You know, make it and I’d join it. Lets see if I can find my last (based on current events) writing prompt:
The Disciples of Eris, a super-powered anti-villain team that specifically targets ostentatious billionaire (or VIP) events like weddings and birthdays, first to arrange for scandalous exposure and then to wreck the event, maybe to steal some liquidatable assets. A signature golden apple is typically discovered post-hoc by the cleanup crew.
At start, she’s the roommate that is the stable income for the household (different characters who have their protagonist moments), and is the one they can depend on to make sure rent is paid, and there’s bad pseudo-Chinese food to eat.
Then she does get her promotion, and gets in way over her head, having to compromise her values to stay employed, and eventually to live.
This is a very similar story path of Sam Lowry in Brazil (1985), though he leaves his perfect job it to chase after his (literal) dream girl.
The water would react similarly to alcohol. Yes, the puddle would be bigger but it would evaporate faster.
A character in my cyberpunk dystopia novel I’m not quite writing yet, (working name Garden Gnome ) has realized that most of the clerical staff are bullshit jobs or the general clerical pool doing bullshit assignments, and realizes everyone’s just courtiers or garden hermits, and so develops a run of performance routines (running to the copy machine just as it’s finishing a job; standing on her tippy toes on the stepladder to access the high files, not getting jokes but saying something even funnier, etc.) as way to meet-cute her way into the upper-management secretarial pool.
If you’re not in the office for actual work, then (for good or ill) you’re there for your character.
This sounds like the kind of flirting I’d expect after seeing '80s and '90s teen angst movies. In retrospect screenwriters just don’t understand how humans interact, or rather they just don’t care and go for madcap antics instead.
I’m way neurodivergent, and was completely unaware of human interaction, so I was looking at Pretty in Pink and St. Elmo’s Fire (etc. etc.) trying to decipher how all that works.
I became sexually active at 26 after folks from the kink community noticed my nerdy vibe, and they schooled me in some basic human interaction. (Note that I matrix-dodged a barrage of incel-to-fascist pipeline bullets thanks to some amazing strokes of fortune.)
After the fact, in recollection, I realized then that a lot of women in my young adult life were signalling me and I never knew.
I also realized my aunt was totally hitting on me when I was sixteen. That’s all sorts of awkward to reconcile.
This meme illustrates by example one of the key failures of capitalism:
Upper management doesn’t see itself as responsible for overseeing staff to maximize their productivity via data-driven methods (e.g. let them have human lives while they work)
Upper management sees staff as their courtiers and garden hermits there to emphasize how important the execs are.
Hence RTO mandates rather than letting them telecommute or giving them sweet workspace at the office.
Meanwhile 77 million Americans really let the Djinni out of the bottle in November.
Maybe every story is Pandora’s jar.
Obama campaigned on getting past it. ( Hope amd Change ) but then he didn’t. Corporations got their bailouts. OWS was cleared violently with the cameras off. BLM notice law enforcement kill a lot of people. The disposition matrix was a thing. The IWOT went on and on. The mass surveillance state was a thing. The economy was better but 88% of households were in precarity, and a lot of people were homeless.
And then Trump won by the EC.
So Ive been waiting for things to get better for a long, long time. I’ve just stopped expecting the suck to ever reverse, or even ebb.
I just use LGBT+ since it was LGBT for a long time (it was GLBT but the Ls earned their place at the front during the AIDS crisis) then it became LGBTQ, then a bunch of other letters were added while the community was recognizing is profound variety before it turned into LGBTQ+
Q+ has a nice ring to it, but since I’m an unusual form of NB, I fit squarely into the catch-all variety of Q.
Welsh?
That is a good assessment. Yes.
In fact, the race between capitalist interests to bypass safety and get operational AGI soonest is entirely about getting that power to be able to use it to hold everyone else hostage.
Courtesy of XKCD, long before we have to contend with unfriendly AI (we have committees of AI-techs working on this problem already) we’ll have to contend with someone like Musk or Bezos determined to own everything and capable of creating an AI-controlled army of killer robots.
We’re not sure how rogue AI is going to manifest. We are sure rogue power-seeking humans exist all the time, and positions of power are commonly filled by them. (That’s the primary argument for election by sortition, or by lottery.)
Whatever made that crater was an ELE. Bigger than Chicxulub.
We have plenty of great filters to navigate:
We end war, or we die.
We restore the atmosphere and rebuild global ecology, or we die.
We end stratified society and power disparity, or we die.
Where are all the aliens? Fermi asked. The first question is, how do we navigate our way to becoming a space-faring, world colonizing species, ourselves? It’s turning out to be pretty difficult for the common hominid.
The… Crowmistress? Queen of Corvids?
From the witching community, you’d have pretty good luck befriending the local murder of crows with cheap bread. Upgrade the bread as the shinies they bring you improve.
According to the meme, pretty soon you’re a Batman villain.
The problem is, it’s plausible they are ice, and in the US hoodlums gathering near a van before pulling a heist are rarer than unmarked ICE guys waiting to acquire a target, so if this isn’t a movie set, they’re most likely ICE.
If they are this obvious, I’d see if I could get a flash mob of civilians with phone cameras.
Either they move, or if action goes down, there’s going to be a big protest soon.
Also we’ll know who they took.
Someone should meme this up as a bunch of dudes about to get jumped by Spiderman.
There are some pepper sprays that are mixed with red difficult-to-remove dye for the purpose of identifying those involved in an incident.
Legal in California!
Parents’ Divorce betrays the irony, (Though speaking of my parents divorce, my presence and neurodivergence certainly figured into the escalating contention between them. That’s a different – probably TMI – story.)
I’ve grown up with sincere propaganda with similar sentiments, and it appeared to get worse at least through the aughts. I think millennials saw them as ironic. Zoomers appear to find them as laughably absurd as the you’re neighbor may be a terrorist propaganda. My Alpha grandson is taking it seriously at 11. Alphas are figuring out early that it’s all a myth to cover up they have nothing to hope for ( at least until revolution goes hot).
In fact, I’d say the serious versions all the signs that we are, in fact, in a YAF dystopian coming of age model, where the society is trying to mold us into replaceable, expendable laborers and soldiers to be expended on billionaire vanity projects (which often appear as nationalist military action or corporate commerce). Your story as a kid is to find a way to escape the paradigm, either to join the Rebel Alliance, or become pirates and hackers…
…oh wait, unless you get abducted by ICE / Sicherheitsdienst des Reichsführers-SS and stuffed into a concentration camp to be disposed of later. Then you’re just fucked.
If you don’t escape the paradigm as a kid, then welcome to the resistance. You’re one of the isolated rebels like Winston Smith in his corner out of sight of the telescreens, keeping his journal. Also like me. Still working on that. Not sure if I’m going to go Weiße Rose or La Résistance
You may be held responsible for all these things, even if you’re often not to blame for them or had a way to actionably evade their harmful consequences. Seventy-seven million Americans voted for a regime that is going to have a far greater impact on our lives than many of the typical personal life choices we make. There Are No Rules Any More. Mired in the Rot in Denmark, to thine own self be true.
In this fucking world, I do not begrudge anyone their tequila, or cigarettes, or their crack pipe, or their poor diet, or their ten terrabytes of pornography…or their arm full of scars.