random icon for random thinking

by the end of the day my work has just as many words but at least 1000 of them are different words.

writing is still hard.

also, it is impossible to say anything about Doctor Who that cannot be contradicted by reference to other bits of Doctor Who, so you end up talking about the tensions revealed by the text ie that it don't agree with itself even.

my chosen subject area is annoying.

I want to study space colony design instead. which would be hard. I don't think anywhere is doing that course yet.
It would be a good course though because you'd have all this engineering and space science stuff and then you'd have to do psychology and population design like in Cyteen and try and fit together a group of people that could be self sustaining over multiple generations. you'd need genetic variety too but people don't take well to arrange marriage. maybe you could pack some frozen genetic variation? and you'd need to figure out how to arrange the physical stuff like housing or spaceships so the human stuff like people not killing each other from hating their music or something works out.
space colony design would basically require you to be good at everything ever.

science fiction authors set themselves some challenging tasks.

of course science fiction wants dysfunctional designs, because drama.

worky designs would be much harder.

but you'd need to understand nutrition and farming so you could send the right stuff to eat, and you'd need to know about hazards like space radiation and poisonous dust on the moon and mars and design not just buildings but procedures so people don't die of it too quickly, and you'd need to send spare people because some of them are going to get dead inconveniently over the lifetime of the colony.
computers can pack a whole lot more books now and maybe video files and pack a university up small, there's starting to be a lot of online courses you could send along with them, but computers are vulnerable to radiation too and you need to pack backups of all sorts of skills and knowledge.
also if it's a small population there'd be skills that you would hardly ever need but when you need them you really, really need them. So you'd need surgeons, but only very rarely. Do you send a whole lot of surgeons or do you send spare farmers and hope attrition isn't too horrible?
and what stories do you tell people to persuade them that it's a good idea?
and how do you get them to trust each other and work together?
and preferably figure out if they can live with each other sometime before you've crossed light years together.
murder in a spaceship is dramatic but anti helpful.

and then when you get there you have to make a plan to have a lot (a lot) of disabled people, because space is dangerous and we don't know yet well enough how to stop people getting ill of the radiation and low gravity and space dust and all the other stuff, so you get to cross space and then get ill a lot and have a lot of disabled people who didn't start out that way and in the second generation have unexpected genetic variations crop up. But your community will be too small to just shuffle people off into a corner and pretend they aren't there. Need all the people. So disabled people be more integrated.

also there needs to be a plan for when people get new and extreme varieties of homesick. mental health in space: not so simple as sending them for a walk in the park. and you couldn't move to a different town to get away from your parents.

... okay, horror story, yuck.

space colony design is hard. I'd like to understand all the things. make a small civilisation that works.


don't think they teach that as a degree course yet.



but English with Cultural Studies kind of got boring cause all you can say is this sucks and that sucks and the other sucks and by the way there's racism and sexism and stories don't reflect they do active things to the world and power inequalities are writ all over them.
and then once you've said all that what do you do?
point at a different text and say the same thing some more?
I bored now.

would rather design people and teams and ships and colonies.

... that I start with designing people reveals the flaws in the real world application of my plans, but there's billions of people on Earth, maybe if I make templates I could recruit to fit.

you know, if I had a spaceship or could build a practice one or something.



I should probably go sleep and do more work tomorrow.

things in Avengers fic

I keep reading fic where there's the Avengers and then some SHIELD agent sent to supervise or liaise with them. Usually Coulson, given the / I read.

I do not keep finding fic where Natasha and Clint are the SHIELD agents sent to supervise and liaise with the rest of the Avengers.

But we know Natasha was sent to assess potential personnel, and Clint was sent to go stare at sensitive projects to see if they're going wrong. So those are jobs that they do. Already. For SHIELD.

Yet in fic it's Avengers vs SHIELD, sometimes with Coulson in the middle. Sometimes Avengers all being mad at Fury for lying about Coulson's death, ( Read more... )

(This ramble brought to you by my neighbours having a smoke alarm thing at two in the morning. Thanks. so much.)

words

It's frustrating doing essays at the point where I have more words than I need. I keep writing a lot and deleting a lot and ending up with around 15K words but they're substantially different sets of words. It doesn't feel like progress the same simple way a word count going up does.

I think by the end of it I'm going to have deleted everything that isn't about the 11th Doctor, which may well be a problem, since the idea was to do comparisons and point at how representation changes, and it's harder to do with only one point. I'd have to make good points about the here and now. It's difficult doing that, it's like looking at your own nose. I know I've deleted the (random rubbish) gender theory bit I'd written. the more I write the less my writing is about the stuff I started writing in the intended to be an introduction. Now I have nothing vaguely introduction shaped at all.

And 3K more words than I can actually hand in.

it's a different sort of panic, but it's still panic.

*sigh*

tomorrow I'm supposed to send it to the teacher to get more feedback again. I hope it's more useful than 'I think you know what you need to do'. Because I do, but then again, I'm flailing.

... flail... not, as the back of my brain keeps wailing, faaaaaiiiiillll....