JP Babb

Maybe *that's* why Picard s3 felt like such a ripoff of it.

If you want people to think that you actually give a shit about the genocide that your country is aiding and abetting, maybe don't say that the people who protested it were "throwing a fit," you callous jerk.

I remember when people were freaking out about how the orgy scene in #LowerDecks went against "Gene's vision", and I just imagined actual Gene Roddenberry getting angry at it because there's no enough hole and also he's just decided that everyone in the future has two sets of genitals #StarTrek

if I were in charge of a Star Trek series, it would have a recreational sex change midway through the first season. Not even a big thing, just like "Oh, hey, you're a woman now!" "Oh yeah, yeah, I kind of felt like it was time for a change, y'know?" And then they shrug and go do their jobs.

This feels like AI

How come characters who want to form hiveminds (with the honourable exception of Agnes Jurati) never get to be heroes?
Like, I'm sorry, but Viktor was the only one proposing proactive solutions to Piltover's social crises. #Arcane

“The advice is ingrained with the optimism that this technology will only get better. It’s the same story the AI companies are telling: with more computers and more data, all will be fine. That’s bullshit. This is and will always be a statistical, associative machine.”

But they have such Trusted Sources!

Sorry; "Freakin'"

Trashy clickbait farms tend to be, as conservatism has faded away entirely except for outrage.

I think I would take career advice from a magic eight ball before I trusted a single thing that "Giant Freaking Robot" has ever published.

People scoff at science fiction and fantasy, but I bet that serious literary novelists have never once needed to rise to the challenge of writing from the perspective of a distributed consciousness simultaneously existing in like six different places at once.

Amazon Link: www.amazon.ca/dp/1997596113

Amazon Review by Benjamin Tippett: 1. it takes place in canada, but not that canada that mediocre writers talk about where they name drop places you have been. our canada, with our weird idiosyncratic denial of the contradictions that make us a nation. a nation which exists only as a means to enable exploitation of people and place, and yet somehow has grown a culture in spite of itself. a nation which is built around a half-spoken promise, a nation of marginalia. somehow this piece of speculative fiction uses this thorough and three dimensional understanding of us as a people as an unexamined premise and a setting for this fantasy story. everyone in this story is maximally unglamorous and a nerd. Babb does not need to say it, because you know in your bones that everyone in this story has a comb-over and a pea-soup-green parka and walks around in sorell skidoo boots. it captures our home as a place which does not feel forced. SETTING THIS STORY IN CANADA DOES NOT FEEL FORCED. and that’s probably one of the finest feats of strength i’ve seen from an author of speculative fiction. margaret atwood couldn’t pull it off. i don’t know why anyone else would even try.

2. this story is about physicists, and the author understands both physics and physicists in a way which emphasizes both their heroic self-aggrandizing natures, and their absurd uselessness. the physics in this book are quite good. no notes. 3. this book is about fairy incursion. we’ve seen charlie strauss try it. we’ve seen terry pratchett try it. their novels were fun. but this one is more fun because it takes place in canada: a country where the constitution is just a bunch of agreements people have stapled together, and hasn’t even been ratified. a country where people strongly believe in the rule of law, but also where no one quite knows what that means and where politicians who try to nail it down get PUNISHED. ours is a country whose devotion to the rule of law, but not the word of law; and whose endless desire to keep talking about it without reaching a conclusion is ANATHEMA to the baroque rules of the fae. 4. Babb knows how to structure a good , winding story. it is exciting to read, and interesting.

This, by far, is my favourite review of Reality's End:
#Canada #Booksky #Books #Fantasy #Physics

The *Picard* novels are pretty good, but they badly need one about Agnes Jurati being an awesome and lovable Borg Queen.

Star Trek Needs New (and Better) Villains - Reactor The "villains" of Trek are meant to be foils to the Federation's worldview, not blindly evil antagonists.

I wrote a thing. #StarTrek #SNW

The most frustrating thing is when you have to argue against someone who doesn't realise that you already agree with them.

I never thought I would die fighting side by side with a Pope.

If you write yourself into corner, just cast some yarrow sticks and pull out the I Ching, like a respectable creative professional.

Everyone fears them until they don't. And then the dam bursts.

What can I say, it's a *really* good book!

I believe he's president these days.

Discworld QOTD, from Men at Arms

“If you had enough money, you could hardly commit crimes at all. You just perpetrated amusing little peccadilloes.”

I think that we need to bring back physical media as a tool of resistance. I'm just thinking of all of these underground comics from the 70s and 80s that were so over the top that they would certainly just be taken down for ToS violations from, say, Webtoon.

Anyway, tune in next week, when I will be explaining the meaning of life. /end

They exist to exist. "What if," Larson seems to ask, "cows made tools?" And the very simple, very obvious answer that he presents is, "There'd probably be some weird, crappy tools around the barnyard." /16

Thus, the absurdity comes from the complete void where narrative is supposed to be in the alternate world that the image evokes. Both the cow and the tools are objects whole and entire and of themselves. /15

This world is paradoxical; the cow is evidently no more intelligent than one of our world (hence the tools' crudity), lives in the same manner as our cows (hence the barn), has no obvious means of either crafting or using the tools, and has no obvious reason for needing them (she is a cow). /14

And so, what the comic is inviting us to imagine is not a particular narrative, but an entire alternate world. One in which cows, like humans, chimpanzees, and certain corvids, are amongst the ranks of tool users. /13

Cows, as a rule, are less intelligent than humans; and thus one would assume that tools made by cows would be a cut below even those made by our ancestors. And so the intended joke is essentially: "If cows could make tools, they would be bad at it." /12