im so dead tired of self aware genre fiction. i dont want the snarky knight or the brooding spaceman to joke about how overplayed something is. gimme back unashamed affect. gimme dudes speaking in thees and thous and starship captains making poignant speeches and shit and stop fucking worrying about being seen by critics or the general public as shlock
“oh haha isnt sci fi so silly lol look at me i know im writing sci fi but my characters are joking about how cringey this all is so like its fine right” i would bite your head off if i could, coward
I remember when I saw The Princess Bride being blown away at how sincere it was— so many things are edgy and subversive that seeing things played so straight felt revolutionary to me somehow. Of course it wasn’t, it was because I’d seen all the films in non-chronological order. But I’d love to see more sincere things anyway
A long time ago now I wrote a Doctor Who fanfic that became a series, and both of these things were called Be Afraid.
I’d had a lot of ideas for Doctor Who stories that were too dark to be real ones, and the world itself seemed so dark I didn’t know what a children’s story should even be. When Jodie was announced as the Doctor I thought she seemed very safe somehow— and so I wrote a lot of stories with a not very 13ish 13th Doctor. I now realise I was writing an inner Timeless Adult for my terrified inner Timeless Child, but that revelation took some time.
But the whole thing ends a bit ambiguously, because at the time I didn’t feel able to do anything else. I wanted to write something that felt true and which wasn’t crushing, and back then it wasn’t something I knew how to do. But I did think of a definitive ending I could write if I felt in a place to do so. It’s not a happy one, exactly, but I don’t think it’s entirely sad either— and knowing that Doctor Who is still in the hands of people who worry deeply about similar things made me want to write it at last, just before the real 13th Doctor goes away. So here is an ending to this series that is indeed an ending for its characters, where all of them are able to let things go.
Kind of shonky illustration for my fanfic THE ENDS OF EARTH
I’ll share this again in case people find it helpful now. It’s a Thirteenth Doctor story set in London at the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis, about the Doctor and Yaz confronting the fullness and the terror of the past in slightly different ways. But it is a hopeful story. I hope.
Kind of shonky illustration for my fanfic THE ENDS OF EARTH
Plot twist: The forces that rise against the Doctor and their Master refers to the Land of Fiction, and the Doctor’s regeneration story involves fighting an army of classic characters from the last hundred years of the BBC
There was a “describe your fanfic in the style of Doctor Seuss” prompt on Reddit, and what the hell:
//
The Who was not from Whoville
As once she had thought
They’d said she was a Time Lord,
Instead, she was not!
All her mind was afray
Painted dull police-box blue
So she went off, away,
To Nineteen Sixty-Two.
But soon she would find
That strange year where she’d hide
Was the one where the Earth
Should have stumbled and died.
A Cold Cuban Crisis. A committed crime.
To save our whole world, once the Doctor broke time.
Two Doctors. Two Armies.
The future and past.
It is now sixty years since our world breathed its last
But still, now it lives, and still now you do:
So perhaps the real question is this: Doctor Who?
At the end of all things, what are we really worth?
Why would anyone fight for the ends of the Earth?
Nothing is forever. No regeneration. No life.
In a surprise twist she means “Keir Starmer,” which is “their Master” pronounced extremely badly
I often feel like the world is hopeless and bleak: that the end of it is inevitable, and coming soon. But of course this belief is very old indeed, and we have had the capacity to destroy ourselves for longer than Doctor Who has existed.
Now that there are Doctors from before the one we met in 1963 I thought it would be interesting to see what they would do in 1962: in the Cuban Missile Crisis, where everyone felt the imminence of the end of the world. What would the Doctor be like, in that time before her show had even begun? What does that have to say about our situation today?
And – of course – how does this all relate to the lie of the Timeless Child?
(This story is not really in keeping with the tone of the Chibnall era; I tend to believe that if you’re tackling dark subjects in something like Doctor Who it’s best to counterbalance them with things that are wild and strange. Also it took over a year to write, so is not even in canon with Revolution of the Daleks, let alone the stories that are airing now.)
Oh no, we just couldn’t have that now, could we?
Literally should be the point of renewable energy. The point of society in general should be to make as many things cheaper or free as possible.
Nerds in the 1950s: Nuclear power is going to make electricity so cheap that no one will even bother metering it.
Nerds in the 2020s: solar power would make electricity too cheap in Arizona so we can’t build it uwu
It’s not like people could adapt to the cheaper electricity at a specific time of day by changing power-hungry processes to take advantage etc., no, the current consumption pattern is set in stone by divine decree
“Too cheap to meter” is way better than what’s happening to solar, which is too cheap to not meter
Negative prices are exactly like positive prices except in the other direction - you have to get rid of the power or it will overload your system, so you’re paying people to take it off your hands.
1950′s nuclear dreams are “what if electricity was like air, free and plentiful”
2020′s solar is “Air so plentiful, we’re dying form pressure induced narcosis”
This is a real problem that really needs to be solved, not an artifact of the evil capitalists sad they can’t make money.
Kirchoff’s laws are an evil capitalist invention by billion dollar corporations uwu
yeah the tweet here is not saying the important thing: if there’s too much supply in your grid, things catch fire.
I propose that we solve this by giving every small town a couple of those gigajoule capacitor banks they have at the National Ignition Facility. Maybe throw in the laser too so they can burn off the energy.
Though I will say: I’ve never understood why you couldn’t just punch excess power into a big resistor and waste it - yeah the numbers are Big but are they that big? (This is mainly me not understanding resistor design, not so much me not understanding power production)
why can’t they just disconnect the solar? is there no mechanism to signal producers to stop?
the issue is that the solar panels continue to run even if disconnected, and so the energy has to go somewhere. a simple solution would be to (if you had suntracking) tilt the solar panels out of the way of the sun and (if you didn’t) just cover a bunch of them in the middle of the day, but both are Very Silly things to do that decrease capacity factor of solar even further below the already low-ish number it is (about 50%, because the sun doesn’t shine at night)
my conclusion from a cursory search is that it’s fine to short circuit solar panels and that leaving them open circuit might possibly lead to some degradation in the long term, but in any case I think it’s perfectly reasonable to require electricity producers to take care of their overproduction instead of forcing the grid to take on energy that isn’t needed
Correct me if I’m wrong but can’t you just ground solar power output automatically if it reaches dangerous levels, a bit like a PWM / control system where it switches between your system and the dirt in your back yard
I think depending on the voltages involved this is equivalent to open circuit, big resistor or short circuit, but I think in general you’re only supposed to discharge to ground in case of fault
Surely there’s no shortage of projects that could use large amounts of electricity on a semi-regular, but not guaranteed schedule. The sci-fi writer in me wonders if you couldn’t pair that extra power with a facility designed to pump water uphill to a raised reservoir, which could itself produce power on off-hours/days by running the water back downhill through an electric dam setup. If its a glorified power-sink relative efficiency doesn’t really matter, just so long as it can sit unused when power isn’t available, and go to high-gear when it is.
Just to say, that last sci-fi concept - pumping water uphill to a raised reservoir and releasing it at peak hours through a turbine to generate power - is not actually a sci-fi concept.
It’s a literal thing that exists, in Dinorwig in Wales. We call it Electric Mountain. Here it is while empty and full:
You can also visit it and go inside.
This is apparently called pumped storage and was first operational in 1907, so it is not only not a science fiction idea but was working before the Model T was first sold
Silly headcanon: The person who was once the Timeless Child has been called “The Doctor” for billions of years, but didn’t actually ever get another name until they were raised as a Time Lord in a body like William Hartnell’s. So the Timeless Doctors are all just called “The Doctor,” while the ones we’ve been following on screen are of course “Doctor Who”
I keep telling myself I need to write things that aren’t fanfic but it’s so much fun
Anonymous asked:
Is there a masterpost of FP authors' tumblr blogs? If not, could this humble anon trouble your grace to make such a thing? :eyes_emoji:
Oh god, I'm horrible at this kind of thing, there are so many… Most of these don't blog about FP stuff much or at all, but here's the list, as far as I can remember at this moment:
- Simon Bucher-Jones @thebrakespearevoyage-blog
- Jacob Black @rassilon-imprimatur
- Niki Haringsma @big-finish-sketches
- Andrew Hickey @andrewhickey (deactivated)
- Aristide Twain @aristidetwain
- Kara Dennison @rubycosmos
- Blair Bidmead @haribeaux / @theo-possible
- Me :)
And then there's the people who I'm less sure have publicly associated their author names with their blogs, but are FP writers nonetheless:
- @the-voice-of-light-city
- @dwellerinthelibrary
- @qthewetsprocket
- @childofthefireandthestorm
- @panbloglodytes
I just know that there are some very obvious ones I’m missing but DO NOT GET MAD IF I LEFT YOU OFF AHHH!!!! Message me or hit up my askbox and I’ll edit you in.
I am indeed technically a FP writer, which still feels weird to write out loud
Today in obscure Doctor Who jokes:
Somebody on Twitter pointed out that the Big Finish companion Hex is canonically from the year 2021, so when he occasionally abbreviates the word "suspicious" to "sus," it's probably an Among Us reference.
The punchline is that this character was actually introduced back in 2004. It was made-up future slang that they happened to get right.
It me.
My current fic is more about breaking things in new and exciting ways, which is also a fun choice to make