37 Sure Is A Number

So as you read this, I have turned 37.

I try not to get too introspective, but I fail. It's the nature of the beast. Can't not think, right? Can't turn the brain off at will. Too easy. So we end up thinking. And fair warning, this is going to get pretty introspective, and not necessarily in a good way.

 

It's been the seventh consecutive year of steadily - albeit slowly - worsening chronic illness.

That's a hard thing to look in the eye, you know? That's a hard thing to cope with. I mean. One of these illnesses just started affecting me worse after I turned thirty, but one of them was brought into being by two separate bouts of illness that left me... basically fucked.

A lot of life, passing by, half unlived.

It is the hand we are dealt, though. We can only play with the cards we hold.

Looking into the future can be hard, from that perspective.

Like at one point I legitimately thought there wasn't going to be one. I thought I was dead in the next day, week, month. I couldn't envisage there being a future, certainly not one to plan for. That isn't even to do with the lung condition, that's just depression talking. (I say JUST depression. You know what I mean.)

I just want to finish the book I am working on, generally experience as little stress and suffering as possible, and... yeah. I understand what dad meant when he said to me that all he wanted was some peace. I can understand that.

Just keep on keeping on, right?

Happy birthday, me.

Sorry it's a short one, this week. I'm busy painting Brighton red.

If you'd care to share my blog with your friends, I'd appreciate that! If you'd like to thank me in a fiscal form for entertaining you a little bit, I do have a Patreon right here, but please - no pressure. Thank you for reading, and check my social media to the right to keep in touch.

NaNoWriMo Thoughts - Who We Are

The future that my NaNo project is set in is pretty grim.

Like, the human race is in the pits. It's at war with [REDACTED] and also has a serious internal discipline problem. 97% of the planets within Central's jurisdiction are owned by one of the 17 Corporate Entities that exist - and I mean literally owned, each potentially habitable or exploitable resource is put to tender and is the sole responsibility and possession of that Corporate Entity.

Human rights are pretty much just a thing of the past. They were left behind with the memory of Earth. Who knows where we came from? Who cares? Who has enough time or energy to worry about it? Most of the human race is too busy.

Which means a big crackdown on our personal freedoms, right?

Well, some of them.

What we have a case of, though, is an unshackling of neoliberal business practice from traditional hard-right "family values" bullshit. Religion doesn't really happen any more, the notion of a nuclear family joins the concept of anti-monopolisation laws as a pre-Spread relic, and society has become a machine for purchasing goods and supporting the war effort.

So as long as you buy the corporation's products and make its weaponry, what do they care who you love or who you sleep with?

I mean, in part I know it is just me wanting to increase visibility and representation in my own work. That's a thing I am into. People exist in a lot of flavours that aren't cishet white male vanilla, and that fact not only deserves to be represented in my work, it OUGHT to be, as a matter of reason and realism.

I've talked about representation before - about movies and such in this one, and in video games and such in this one. There's a lot of stories that need telling that don't have a random straight white dude in the driver's seat.

I'm not really qualified to tell a story about being trans, about being gender fluid, about being asexual or aromantic - they aren't experiences I have lived, and there's voices a lot more qualified than mine that can talk about them. What I CAN do is include those people and those voices and experiences, and indeed I feel I have a duty to, to correct the swerve toward invisibility and marginalisation that most mainstream media tends to undergo.

"I just don't want people to think it is normal to be like that," are words I have heard someone actually say, recently, relating to gay people. I'm not sure where that attitude started from, but I can guarantee that it only gets reinforced by almost every major movie and TV series cramming your standard cishet relationship mush down your throat, and that anything that deviates from that norm has to come with a warning label to avoid sending Daily Mail readers into an apoplectic fury.

This comparison is going to be an awkward one, but once I did a blog about how watching Watership Down when I was young prepared me for the death of a pet. We can roll our eyes as much as we want at the notion of the media shaping how we think, but it CAN, in our formative years. Maybe, just maybe, if these people who see anyone that doesn't fit their standard cast as "not normal" had seen them proliferate in the media they'd absorbed without even thinking since early childhood - maybe this would have been their new normal.

I mean, we somehow managed to normalise people in suits earning a hundred times what their actual employees earn. We managed to normalise the Cold War, we managed to demonise words like Socialist and Feminist.

Surely we can normalise not treating people like shit any more.

NaNoWriMo Thoughts - Where Monopolies End

Yep, it's that time of year again - I am doing National Novel Writing Month once more, and this time, we're going cyberpunk, baby.

This will form part of a series of blogs about my NaNo project and about writing in general, each looking at themes I am exploring or generally find neat or awful respectively.

Now, with cyberpunk, we find ourselves in the corporate future.

Take this shot from the set of the original Blade Runner:

See how well-lit everything is? And can you see any actual streetlights? It's all shining down from logos and neons.

This is a theme that gets heavily picked up in cyberpunk and scifi. Neal Stephenson, in 1992's Snow Crash, labels the effect Loglo. Here it is demonstrated in the TV series of Richard Morgan's Altered Carbon:

Pretty but also a bit troubling, right?

For comparison, here is what I believe to be Tokyo, circa 90s:

I have gone on record before as saying that I believe the cyberpunk future to be the future we are heading into.

Picture this though. Picture the far future. Not the relative near, wherein we are still Earth-centric and our values are pretty similar to what they are today. Wherein the things that trouble us are also relevant to what they would be today.

Instead let us turn our eyes hundreds, if not thousands, of years into the future - a future based on the notion that, today, now, the corporations win. Massive business entities made out of hundreds of different individual corporations handling the exploration, colonisation and habitation of spheres beyond Earth. I hope that doesn't sound too out there, given that SpaceX exists. How big a jump is it, really, to go from SpaceX to something like...

So if one single company colonises a planetoid, builds all the homes there, makes it breathable, makes it habitable - is there still going to be a monopolies commission to make them let other corporate interests take root in the soil that they themselves made fertile?

Given how the world is going, I daresay that the law against monopolies will be left on Earth.

So this business ends up basically owning this entire planetoid, be it a moon, a large asteroid, an actual planet, whatever. And it can either let other businesses in, or it can just...do it its damn self.

Lets say that the company that ends up owning Titan is Nestle. I'm sure you have all seen this rather scary image.

Now this is just food and drink items, but it shows what a spread of products each of these individual large businesses has under their purview.

So lets say Titan needs places to live. Good news, one of the subdivided companies actually has a wing that deals entirely with housing. The people that live there need places to eat and shop, which is good, because another subdivision has both a chain of stores and a chain of bars and fast food restaurants.

These people need to work, though - and only so many of them are needed to actually "service" everyone else. Which is great, because Titan has plenty of natural resources to exploit, and there's plenty of business opportunities! ... for the processing and manufacture divisions of the company.

Who gets to tell them no? Who goes out into the solar system and rocks up to every single settled planetoid and demands that the company that literally built everything on it needs to let in competition?

The company gets to be the law, here. Gets to be the judge and jury. And one might assume that the way a business gets to be the one to settle, say, Titan is by a bidding system. That the colonisation rights would be put out to tender, and whoever can afford / make the best case for the rights, gets them.

So you, the normal person, some fifty generations after settling - you have grown up knowing nothing but the company. You've only ever lived, eaten, breathed, worked around company territory. You pay them rent out of the pay they give you for the work you put in. And whatever central government exists doesn't have to care about you, because you are the sole responsibility of the company that bought Titan.

Or Analog Incorporated, the company that bought the civic rights to Corpus VIII's second moon. Auroch, a moon with an atmosphere that is breathable and survivable but that has no magnetosphere and can't shield you from very rapid death from solar radiation. You can't go out by day - which is okay because a significant amount of time is spent in eclipse behind Corpus VIII, a gas giant.

The company doesn't have to pay for street lights. It has its own logos to light your way.

Welcome to the setting of my NaNo, 2018.