image of a Spinosaurus, and frankly I don't care for the implication that "lack of education" or "scientific ignorance" is what's destroying our world rather than, you know, the corporate greed of people who absolutely do know better. This kind of outlook is more or less blaming the poorer, lower class majority for issues they have no power over at all. "The Properly Educated are the heroes who hold back the teeming throngs of mindless zombie idiots from annihilating society" is to put it gently not a terribly realistic or fair perspective. It's really in fact more of an anime villain monologue.

why is there no electricity after the apocalypse?

something people writing post-apocalyptic fiction always seem to forget is how extremely easy basic 20th century technology is to achieve if you have a high school education (or the equivalent books from an abandoned library), a few tools (of the type that take 20 years to rust away even if left out in the elements), and the kind of metal scrap you can strip out of a trashed building.

if you want an 18th century tech level, you really need to somehow explain the total failure of humanity as a whole to rebuild their basic tech infrastructure in the decade after your apocalypse event.

i am not a scientist or an engineer, i’m just a house husband with about the level of tech know-how it takes to troubleshoot a lawn mower engine, but i could set up a series of wind turbines and storage batteries for a survivor compound with a few weeks of trial and error out of the stuff my neighbors could loot from the wreckage of the menards out on highway 3. hell, chances are the menards has a couple roof turbines in stock right now. or you could retrofit some from ceiling fans; electric motors and electric generators are the same thing, basically.

radio is garage-tinkering level tech too. so are electric/mechanical medical devices like ventilators and blood pressure cuffs. internal combustion’s trickiest engineering challenge is maintaining your seals without a good source of replacement parts, so after a few years you’re going to be experimenting with o-rings cut out of hot water bottles, but fuel is nbd. you can use alcohol. you can make bio diesel in your back yard. you can use left-over cooking oil, ffs.

what i’m saying is, we really have to stop doing the thing where after the meteor/zombies/alien invasion/whatever everyone is suddenly doing ‘little house on the prairie’ cosplay. unless every bit of metal or every bit of knowlege is somehow erased, folks are going to get set back to 1950 at the most. and you need to account somehow for stopping them from rebuilding the modern world, because that’s going to be a lot of people’s main life goal from the moment the apocalypse lets them have a minute to breathe.

nobody who remembers flush toilets will ever be content with living the medieval life, is what i’m saying. let’s stop writing the No Tech World scenario.

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sieveplayer

2 years ago