Month: July 2015

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

{{previous post in sequence}}

thessalies:

so much fiction about the angst of immortality and just fuck that i want to live forever i want to build a house on mars and have sex in space and watch first contact on the news and i want to see how much better we can get as a species and i want to learn how to play every instrument and speak every language and i want to learn how hardcore cosplayers make those impressive sets of armor and i want to watch all the tv that will ever be made and i want to learn every weird science fact and i want to get married 50 times and i want to survive into an age where science will finally figure out how to fix my sensory issues and cure all mental illness and even if eventually all the suns die and i’m left immortally alone in a dark cold void for all eternity that would be fine i would just write fanfic in my head i could keep myself amused, it would be worth it

mostly though i want to know what happens

 

thessalies:

incidentally, none of this would be impeded by vampirism, so, stop whining lestat

 

slashmarks:

I was always so frustrated as a kid by how vampires in fiction never did anything cool with immortality and I kind of made up a whole fiction world based around them actually doing shit

 

cyborgbutterflies:

If I could, I would definitely become a vampire and start (consensually) spreading vampirism to others.

 

theunitofcaring:

cyborgbutterflies you have read Luminosity and Radiance, right? Because everyone should but especially anyone interested in a book in which Bella Swan decides it’s a moral obligation to overthrow the Volturi so she can vampirize anyone who is interested, and then does it.

 

brin-bellway:

#I’ve read Luminosity#it was very well-written and engaging#and I found it very refreshing to see a narrative that viewed immortality as a valid goal#after growing up on Harry Potter’s bullshit#(they *tell* you all this crap about how ‘death is just the next step’ and Flamel still chose to die)#(and yet they *show* you that Flamel chose to die after over *six hundred years*)#(given the opportunity to set his own lifespan he made it several times longer than what he would have had otherwise)#(but I don’t get the impression we were supposed to read between those lines)#(the lines we’re *supposed* to read between are more the timelines of Voldemort’s life)#(he died his final death less than halfway through the life expectancy of a wizard)#(chasing immortality made him die *sooner*)

 

comparativelysuperlative:

Even worse than that, though. Flamel’s age at the time of the first book,a few years older than the historical Flamel would have been in 1991 so it isn’t coincidence, was six hundred sixty-five. The guy who comes closest to immortality gets handed a number just shy of a certain other well-known number. Almost as if the author wants to tell us something. Depending on how much time is enough to set his affairs in order, she might be being even less subtle about the moral status of immortality.

Tags:

#… #…oh dear #Harry Potter #oh look an update #I just got a pop-up notification that justice-turtle reblogged the previous version from me #sorry about the cross-posting JT

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

theunitofcaring:

cyborgbutterflies:

slashmarks:

thessalies:

thessalies:

so much fiction about the angst of immortality and just fuck that i want to live forever i want to build a house on mars and have sex in space and watch first contact on the news and i want to see how much better we can get as a species and i want to learn how to play every instrument and speak every language and i want to learn how hardcore cosplayers make those impressive sets of armor and i want to watch all the tv that will ever be made and i want to learn every weird science fact and i want to get married 50 times and i want to survive into an age where science will finally figure out how to fix my sensory issues and cure all mental illness and even if eventually all the suns die and i’m left immortally alone in a dark cold void for all eternity that would be fine i would just write fanfic in my head i could keep myself amused, it would be worth it

mostly though i want to know what happens

incidentally, none of this would be impeded by vampirism, so, stop whining lestat

I was always so frustrated as a kid by how vampires in fiction never did anything cool with immortality and I kind of made up a whole fiction world based around them actually doing shit

If I could, I would definitely become a vampire and start (consensually) spreading vampirism to others.

cyborgbutterflies you have read Luminosity and Radiance, right? Because everyone should but especially anyone interested in a book in which Bella Swan decides it’s a moral obligation to overthrow the Volturi so she can vampirize anyone who is interested, and then does it.

Tags:

#transhumanism #vampires #recs #I’ve read Luminosity #it was very well-written and engaging #and I found it very refreshing to see a narrative that viewed immortality as a valid goal #after growing up on Harry Potter’s bullshit #(they *tell* you all this crap about how ‘death is just the next step’ and Flamel still chose to die) #(and yet they *show* you that Flamel chose to die after over *six hundred years*) #(given the opportunity to set his own lifespan he made it several times longer than what he would have had otherwise) #(but I don’t get the impression we were supposed to read between those lines) #(the lines we’re *supposed* to read between are more the timelines of Voldemort’s life) #(he died his final death less than halfway through the life expectancy of a wizard) #(chasing immortality made him die *sooner*) #anyway enough ranting #I need to finish Radiance someday #death tw

{{next post in sequence}}

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

comparativelysuperlative:

I forgot to describe what happened with the Scrupulously Ethical Rogue, didn’t I.

I skipped the Castle. Just because the soldiers would try to kill me on sight doesn’t justify killing them, and that goes double if I can just not let them see me. The Wand of Wishing would give four to seven wishes, and I could easily take it without having to kill any enemies, but that wand belongs to someone. Got to leave it.

And wishes are fairly plentiful anyway, in Slash’EM. I of course spent one on a spellbook of create monster, because those monsters would rather exist than not exist.

In Gehennom, I was constantly surrounded by various demons trying to kill me. By the time you get that far, no single monster is much of a threat, so self-defense doesn’t come into it. I was constantly Googling for information on demon types in NethHack (or DnD, since they imported those species), checking for which ones are barbaric but people and which ones come under the BtVS Vampire Exception.

Important tools: Elbereth, a tooled horn, and a wand of teleportation. Without that kind of thing, it’s really hard to get enemies or monsters that you don’t want to kill to move out of your way on a maze level. What I ended up doing was turning into a xorn so I could walk through walls and the mazes wouldn’t apply to me. (The fact that I stayed as a xorn had absolutely nothing to do with the fact that I forgot turning into large monsters would wreck my armor. It was on purpose, definitely.)

Killing the Wizard of Yendor is completely justifiable. He wants the player character dead and is capable of doing it, and besides, he’ll get better. Death ray.

I ended up losing. The problem with being a xorn is that you don’t have very many hit points, so between the High Priest of Moloch and two Wizards of Yendor it goes down very fast.

That means the game was probably net-negative utility. I killed a lot of monsters, many of whom were sentient. I lost track of how many hostile gnomes and hobbits and goblins I killed by accident, even, just from pushing the wrong button. And since I lost, I didn’t get to deliver the MacGuffin to the Utility Monster. Except…

At one point, I sat on a throne. I was offered the chance to exterminate any one type of monster. I took it. Slash’EM contains tsetse flies, so those are an available choice. With those dead African sleeping sickness has no remaining vector, saving over nine thousand lives per year. (Too bad “mosquito” wasn’t an option.)

As usual, the moral is to donate to the Against Malaria Foundation. I promise I did not go in to the game with that in mind.

Tags:

#Nethack #anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #(‘as usual the moral is to donate to the Against Malaria Foundation’)

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

vaaaacaaaationnnn

eeeeeeeeeeee

(I didn’t talk about finals here while they were happening because I was worried it would make it seem too viscerally, overwhelmingly real. But, now they’re over! I got an A in English; I don’t have the results for Java yet, but all of the exam questions were about very familiar stuff, so I feel really good about my answers.)

Tags:

#adventures in University Land #oh look an original post #we are going to the local Italian place tonight to celebrate