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Joined 2 years ago
Cake day: July 10th, 2023
  • monk@lemmy.unboiled.infotoScience Fiction@lemmy.world•What are things that mildly annoy you in SciFi?
    2·
    13 days ago

    Oh, I have the same gripes and more, so in my roleplaying campaign that has later turned into a book:

    1. Characters have to conspire, mostly outside of their ship, just to have a chance at a secret away from the surveillance. Two characters that are no strangers to oppressive surveillance manage to maintain exactly one secret, but its hours are inherently numbered and it takes a lot to happen to make it last, what, an entire day?
    2. Alien language is one of the central problems, despite it being phenomenally trivial (and following a decidedly indoeuropean sentence structure only because the readers also need to comprehend it). All characters not preselected for fluency in it outright don’t speak it, there are just three of them on-screen, implied to be the best of the best. They then proceed to mess it up big time while messing it up, recursively, multi-track drifting style. Phonetics is mutually unpronounceable, but intelligible both ways, yet over the course of the entire story both sides attain only barely passable and generally unreliable listening proficiency. They mostly get by in alien writing. And alien writing isn’t even exactly linear, because
    3. Anatomically, aliens are lizard-like. Unless your world building justifies aliens being related to humans, humanoid aliens are utter cringe.
    4. Allergies are, uh, let’s just say one results in a pivotal plot point. Standard nutrient packs are a thing; people are shown to get creative with them on day two, yet not a single soul ever attempts munching any alien flora or fauna, lol. Not being utter morons about what they eat doesn’t automatically mean they’re safe either.
    5. Translation is available, and the problem is not even studying the alien language, it’s that it doesn’t really help bridge the cultural mismatch; if anything, “knowing” the language is a bit of a disservice here because the inherent crudeness of the translation only compounds the misunderstandings pileup. Blue/orange morality doesn’t help it either: the question of how does one translate what was originally mistaken for alienese for “good” is, uh, an annoyingly recurring one.
    6. No technology available in abundance is used in an even remotely reasonable manner. The very idea of being rational about using Tech X makes no sense if Tech X ain’t rationed. Abundant resources are gonna be used willy-nilly, period.
    7. Competence is scarce, doubly so when anything goes off-script.
    8. People are absurd. Groups of people are next-level absurd. Don’t even get me started on societies. Fiction involving all three that isn’t woven almost entirely from blunders upon blunders is, likely, bland competence porn. Now add a second species to the mix and there’s no ceiling to the absurdity now. At this point, getting a point across the interspecies barrier, let alone cooperating on a thing, becomes unrealistic by default. Successful willful interspecies cooperation is, at the very least, a hard-earned success worth celebrating in-universe. And that’s if the species are interested in said cooperation.

    (non-sci-fi)

    1. A story doesn’t feature a villain that’s a perfect mirror image of the hero, largely because 9a. it doesn’t feature any villain. Villains are lame, and so is plot-mandated antagonism. While it’s just lazy writing in general, it’s particularly unrealistic because
    2. People just don’t care that much in general. Yes, I know people have interests and strong opinions on select few subjects, and sometimes these opinions even happen to clash. What are the chances though?
    3. Things generally just don’t happen as much as they do in most of the fiction. Real life doesn’t have the ambient soundtrack that immediately conveys or foreshadows the importance of the unfolding events. Thus in real life, the perceived importance of events is almost always off. Fiction rhould have it the same: things happen, some might even feel important in the moment, but rarely the ones that mattered.

    There’s probably more, but such gripes don’t usually spring to mind unprompted. Now, when you see them, then they do grind your gears…

  • monk@lemmy.unboiled.infotoLinux@lemmy.ml•What would you do with hardware like this?
    2·
    21 days ago

    Get rid of the dGPU power comsumption at all costs, as it’s underpowered for anything serious.

    Enable Intel AMT so that you get hardware level remote control, including power control.

    Afet that it’s a now-weak power-hungry CPU with weak cooling, but a decent amount of RAM, so, IDK, a buildserver or a VM host for scenarios when something needs to happen in the background, but latency doesn’t matter.