The Fact That ProZD Sounds Exactly Like Jason Alexander Disturbs Me Greatly.

I think your best bet might be the Internet Speculative Fiction Database, which has mountains of bibliographical entries for obscure and forgotten sff authors. The SF Encyclopedia is another good source, but that's more focused on SF in general rather than solely authors. There's also the SFE's sister work The Encyclopedia of Fantasy; it hasn't been seriously updated since the turn of the millennium, but if you're looking for an old fantasy author, you might get lucky.

the peril of reading old scifi/fantasy is i’m left trying to navigate author websites that were clearly hand coded in html 20 years ago and haven’t been updated since when i just want a nice neat list of all their books that they somehow don’t seem to have 😭

Esther, speaking as a big ol’ Star Trek fan, your friends were right. Season 1 was rough. A lot of the time it comes off as an attempt to make a 1960s-era Trek show in the 1980s, and it does not work at. all. Production was also a nightmare, to the point where the TNG writers’ room gained the reputation as one of the worst places a writer in Hollywood could work at. There’s a documentary called Chaos on the Bridge that discusses some of what went on, but it has its own biases and axes to grind. Still, Season 1 TNG did give us this incredible moment. (cw: more gore than you’d ever expect to see on an episode of Star Trek) If you ever want to give the show another shot, I’d recommend just watching any episode whose summary sounds cool. TNG was made with an eye to syndication, so the writers were discouraged from any heavy serialization. Anyway, great podcast, and I hope Madiha has recovered from finally seeing the Super Best Friends stumble their way into one of the worst (in all senses of the word) endings for Detroit: Become Human.

Transmediacrity Episode 23: You Deserve To Be A Space Kid

I'm not down with the catholic church; I just want to dress this way.

Please do not listen to this episode on full blast volume earbuds, there’s A Thing.

Topics include: Heart to heart about being depressed all the time; Madiha reads HAKAIOU ~ GAOGAIGAR VS. BETTERMAN; 2017, a year of closure for Betterman; the story of GGG vs Betterman; a brief, confused summary of GaoGaiGar; combining the tones of GaoGaiGar and Betterman; Linker Gel Dyalisis; THE POWER; Esther is back into Shin Megami Tensei Apocalypse; masters of reusing assets; god’s toilet; sexy nun; it all sounds like a doom level; SMT Mobile, why the fuck would I play that; did you get the dick chariot; CAN’T ESCAPE FROM CROSSING FATE; BACK IN to Honkai Impact; but first the masocore gacha hell of Bang Dream!; 29:00 warning for volume; this is like hell; NOT EVEN A FREE ROLL; thank you Honkai Impact; Sakura Samsara, the open world content; Theresa, the old small nun; Mihoyo storytelling; FGO is a demon monster gacha game; PUT HONKAI ON STEAM MIHOYO; honkai impact is warframe for lesbians; warframe anxiety; impossible to progress; FUCK DAVID CAGE. Send us timestamped suggestions for the Transmediacrity podcast sampler for newbies!!!

Outro theme is “Ashura-Kai Authorized Shop” from the Shin Megami Tensei IV OST.

Email us at transmediacrity@gmail.com! Check out our TUMBLR and TWITTER.

SUPPORT US ON PATREON! Or donate directly to Madiha for hosting costs.

Check out our YOUTUBE CHANNEL. Subscribe, and like our videos!

Special thanks to Velt for our cover art! Check her art here. (Not worksafe.)

You can find us at:

Madiha: Twitter, Tumblr, The Solstice War. Esther: Twitter, Tumblr.

:3

Could you make one daily Kuvira a drunk Kuvira?

Daily Kuvira #31

Tbh I don’t know much about drawin’ drunks. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

But Kuvira probably rarely drinks and when she does she’s the ultimate giddy dumbass.

Forgive my bluntness, but isn’t the Myers-Briggs system based off of a deeply simplified interpretation of Jungian psychology that mental health professionals (Jungian psychologists or otherwise) consider littler better than a horoscope? Are companies actually using the test as a way to judge candidates? (Mind you, we could probably say the same things about IQ tests.)

Study Myers-Briggs and learn to fake out the test to thinking you’re an “SP” or “SJ”, preferably extroverted type, depending upon the job that’s giving you a personality test. I suspect that lots of non-professional jobs and non-tech jobs are specifically weeding out people who would map to Myers Briggs NT or NF types, and using iNtuitive Thinker traits as a proxy for autism. Make sure you can fake the test out to your cisnormative personality type expected of your gender; that will be T if male and F if female. I highly suspect that iNtuitive (Thinker or Feeler, but especially Thinker in any retail setting) personality traits are being mapped to unemployable neurodivergence by employment related personality tests.

Daily Kuvira #16 - Autumn

Taking time to get away from the city.

And perhaps visiting a friend….

Even more than Betterman? How is that possible?

It’s taken me 30 minutes to take down notes on like 2 minutes of this scene happening. I don’t know that an anime has affected me as much as this has.

it’s a tragedy that dinotopia was adapted as a weird gritty looking tv movie with bad cgi when it’s, without exaggeration, the most ghibli any book has ever been

As the kids on Tumblr say, “big mood.”

@nick-nocturn, isn’t this basically what Keratin Garden was?

a beauty guru that is haunted by a demonic entity

This has become something of a critical issue for sf/f writers in the past few decades. Way back in the early 2000s, when blogs were still a thing, the British author M. John Harrison caused something of a tempest in the online genre community criticizing the concept of “worldbuilding” as detrimental to the creation of literature. The original posts are long gone, but there is a Reddit post copying Harrison’s final summation of his thoughts on the matter.

Even though I’m not a “proper” writer yet, this is an issue I’ve worried about over the years. While I don’t have the philosophical background of Mr. Harrison, my own objections to the primacy of worldbuilding stem from a key complaint Harrison makes: the idea that worldbuilding “literalizes the act of creation.” The essay talks about Harrison’s interpretation of the matter, but here I’ll quickly over my own.

The problem with believing that worldbuilding is all is that it changes the reader’s relationship to the text. If a reader believes that the mechanics and details of a setting are the most important part of a story, they will end up seeing stories not as stories, ambiguous creatures of metaphor and meaning, but as documentaries of alternate worlds. When this happens, the reader both forgoes the suspension of disbelief required to make any story work and unknowingly imposes their own worldview on the story under the guise of “objective reality.” Rather than developing a symbiotic relationship with the story wherein the story is accepted on its own terms, the reader instead becomes an anthropologist in a duck blind scanning the story from afar, compiling a list of points observed. This is how you end up with situations where people complain that characters don’t act “logically” without considering the thematic reasons for their motivations. Obviously no one will ever be able to suspend their disbelief for every part of every story, but some level of acceptance is always required. Without it, the forest just becomes a big bunch of trees.

This attitude also poses problems for the writer, who is no longer expected to be a storyteller, but a God who dreams up and fashions every aspect of their creation from the wings of an aphid to the greatest supergiant stars. Needless to say, this is an awful attitude to have as a writer. Rather than having the reader accept your story and go along for the ride, the entire burden of creating the world falls on you, and the sad fact of the matter is that most of us aren’t God. A few of us out there are polymaths and Renaissance men that can shoulder the burden, but most of us, myself included, aren’t. What happens with most of us is that we develop the belief that we must understand everything before we can create something, which often leads to writers putting their stories off to research things they don’t really need. I’ve been guilty of this myself with things like starting work on a fantasy novel by working out the layout of the solar system and worrying about getting myself up to speed on introductory economics (so much economics in fiction these days...I’m sick of it). Some of this would have been important thematically, but my problem was that I was doing in first instead of figuring out what I actually wanted to tell a story about. I’m sure many of you have similar stories to share.

In short, if you’re the sort of person who loves creating all this intricate background for their fantasy settings, knock yourself out, but just remember that for the sake of both you and you reader that they can’t be everything.

(As a final note, I have actually seen some people drop traditional narrative entirely and write what are essentially fictional textbooks. It’s something you tend to see in the online alternate history community, where the primary attraction is seeing the raw mechanics of historical change play out over centuries across nations filled with millions upon millions of people, the scale of which the human-focused modern novel has some difficulty capturing. They rarely appear on bookshelves because they don’t fit in with the publishing industry’s classifications of genre, but you sometimes get odd anomalies like Robert Sobel’s 1973 work For Want of a Nail: If Burgoyne Had Won at Saratoga.)

I think the best writing tip I can give (this is untrue, I can probably give many writing tips, but this is the writing tip foremost in my mind at the moment and I needed a good hook to start this post) is that not everything that is read as Lore needs to be important or explicable to what you’re writing. Often times you need a detail or a character to appear to make another detail or character sound more convincing or to appropriately place it in the world, people will latch on, but maybe that’s not the story you’re telling or what’s actually important to you. For me, for example, it’s not important to detail say, the histories of Nochtish tank design bureaus. It’s enough to know that they exist and what they’re making, but the staff and position of Rescholdt-Kolt are not actually crucial to the story.

I think because of wiki culture and general curiosity we want every capital letter noun to be drawn out to us, but some things just exist solely to be a cool name.