not to derail the low income writer thing, but I’ve actually had this discussion before, many times, in smaller writing circles, with how so much of the current writing and publishing “climate” does not adhere nor even acknowledge how difficult writing (or any creative outlet tbh) can be for people to pursue - even as a hobby - when your energies are sapped into simply surviving, into struggling through life, working full-time, perhaps even balancing multiple jobs, or care-giving children, elderly or sick family, with little to show for it beyond the absolute minimum. how the current economic living crisis has been inevitably crushing creatives, and potential creatives, when there are so many limitations, not just financially, but in time and in energy
advice akin to “those who want to write will find the time” is insulting to those who are already running ragged just trying to get by, whether due to jobs, brain fog, illness or a combination of all the above and more. “get up earlier or stay up later” doesn’t take into consideration how much people are already sacrificing everywhere else. how out of touch a lot of it is, mostly offered by those who are already successful, or from those who have the luxury of time
most low income writers are self-publishing their work already prepared for a significant loss, after cover art, marketing budgets, editing etc, and so, some low income writers will never be able to justify self-publishing at all. and money aside, other avenues aren’t exactly easy either, patreon subscribers, for example, look for discord access, social media presence, weekly or bi-weekly updates, asking for more time and more energy from the author.
simply the way readers engage now, expecting immediate sequels, long series, multiple books published a year, constant engagement, this entire set-up is making it almost impossible for low income writers to keep up, and it goes way beyond the monetary limitations.
I see it a lot in my students that the ONLY mode they can engage with literature on is one in which they either say it’s good because it’s “relatable” or it’s bad because they “can’t relate to it” as well, and I feel like this is a symptom of the same problem. An unwillingness to engage with fiction outside of its ability to be a mirror to your specific worldview and set of morals. But art doesn’t exist to give you moral purity badges–it’s a mode of expression that produces conversations between artists and readers. And to engage in those converesations on an adult level you need to learn to process the discomfort of flawed human realities productively.
The problem with writing a fantasy story where they have computers that are powered by magic is that computers are already magic.
Seriously. Moreso than any other subject I know, computers are the ultimate bell-curve, where people who don’t know much about how they work and people who know a lot about how they work both agree: they’re magic.
Like, do you know how we make computers? We etch intricate patterns in crystals. Using light. The shape of the drawings determines how they work.
Seriously, that’s how they’re made. We grow super-pure crystals, cut them into wafers, cover them with acid, then shine a light on them through a mask to activate or deactivate the acid, etching away some of the silicon surface. It’s called photolithography.
Only we’ve since decided light is “too big” and we’ve moved up to using x-rays, which are smaller. This lets us fit smaller drawings on our crystals!
The best part is that because some processes use light to harden the photoresist layer and some processes use light to break it down, it means some computers are made of light (because the parts of the crystal that got light on them remained behind) and some parts are made of shadow (because the parts that got light were washed away.)
Do you have a Light CPU or a Shadow CPU? You’ll probably never know. This is industrial secret stuff.
And because we’re making them with light, we can make them tiny and we can make lots at once. Like, I found a reference once that said that MOSFETs (a type of electrical switch) is the single thing Humanity has made the most of over our entire time on this planet.
How many have we made, exactly? It’s estimated that between 1960 and 2018, we made about 13 SEXTILLION of them.
That’s 13,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.
If every human alive (all 8 billion of us) lived to 70 and devoted our whole lives to making them, never sleeping, just making MOSFETs, we’d have to make 736 a second to make 13 sextillion MOSFETs.
Computers are magic. And we’re very good at being wizards.
Ok so Haumea, a dwarf planet beyond Pluto, spins so fast it gets elongated like this. This is just what it looks like. Something deeply unsettles me looking at it. Terrifying.
this is so fucked up
This planet looks like a cool rock someone found in a creek.
one day it’s going to hatch and then all of you will be sorry
Thas a fukin mentos
i want to draw a smiley face on him and name him and keep him as a rock pet
