The Wordsmith's Forge

The Return of the Dire Wolf

Relying on deft genetic engineering and ancient, preserved DNA, Colossal scientists deciphered the dire wolf genome, rewrote the genetic code of the common gray wolf to match it, and, using domestic dogs as surrogate mothers, brought Romulus, Remus, and their sister, 2-month-old Khaleesi, into the world during three separate births last fall and this winter—effectively for the first time de-extincting a line of beasts whose live gene pool long ago vanished.

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After the Washington Post incident and its followup, people have been talking about freedom of the press. So far, the Post has lost over 200,000 subscribers -- about 8% of its total -- as well as 2 columnists and 3 of the 9 editorial board members. Kick him where he lives! His wallet.

So what is freedom of the press? What is freedom of thought, of expression? Let's explore...

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This continues a discussion about solarpunk and the Chobani yogurt ad. Start with Part 1: Things I Like. and Part 2: Things I Question. Continue with The Chobani Solarpunk Ad Part 4: So You Want to Live in Chobaniland.

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alyaza has posted an excellent critique of solarpunk -- which can be an aesthetic / genre / movement / whatever -- to which I have previously added a couple of comments. Solarpunk is basically about challenging (that's the punk park) the idea of all-powerful fossiltech (that's the solar part) to create a different future than the one presently ahead of us. It's the "Green Future" out of four projected paths. The chewiest part of that post is a Chobani yogurt ad, which you can also watch on YouTube, that features a farming family. It's worth using the fullscreen view so you can see the details better. You need to use Pause and Rewind a lot in order to catch things because it's so densely packed. Helpfully, the voiceover text is printed in a letter on the refrigerator near the end if you want to copy that.

Continue with Part 2: Things I Question, Part 3: The Most Interesting Part, and The Chobani Solarpunk Ad Part 4: So You Want to Live in Chobaniland.

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This year in Three Weeks for Dreamwidth, I'll be posting questions from the new 2024 questionnaire that I made. If you like the questions, feel free to follow along. You can post your answers in a comment below, or make a post in your own blog and link to it in a comment.

Question 6: What does nobody want to talk about, but really should? And what do you have to say about that?

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This year in Three Weeks for Dreamwidth, I'll be posting questions from the new 2024 questionnaire that I made. If you like the questions, feel free to follow along. You can post your answers in a comment below, or make a post in your own blog and link to it in a comment.

Question 4: What is the messiest situation you've ever encountered? How did you deal with that?

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This year in Three Weeks for Dreamwidth, I'll be posting questions from the new 2024 questionnaire that I made. If you like the questions, feel free to follow along. You can post your answers in a comment below, or make a post in your own blog and link to it in a comment.

Question 2: What thing(s) from childhood do you still enjoy to this day?

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oursin posted about this with the quote:

‘Moral duty’ to allow family and friends to make big life choices, says Cambridge philosopher:
Trying to stop friends and relations from making certain life choices such as whether to take a new job or start a family could “violate a crucial moral right”, according to a new paper by a Cambridge philosopher. Dr Farbod Akhlaghi, a moral philosopher at Christ’s College, argues that everyone has a right to “self authorship”, so must make decisions about transformative experiences for themselves. In a new paper for the philosophy journal Analysis, he argues that this right to “revelatory autonomy” is violated even by well-meaning advice from friends and family about crucial life decisions. Akhlaghi argues that it is impossible to know if a friend’s life will benefit from a transformative experience – such as new job, the birth of a child, or a university course – until after the event. It is for them to find out, he says. Crucially, he argues, it is only by making these choices independently that we can know ourselves.

And then disagreed with it. My thoughts are more complex.

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Talking with dialecticdreamer, I stumbled across one reason why Terramagne-America has a legal system so much better than ours. They use rubrics. For each crime, there's a checklist of things that constitute that crime and steps required to prove it. That means everyone can check off completed items as they go along, and at the end, there's an interpretation note to show how much is required for probable cause to charge someone with the crime or to convict them of doing it. That's so much easier than trying to do it all in your head and hoping you haven't missed something. For official purposes, you then list references after each item leading to supporting evidence of it. Because it's much easier to prove crimes with physical evidence than without it, a key area of improvement lies with nonphysical crimes such as abuse or discrimination, where the rubric makes it easy to show a consistent pattern of misbehavior.

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I came across the fanfic "A Very Sherlock Musical," which is actually a great deal deeper than it seems. Begin with the premise: So, you know how musicals are set in a world where people just burst into song every five minutes, and everyone around them automatically knows to join in with the tune and choreography? This fic is set in that world. You now know enough to write brilliant fanfic of your own in whatever canon you wish, using the same premise. Add the plot: John finds it extremely frustrating that Sherlock won't sing their theme song with him.

Here we have a motif straight out of crackfic, the musical episode. Yet the author uses this setting to explore some very serious issues -- it's actually a story about attachment problems told through the metaphor of musical interaction or rejection. Touch on another Sherlock motif, and what you have is fantastic analog of asexuality: a situation in which Sherlock doesn't want to do the thing that everyone else is doing, and people think less of him for not liking it and not understanding why it's So Very Important to them. There's quite a lot of astute exploration into how social ties form between couples or work groups, and how that gets expressed.

This story reminds me strongly of "Once More, with Feeling." That famous episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer showed the problems that can come from stripping away filters and forcing people to sing about their feelings. In that show, they're not used to it, because it's not natural; it's demonic influence. Compare that with the above story set in a world where musical interactions are the norm.

Another variation is Happy Feet, in which all penguins are expected to sing, and the one who can't gets rejected.

There is a lot of potential to explore more challenges caused by living in a musical world. Most musicals never examine the fact that they are musicals. They just do their thing, a quirky little commentary on everyday life. But when they become genre-savvy, a whole new realm of possibilities opens up. How does the musicality work? What can go wrong with it? How do people cope with disabilities -- being deaf, blind, mobility-impaired, etc. in a world where singing and dancing are fundamental aspects of every human interaction?

I'm not all that fond of musicals, but I'm fascinated by the "musical world" as an AU setting template.