What I was thinking when writing Scrapyard Station

Parasites: (reading Petaybee) this is so fucked up.

Nomads: what would be a more “realistic” take on alien catgirls?

Builders: (reading The Damned by Alan Dean Foster) the Lepar are interesting. They’re dumber than humans on average, so humans falsely assume they’re always dumb.

Scholars: (reading the definition of “formicophilia”) I’ll take that as a writing challenge.

Riders: you know those cartoons where the parrots are as smart as the pirates? What if there was a whole race of parrot-people?

Stewards: dragontaurs are cool.

Scrappers: (reading Sekirei) this is an awesome take on a “warrior race,” but I feel like they’d make more sense if they had more ambiguous anatomy and were harder to injure.

Winnowers: a lot of these aliens are easy to get along with. What would make aliens really hard to get along with?

(no subject)

Every person says stupid things sometimes. Therefore, if you bite people’s heads off for being “stupid,” nobody will want to talk to you.

(Today this is about Demily, but it could just as easily be about Coelasquid, Darwin Candidate, or Scott Adams.)

Originally posted in response to a post praising “Western culture” for not being homophobic

A lot of people act like whatever culture they were born in is the only culture ever to have subcultures, and they treat everyone else as having the culture of the most powerful and influential people. For instance, if they’re not Japanese, they pretend Japanese gay subculture doesn’t exist, so they see it as both natural and inevitable for any Japanese person to adopt the bigger anti-gay culture of Japan. If you play along with that, and then you point out how shitty the dominant culture tends to be towards minorities, “my culture is good for being the one that has subcultures” is the obvious response. But it’s better to just say “other cultures have subcultures too.”

(no subject)

Related to one of tonight’s earlier rants: my biggest problem with being told that I’m being condescending or holier-than-thou or whatever is that I don’t see what it has to do with what I said. If I’m being condescending when I say the capital of the U.S. is Washington, D.C., that doesn’t make me wrong, and if I’m not being condescending when I say the capital of the U.S. is New York, that doesn’t make me right. I’m not trying to make a statement that I’m smart or talented or whatever. I’m trying to make a statement about the thing I made a statement about. And I’m sure it’s condescending to explain that, but at that point, fuck you.

I recognize the hypocrisy of arguing this while also arguing that you need to be able to convince people to listen to you. But a lot of the time, it doesn’t seem like there’s a way to state my case without being called condescending. The only thing I could possibly do that wouldn’t get called condescending is say nothing and pretend to agree. I play the social game because there’s at least a theoretical possibility of winning, and if I can’t ever win, I might as well flip the board over.