chaosphaere | Recent Entries

I do not read the genre I write in, for the most part. I just want to avoid borrowing and avoid being influenced.

Welcome to the MetaNet.

It's not the "real world" your parents knew. It's an I/O device which interacts seamlessly with your internet-equipped devices.

It's the world in which you take delivery of your Amazon orders. In which you meet your Tinder dates. It's the world you talk about on Facebook - heck, perhaps you do things *just to report them on Facebook*. It's the world in which you get picked up by your Uber driver.

The MetaNet is the display device for your internet interactions.

Welcome to a new way of thinking about reality. You may have been around for the majority of the "real world". Chances are, the MetaNet will be how your children and grandchildren relate to reality.

Is your postal address your Outernet URL?

For about 24 hours, my Facebook and Tumblr feeds dropped everything they were doing, to talk about the life and contributions of one mensch. It was like the entire Internet called a cease fire.

You don't remember when you started watching the faces on the 1015 train. They never changed. People in shades from peach to ivory to sepia and ochre with hair in every color, occurring in nature and not. But they were the same. They moved in groups, laughing, from place to place. Scrupulously maintaining an inch of space between your bodies no matter how crowded the train was.

They tried to look different yet they were the same in their... resistance to sameness. You gripped the metal rod to keep yourself on your feet as your train lurched to a halt. You pushed your glasses back up your nose. You felt an object collide with your body from behind. You turned, startled, and it took you several moments to realize that a person had collided with you. You checked your pockets, everything was still there. A woman pulled her child back and muttered an apology, turning as her cheeks colored. You said nothing. Best not add insult to injury.

The train moved again, jerking forward. It sliced soundlessly on its track through the haze, above the city. You looked out, as always, at the sleek buildings so even and precise and pristine, their pieces having been poured from machines.

At least that is how they did it then, you thought. Who knows what they do now. Who knows what they’ll do tomorrow.

You walked home down streets that never went dark. You'd read once that the future would be lit in neon.

But the advertisements poured off of the buildings on huge, flat screens that reminded you sometimes of the huge, glib antique television sets of your grandparents. No neon. Pastel, white, chrome and glass.

You checked your Io brand wrist companion, fingering its black rubbery strap reflexively. You found it reassuring. You felt unique in the customized options you’d made. We’re Io and we help you be you. You’d worked that campaign once.

You walked rapidly past pastel-lit storefronts. Funny, you thought, you didn't remember these stores. A chocolate shop had moved in. Since 2017, it read. You shook your head as you passed. You worked that account, too. For values of "worked" that meant making sure the changed year (Atelier Chocolatier didn't open until about 15 years after that date) got changed everywhere it appeared.

You touched two fingers to your wrist companion as the bright facade of your building came into view ahead of you. When you reached the door, you pressed the small tile against the panel by the front door. For a moment, no sound, nothing. You wondered if you'd paid your rent this week. You tried to remember if surge pricing was in effect. You tried to remember what the rent was. Click, whirr, the door slid open. It must've been deducted. You wondered what was left.

This is a response I made (as a comment) to someone else's post, about my observations about the changes in geek culture. It would explain a lot to me about why some of my geeky friends (who have not been with the community long enough to change with it) feel alienated and don't seek out other geeks; there really is a feeling of "having missed a meeting" if you haven't done anything (socially) geeky in the last ten years, because you're literally not up on a good 80% of the culture that is being discussed.

I have noticed geekery changing for a long, long time. I particularly noticed it in 2007 or so, when I came up with the term "nuGeek" to describe how younger Xr and Millennial geeks were engaging geekdom.

NuGeekhood is borderline mainstream, and FAR more franchise and consumerist oriented than old geekhood was. Look, it's even got its own market segment!! Hot Topic and ThinkGeek. It even has a *name*. My friends and I never called ourselves anything: we were just *friends* first and foremost, who happened to click over liking Star Trek, sci fi novels (we're old enough to distinguish between serious literary SF vs "skiffy"), and tabletop role playing games. Most of us ended up either 1) computer people or 2) a hot mess because apparently computers/engineering seem to be the only middle class professions compatible with our personalities. We are also old enough and close enough with the older generations to identify the shout-outs in the DS9 episode that referenced the inner world of classic 50s science fiction publishing. Even if we don't know, we're probably friends with someone who does.

But younger geekery is *much* different. It's far more based on consumerism.

A new thing has emerged, too - META. META CULTURE.

I identify now why I fell out of the community (beyond my existing friends) when Firefly fandom began. It's not that Firefly started the trend, but it really is symptomatic of that trend. It was too genre savvy for its time, and for its own good, and to me, that's why it failed. It referenced geek culture and tropes so heavily that non-geeks just didn't get the show - so it (to me) just came off like Joss Whedon jerking off with his own interior universe. The show has much more geek-historic and nostalgic significance than it actually had at the time it aired. But it captured the imagination of a lot of younger geeks, who were tuned in to the emerging massified nuGeek culture.

Whedon may be the first real icon of nuGeekhood. People paid attention to things he said and he made things specifically for the geek community in a lot of ways, in ways that even people like Gene Roddenberry didn't - geek creators had, as of the early to mid 2000s, become self-aware of their geekiness. For the first time, people talking about geekhood became a major fandom in and of itself.

Whedon was the beginning of most geeky things consisting of lots and lots of meta and media that mostly referenced other things within geekdom; geek pop culture was starting to consume itself, and feed off itself, but by the late 2000s, it had enough of a following to allow for this. And while fanfic has always existed, it had never quite been more than a niche thing before. Now screenwriters even tease about it or throw bones to the audience.

You also have the birth of meta-culture and critique culture (and you see tinges of this postmodernist approach in "Buffy" as well). More of geek culture consuming and feeding on itself. Nostalgia Critic. Nostalgia Chick. TVTropes. Tropes vs Women. Doesn't matter which side of it you're on, because the kerfluffles which were spawned (GamerGate vs anti-GamerGate) are, to this OLD SCHOOL geek, two sides of the same coin: which group of Millennials is going to control geekery, the entitled and narcissist kidult boys, or the entitled and narcissist kidult girls? It's all the same, really. The new "battle of the sexes" is a battle between two equally entitled groups of adult-bodied, narcissistic children. Both of whom are duking it out for control of the geekosphere. And there is no better example of this than the debacle that was GamerGate.

As for me - I am pretty much an "old school geek". I started feeling alienated by the geek community at about the time that "nuGeekhood" arrived on the scenes. I know that there are still circles that cater specifically to our people. And there are even fandom subcultures (such as steampunk) that are equally popular to both kinds of geek.

tl;dr:

ALL of the geeks my age and older are starting to complain about con culture, and most have the same complaints.

You're not alone.

But if you're expecting modern geek culture to be the all-embracing social utopia for the freaks and geeks that it may have been to us when younger... it hasn't been that for a long time. It's both going more weirdly postmodernist (meta-this and meta-that... half of the culture seems to exist around critiquing the other half), and more mainstream. Absorbing all the mass-market consumer franchises has had the effect of turning SF/F literature fans and older franchise fans (Star Trek, etc) into needles in the giant Millennial haystack.

There are cons that are more focused on literature (such as my local FogCon), but the political and social justice discussions that pervade every panel talk probably will be something you personally find alienating, based upon knowing you. I wish your local area had a group similar to LASFS because it's one of the very last holdouts of old-geek culture.

In short:

Older geekhood referenced science, history, literature, and other things. It was "nerdier" for lack of a better term, more academic.

NuGeekhood references itself. It references geek culture.

(To me, this is one of many reasons why many geeks don't at all identify with "Big Bang Theory"; the guys in some ways - despite being into superhero lore and cosplay and con culture - are much more like older geeks, and someone who is a nuGeek is probably far, far more in the mainstream. Um - the guys on BBT may seem "really weird" compared to younger geeks, but they are actually MUCH more professionally and personally successful and socially functional than the worst stereotypes of "nerdy" older geeks. At best, we had Revenge of the Nerds. At worst, we had Comic Book Guy.)

And dang, the formatting of this post ended up way, way screwed up. Oh well. I don't feel like fixing it.

In one of my bits of writing (just bit of writing practice I do with some of my RPG characters), there is a heterosexual couple where the man - who superficially is a macho, tough soldier type - comes from what I headcanon to be a traditionally woman-led society and from a society that canonically has women (who are equally capable fighters, but often taller) initiating the sexual relationships.

When I write about these two, I often forget this fact, but just changing who does the initiation would affect all kinds of dynamics.

It would also imply that the men-types (it’s a culture where the genders don’t quite as neatly map to ours) are the gender that is the sex object, and possibly, often sexually harassed.

It would imply that men-types in relationships would be concerned with being “desirable” and concerned with women-types finding them attractive and probably would be the more accommodating gender in that kind of a social set-up. It means that there might be a subtle pressure on the male-types to do more of the accommodating - i.e., a subtle prioritization within the relationship, of the female's desires and goals, with men often doing hands-on jobs that are more "portable" from location to location. I.e., perhaps in this dynamic you'd see a woman with a less portable, replaceable job - such as scientist, professor, et cetera - with a man commonly in more menial jobs that a strong guy could do anywhere (such as builder, bricklayer, security, etc).

A male might experience pressure to change his job to accommodate a bond when the female types might not deal with any such pressure at all, or only minimally.

It implies that women are the ones who take mates but men are the ones who worry about being attractive, and about holding on to them. None of this is stated in canon, but it’s how I head canon a society that canonically positions women as the initiator.

Because a lot of dynamics change when you’re reared to think of yourself as someone who would passively “attract” a mate versus just going and getting one, and a lot of dynamics change when you are in a society where women are given authority and deference but men are basically expendable (and mostly valued - in a society with dramatically and catastrophically falling birth rates - for the fact that they continue to produce semi-viable sperm well into old age).

Given survival/financial support isn’t wrapped up in this (everyone has a job they do and it’s a collectivist society where everyone is supported by a larger group of people), and given that physical dominance doesn’t come a huge amount into play, and given how much the society privileges one specific relationship type that isn’t any of the relationships described here, there’s only so much that the power dynamic will be affected by just a change in initiators.

But it will inevitably change some of the dynamics and the psychology of the people within the relationship, and how people within it think of *themselves*.

I'm increasingly feeling like my involvement on Tumblr is a huge timesuck and mindsuck.

Granted, I love Tumblr, I really do. I LOVE the art and science blogs on Tumblr.

But my dashboard (I follow some 200 blogs) is unmanageable, I tend to get sucked into depression/OCD/anxiety blogging which actually makes my stuff *worse*, something about that environment turns me into even more of a navelgazer (as it does to everyone - somehow, people on there tend to make everything about themselves; something about the UI and design), and well, you already know better than to ever get involved in politics there.

I don't write, I don't actually blog anything non-navelgazy.

I am tempted to start a new account, take over only about 20 friends, just follow the art and science blogs I want to follow, and leave it at that.

Additionally, I'll be running my own art blog and restarting my science blog Today's Malady over there, so there's that. But I really need to prune things. I miss writing fiction and actually doing things besides staring at my own navel.

This is an absolutely gorgeous and well made film but it doesn’t work for my neurology.

The film is too eyegrabby for me to watch sober (because being medicated is the only condition under which I can ever just sit and watch something for two hours). I almost never watch films that require too much fixed attention unless it’s in a theater. I would have loved this in a movie theater but I’m too distracted at home to follow it. I can’t just sit and watch a film and do nothing.

I tend to prefer stuff that is actually less visual *because* I can draw, check my email, etc while I watch it.

The speech here is too dense, too. It’s a constant wall of words. It’s very talky. I don’t like talky stuff unless the talk is paced and there’s adequate silence between speech acts. It’s like a constant wall of words in which people are constantly speaking.

It’s actually kind of nauseating… like low level sensory overload.

The speech patterns in this film are almost migraine-inducing to me. I’m able to hear the rhythm of the speech - it’s a distracting, CONSTANT patter - with a few exceptions, someone is CONSTANTLY talking to someone else - but I cannot actually parse any of the things being said. And the speech is too rapid for me to follow the closed captioning.

The speech is not naturalistic speech.

My own perception of karma - my own personal insight into it - is that we as Westerners are really unable to wrap our minds around it without making it "bad things happen to bad people", because we often filter the whole idea through our western Christian-based moral system (and even if one isn't raised specifically Christian - I'm secular Jewish for example - it's still a Christian-dominant culture and it's impossible to escape those memes if you were raised in this culture).

And another thing that doesn't translate very well with nonwestern-based systems is how much of our worldview is based upon taking the word of appointed "experts" relatively unquestioned (granted, this is in other worldviews too, but I speak of the one I'm most familiar with). You see this a lot with the most radical fringe of the skeptic/atheist contingent who basically take their favorite experts' word as gospel, completely devaluing subjective experience (a particular thought pattern that tends to indicate a collective issue with theory of mind to me - "but you don't really feel good, you only THINK you feel good, because it's not objectively possible to..."; you get the picture), while not actually understanding how much uncertainty and mystery is actually involved in real science (and that that's the POINT of it) - which is why some scientists don't find conflict with being religious or spiritual. The same worldview can be as much of a shutdown to inquiry and knowledge as religion itself had been.

Subjective experience is not accepted by the skeptical worldview, but - surprise - it's not a part of most traditional, mainline mainstream religious views, either (though it seems to be creeping into the more liberal practices of both Judaism and Christianity). Of course it wouldn't be. Subjective experience is individual, and our culture deals with consensus (of either the men in black frocks and white collars, or the men in white coats and dark ties), and hasn't yet made peace with how to balance individual experience with class analysis, because we just haven't been doing it for that long.

At this point, I've been involved with three different things that tend to be about subjective experience - Buddhism, meditation, mind altering substances (to a small degree) - and my understanding has been with Buddhism, there was the encouragement that one should meditate *because* what it tries to describe can only actually be internalized and understood subjectively and empirically... "no one can tell you what the Matrix is, you have to see for yourself"... and that with reflection, you would come to see the ideas described *on your own* and internalize them.

My understanding of karma: there's no deserving because "deserving" is a product of dualistic thinking, as if some god in the sky were doling out either brownie points or blue-chip stamps for bad or good behavior. All of your action and thought in the past brings you to where you are now. That was my understanding of it. I also felt that the more simplistic explanations of it in terms of mysticism, etc, tended to be metaphor (one Tibetan geshe told me, "if you think that's all bullshit [the stuff about the bardo, hell realms, etc], that's ok too, because all of that isn't the point".)

It's interesting to think and talk about this stuff. I know relatively little about it, but it's still pretty interesting stuff.

Was thinking I was going to migrate my fiction over to this account, from the chaosphaere account. But... I am actually doing something of a reboot of that universe, so you're actually going to see new material (and some rewriting of old material, but as it's a reboot, it's going to vibe differently.)

So, I will leave the old "Ninth Millennium universe" fiction on my old account. New goes here. Onward and upward. Everything here will new stuff (9m reboot universe, other stuff I'm writing).