Trope-a-Day: Discount Lesbians

Discount Lesbians: Averted.  While the Worlds include monogendered species in which the monogender happens to be female (happens a lot, since, y’know, the functional definition of female is usually the same as that for reproducer), and also include trivial sex-switching, gender-rewriting, and sexuality-adjusting technology, there are also an arbitrarily large number of “regular” gay women.  The existence of the former doesn’t delete the latter.

Apologies…

…for the lack of updates over the last few days.

Essentially what’s happened is that my wiki in which I keep my quarter-million words or so of current worldbuilding notes is no longer to be supported, developed, etc., which is something of a pain inasmuch as I’m going to need that around for a while yet.  So I’ve been transferring them over to a new storage format (making the odd edit and concept-note along the way), and that task has more or less occupied all of my time and more importantly brain cycles for the last while.

Normal service will be resumed as soon as possible.

Apologies

I should perhaps apologize for the current absence/delay in posting the fics-a-day – our air conditioning is currently broken, which means I’ve had to take my servers offline in the heat, which in turn has meant all my Eldraeverse reference material, works in progress, and such is currently unavailable. Normal operation will be resumed as soon as normal operation is resumed!

In the meantime, I do have some older material available here on the iPad which is being revised to fit the canonical universe, so there should be more to read soon, even if not what was planned.

SOPA/PIPA Blog Blackout

While WordPress.com have made it possible for us to participate in this event, tomorrow (the 18th), I regret to say that I won’t be joining those of y’all who choose to participate.  For two reasons:

One, as a rule, I abhor gesture politics, and especially the kind of gesture politics that relies on annoying the crap out of innocent third parties as a means to get its point across.  This is just a personal quirk of mine, and one which I don’t intend to argue here.

Two, I have made promises to my readers of two daily items, the Fic-a-Day and Trope-a-Day on this blog, upon each and every day in 2012 in the first case, and until I run out in the second case.  And it is not for me to unilaterally void those promissory statements.

Having said this, however, let me also take a moment to say that while I will not be participating in this particular spectacle, and while I am fully in support of intellectual property (after all, I produce intellectual property), I nevertheless firmly believe that both SOPA and PIPA are atrociously bad proposals legally, ethically, morally, technically, and grammatically, and everyone involved with lobbying for, promoting, writing, arguing, or otherwise with either of them should be taken and hanged by the funes until they’ve jolly well had enough.

That is all.

Night Thoughts

The good thing about being self-employed is that when you can’t sleep, and have finished your book, and played every game you own, and fiddled with all of your apps, and come to the End of the Internet, you have the option of getting up and do something useful.

(Or you can sit around and write speculation about how to cook in microgravity, which is what I’m actually doing, but at least the other option exists.)

Introduction

Hello, new people!

If you haven’t seen any of this before, this is my worldbuilding/writing blog, in which I talk about the universe in which I work.  It’s recently been moved here from another site, which is why you can find some archive content older than this, but as this one’s only just been set up, I thought I’d add this introductory post here to welcome you.

And if you aren’t familiar with what sort of writing I do here, here’s the “elevator pitch” about-page text I wrote to cover it briefly:

In another universe, in a galaxy strangely similar to our own, there’s a bubble of space a couple of thousand light-years across – somewhat distorted by bumping into the edges of the galactic disk to acme and nadir – filled with millions of stars, bound together by an ever-expanding spiderweb of manufactured wormholes, and bright with the EM babble of civilized life.

These are the Associated Worlds, sprawling myriad species, polities, philosophies, corporations, clades, and cultures.  From the hypercivilized Powers at their heart – the Empire of the Star, self-proclaimed jewel of the galaxy; the Photonic Network, by, for, and of digital intelligences; the Voniensa Republic, standing up for the natural sophont in a galaxy leaving them behind; and more – to the brawling colonies of the Periphery and Beyond, trillions of lives are lived, each with its own story to be told.

These are some of them.