“This media is problematic”.
I’ve heard dozens of variations on this refrain, hundreds of times. I’ve seen people respond to it with hostility - “what’s your problem?” - or confusion - “what’s the problem?”. I’ve heard people say that such critics are unpleasable. “They’ll never be happy”, they grumble.
What can we take away from this kind of situation?
Read more "The Unpleasable Progressive and Red Rock Mountain" »
Twitter is taking an awfully long time to die, but its death is widely seen as inevitable.
Some people have already fled to other social media sites, e.g. Mastodon, or the newer Bluesky or Threads. I did too, to be fair.
But the whole idea, that my stuff lives on the servers owned by people manifestly committed to shitty behavior, still feels bad.
POSSE is essentially a fancy new acronym for a very old idea - publish and syndicate content. The tools, like RSS and Atom, have been around for years. ActivityPub is really neat, but it’s an evolution of an existing concept.
So what does all this mean?
There’s an excellent thread on Twitter about magic, urban fantasy, and the Dresden Files in particular.
Since my reply to it talked about my frustration with worldbuilding in contemporary urban fantasy and how I respond to it, let me illustrate what I consider to be “good”.
The vampire has been with us for millennia. Before Bram Stoker’s Dracula, cultures around the world had their own stories about blood-drinking undead fiends. Works like “Nosferatu”, Anne Rice’s books, White Wolf’s “Vampire: the Masquerade”, and more continued to flesh out what vampires were about. They became metaphors for sexual assault, disease, and other social anxieties, but equally were cast as darkly magnetic, powerful, and tragic figures on the outskirts of polite society.
How does your fictional world’s summoning or conjuring work? When your magic users call for something to appear, what’s going on that makes it work?
Here are a few sample models I’ve seen in fiction. Each approach implies different things about how to break the summoning, and the entity’s attitude toward being summoned. They can also be combined.
