dannnex

Dannnnnnnn̈nnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnex!

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my guilty pleasure is opening this website every 2-3 months and searching up my own name to see if anyone has been talking about me

This might be too niche and I might just be being overly aggressive, but some of the cosmere-themed social media accounts out there annoy me so much.

Like I don't want to gatekeep anything, people should be free to engage with these books however they want, and I'm aware I'm being overly critical about something that doesn't matter at all but...

There's like 2 accounts in particular that really just tick me off, one on instagram and one on twitter. Both have 20k+ followers. They're not related afaik but they're similar in tone. Both "Cosmere News and Memes!"-type accounts. The type of account that portrays themselves as a community authority figure just because they know how to repost Tor articles. 

Like you didn't create your account until 2023, calm down. You are not an authority on anything. I think that's genuinely a fair thing to "gatekeep", like anyone and everyone is welcome to be apart of the Sanderson community, but elevating yourself to the "Best source of Brandon Sanderson News!" is just so annoying. The amount of attitude these accounts have, you'd think they wrote the books themselves!

It's not just people posting for the love of the game either, these are the type of people with amazon affiliate links to sanderson merch in their bio. Actively trying to profit off of the community by reposting things other people make. The twitter account in particular peeved me last year when it made a separate tweet for every single line in the State of the Sanderson address that could be considered "news". Never mentioned the newsletter itself btw, just deconstructed it and copied every line. 

And I have to mention the "memes" these accounts post. They just aren't funny. This is probably my most invalid and/or gatekeepy critique, but they're just not funny I don't know what to say. Making jokes on the internet is a skill, you don't have it just because you know how to use imgflip and mematic. 

It's all just slop, reposts from official Dragonsteel sources, and more slop. I have no clue how these accounts are as big as they are. I think we, as a community, can do better. 

I've been thinking a lot about the different ways we engage with fiction, and the ways we talk about our reading experiences with others. Specifically I've been looking at the factors that can cause a person to either like or dislike a character. I'm starting to notice two very distinct ways that people view characters. This will sound obvious when I say it, but I think there's actually a lot of nuance here. 

Some people tend to look at characters from an above-story perspective, you judge a character based on the quality of the writing in which they're portrayed, and based on how they fit into the overall plot. Other people view characters from a within-story perspective, they judge a character based on their personality and the way they act towards other characters. They'll dislike a character if they'd also dislike a real person who acted the same way. 

I don't think anyone falls 100% into either category, it changes from character to character. I think we're more likely to fall into the second camp if a character strikes a nerve with us, if they remind us of people we've interacted with in our own lives. I also think we rarely use this perspective if our conclusion is that we like the character. This perspective tends to accompany a negative opinion. I think its rare to enjoy reading a character who is written poorly, but portrays the personality of a person that you'd theoretically enjoy spending time with irl.

There's obviously no "wrong" way to come to a conclusion about a character, your opinions are your own. But I think this is a good thing to keep in mind, especially when discussing characters with other people. It can help you identify both your own and others' biases.

Almost a decade ago, someone asked me what I thought was the most "sci-fi" technology that already exists in society. For a long long time my answer to this question was contact lenses. Magic little gel hemispheres that are relatively cheap and manufactured with so much precision that they bend light in exactly the right way to allow someone to see clearly. That's insane. (The history of contact lenses is super interesting too, they're both insanely old and super new depending on how you look at it. The very first idea that resembled modern day contact lenses was proposed by mfing DA VINCI in 1508, but modern silicone hydrogel lenses were only invented in 1998.)

And that might still be my answer in some contexts. But from a more aesthetic/philosophical standpoint I think the answer has got to be street lights.

Now the technology of "large lightbulb on a stick" doesn't exactly scream sci-fi, but the purpose and infrastructure around them absolutely do. The single most constant ecological feature of this planet is the night-day cycle. Long before the first microorganisms, even before WATER was present on this planet, the earth rotated during its orbit around the sun. The cycle of day-night-day-night has never been broken in 4.5 BILLION years.

Until now. 

Ours is the first society to say "yeah we'll pass" when confronted with the mandatory darkness of night. A society so constant and unyielding, so full of momentum, that we decided we don't need the sun to light our paths anymore. We'll do it ourselves. Our society must grow, must expand, and before we eventually expand upwards and outwards into the solar system, into "3D darkness", we had to expand into 4D darkness, expand not our usable physical area but our usable temporal area. We claim the night as OUR time, say that these are hours that we WILL use, and we will MAKE them usable, natural order be damned.

If that isn't sci-fi, I don't know what is.

alright fine, i'll be the one to finally say it.

it's messed up that cubes have 6 faces. 6 is not a squarey number. it should have 4. or 8.

Isn’t she beautiful

wind and truth in 3 days wind and truth in 3 days wind and trUTH IN 3 DAYS WIND AND TRUTH IN 3 DAYS WIND AND TRUTH IN 3 DAYS

i'm a grown adult and i'm absolutely freaking out

this is the culmination of a story arc that started almost 15 years ago. FIFTEEN YEARS.

this is historical. a book release that will define a decade, if not a generation.

Dec 6th is gonna be such a good day for media enjoyers

not only is WaT releasing (obviously)

but Interstellar is getting rereleased in theaters in 70mm imax film. 

i watched Oppenheimer in 70mm and it was the greatest theatrical experience of my life. Film is just better idk. There’s only 19 theaters in the USA capable of showing 70mm imax films, and one is like 20 mins from my house. 

COSMERE TTRPG LOOKS SO GOOD WTF

im about to spend so much money on this kickstarter this is insane it’s so cool

but then it isn’t actually releasing for OVER A YEAR