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I don't remember this line; which book is it from? Is it the Germania?

Along with the Farmer's Market for Mattman.

I've also chucked in three Archaic Human Restoration Projects (in East Africa, Denisov, and Flores), and some more Mormons (feuding with the first lot, natch). But I've let Lesotho retain its independence, because I feel bad for it.

DCCCV, you can go ahead and assume that there's no such place as Bielefeld, and that there's a mountain in the heart of Berlin that no-one noticed until recently. But I don't think my giant polygon map can come with the scale, so.

hS

OR How Cipher Clickbaits You...

FULLMETAL ALCHEMIST IS GETTING A LIVE-ACTION MOVIE ADAPTATION!



CATCH THE TRAILER AND GET HYPED, SON!

That the Midwestern United States be known as the "Farmer's Market"... Or perhaps the "Farmer's Union." Either or it should be a major military power with weaponry being based off of Farming equipment as a general rule.

South Africa and the surrounding countries could always be put into some kind of 'New Zulu Empire'.

As for South America, You could have a nation consisting of Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, maybe some of the southern parts of Brazil and the Falkland Islands known as 'The Falklands Republic'. Their motto would be 'Bet you didn't see that coming, did you?'

I do like what I've written so far, though. There's the beginning of a short story about Jewish vampires, and a second thing started that combines two of my oldest original works into something new and fun. So at least there's that.

~DF

...am so far off schedule that I've written about 3k words total, have definitely not written every day, and actually almost half my word count comes from the two short essays I wrote yesterday for a midterm (I like them. I had fun writing them. They totally count.) In my defense, I've been sick and busy and mostly just exhausted from being sick. It's annoying.

I have no clue if I'm going to break even 10k words this time (not counting the essay I need to write for the end of the month), but I look forward to finding out. And I look forward even more to a, getting back to writing much at all, b, not being sick anymore, and c, actually getting caught up on my German homework. There's a lot of that.

Cheers, and good luck to whoever's writing,
~DF

How's everyone doing? [Checks earlier thread] Okay, so 'everyone' may be about... like... two other people... hmm. [Scribbles all over plans for post; creates a new one on the fly]

For myself, I'm still Live(Journal)streaming my novel; I don't know how many people might be reading it, but if I was doing this for feedback, it wouldn't be NaNo, so that's okay. ^_^

I've also got a very entertaining (to me) world map, which does finally include Larfen's multitudinous Australias. I feel really bad that Africa and South America are both completely left out; if you can think of anything that could slot in there, I'd be delighted to consider it. We've got everything from historical resurgences to micronations writ large to silly in-jokes - plus the Kootenai Nation, which I'm pretty sure qualifies as all three.

And... I'm having fun. It's been hard to get anything written some days, and my characters have a distressing tendency to make me write around action sequences (the most recent one ended up as a flashback), but it's fun, and I'm on schedule, and NaNo rocks.

hS

We are the citizens of the dystopia. Our lives are worth less than others' right to shoot. Our health is a commodity, to be bought and sold. We work, earn, and live at the pleasure of the Corporations. If we lose their favour, we die - there is no escape.

(Freedom is slavery.)

Our votes mean nothing. Town and country are at war, and those who rule are happy to keep it that way. They have shaped the very landscape to give us no choice in who represents us; even the highest ruler of all is chosen by a bare handful of us, while others merely tread their pre-chosen paths.

(Resistence is futile.)

They say those who seek peace should prepare for war; we, who preach equality, prepare ourselves by rejecting it. Across swathes of our country, outlawed hate is shouted from the rooftops and marches through the street, while our leaders laugh along. The police do nothing to stop them - they are the police.

(Silence is golden.)

Welcome to the Dystopia. We call it the land of the free.

(Ignorance is bliss.)

~hS

I did not mean to offend anyone with my example, so to everyone I offended: I'm sorry.

(Let's pretend I hit that "post reply" button a sentence too soon back there.)

I apologize that I did not make it clearer from the beginning that I was not equating being gay and being racist.

We're continuing the dramatic reading in a few minutes! Hop on the Discord voice chat, we'd love to have you all.

First as to your immediate point about saying a thing, that's hearsay, and while hard to prove is provable. But as to the Hate Speech, that's not exactly correct.

Hate speech was at one point prohibitable, back in the 20's. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., wrote explaining that it along with several other types of speech could be banned or otherwise restricted. Then the 1960s came and between Cohen v. California and Brandenburg v. Ohio, "Hate Speech" gained some modicum of protection. Brandenburg is actually uniquely on point here. It arose as a result of a Klan rally, Ohio tried to prosecute the Klan members, but the Supreme Court held, that even the Klan's speech was protected provided there was no active incitement. In other words, so long as the Speech does not advocate imminent lawlessness, (Clear and Present Danger) then generally you cannot restrict the speech as to content. Time, manner, and place, are different separate issues.

It comes down to the obsession with "individual freedoms" that permeates through the U.S. Essentially, we have this doctrine that runs through all our rhetoric and media and narratives, which is that... well, it's complicated. But essentially, Pure Capitalism = Pure Freedom.

It's this idea that because anyone can do anything, since we Definitely Don't Have A Class System, anyone . . . should be able to do anything. Business owners should be able to hire or fire whoever they like, sell whoever they like, etc. And, in theory, if their workers don't like it, they can just... ya know, start their own rival business, and the better idea will win out, because it's a free market.

It really makes absolutely no sense, but at the core of American identity, there is the delusion that everyone, regardless of their socioeconomic status, has equal opportunities and therefore need no protection. (And, of course, is individually responsible for their situation, regardless of how they got there.)

I'd mostly recovered from the first blows of the election reminding me that half this country does not agree with universal human rights. And then this news sent me over the edge again. Have any of you listened to his very last album, "You Want It Darker"? It's heartwrenching. Quite reminiscent in a very strange way of David Bowie's farewell album.

Though I'd heard "Hallelujah"'s many covers, the first time I heard Leonard Cohen himself was back when I was involved in Food Not Bombs, a group of anarchists who used groceries' discarded produce to make public meals, which were cooked in the basement of a synagogue, and distributed in a dirty and somehow still pretty park nearby. There was a boombox on a fridge, and people shuffled their mix CDs and cassettes through it, and one day, the song was "Everybody Knows." I mention this because it was the first time I'd heard a song like that, and because I think L Cohen would approve of this story. The song is grim and angry and bleak and yet beautiful.

That's what my memories of Hartford are. A city that's empty, usually, and dark, but the gardens are beautiful even while overgrown, and we saw a great blue heron land in a pond that was more trash than water, one day. I associate Leonard Cohen very heavily with Rice Boy, and probably always will.

Somewhere in my mind is a memory of Leonard Cohen saying that one day, as a student, he “came across a poem by Federico Garcia Lorca that ruined my life, I am happy to say.” The same is true of Cohen - he showed us the beauty in shadows and dust and broken glass mosaics in the cracks of the roads, and he was honest about the loneliness and the meaning of love and of G-d and of the position of self, and, and, I feel the world is missing something now that he is gone from it.


That was too long, and self-indulgent, but this man's music really has been a central part of my life for a long, long time.

Oh, and as for the infertile thing, here is how I imagine the argument would go.

The gift of Life is given unto us by God, as blessing and as means to further His plan. However, there are some whom are not meant to bear child in His plan, but to do His work in other ways. To try and to fail to raise child is not unholy, for to fail is God's plan for those who cannot. However, to deny the opportunity for God's gift, to shun Him so by actively preventing His will, is sin of the highest degree.

Or, to boil it down to cliche, "God works in mysterious ways. Let Him do His work."

The key point here is that you live in a country Unfair dismissal is allowed at all. Because that is spectacularly dystopian.

Seriously. Seriously.

hS

There are places where we're basically just people - my good state of Washington, for one, has about the same protections add the United Kingdom. That doesn't mean we're safe in practice, either here or there. A trans person was assaulted during Pride week on capital hill, the queerest neighborhood in Seattle.

But it gets worse. There are states where we don't have protections. There are nations that require us to spend years living as ourselves before getting access to hrt or updating ids, which ends up being nothing more useful than a government-sponsored hazing. There are states that won't update gender markers on ids until after expensive and major surgeries; this puts a hard class boundary on being able to not be outed as trans every time you show an id. Mandatory sterilization is still a thing in a lot of Europe, too, if you like a side order of eugenics with your prejudice.

And the US and Europe are still some of the best places in the world to be trans.

Welcome to the dystopia.