two things I want to talk about today

>faces

>spaces

FACES

I find it interesting that when animals — specifically pets and domesticated animals — want your attention, or want to seemingly communicate with you, they look you in the face. not your hands, which typically act to fulfil their needs, nor is it your sternum or hips, the centers of your movement. it’s your face. it’s like they know that where You truly reside.

SPACES

the creative world is ripe for the next great space opera. and something in me wants to take a stab at writing it; or at least, writing a space opera. can’t guarantee it’ll be the next great one, nor even the next mediocre one, or even really the next one; I’ll likely never finish it, if I even get around to starting it.

but I think the culture is ripe for it. and so I started thinking about it. how would you build a world? well, first you need peoples and cultures and economies. these things all sort of create an ecosystem — a socialsphere — of interactions, which subsequently give rise to behaviors.

you can start pretty broad too, and some of the details just sort of fall into place via logical elimination of concepts. for example, if you wanted to write something about a multi-planetary species that harvest minerals from a local asteroid belt to use as energy, well, that comes with a lot of implications. notably, and this is just a few off the top, but notably, they would need heavy machinery of some sort to mine minerals; they would need transportation to move them; they would need some sort of refinement process to turn those minerals into an energy source; and of course, all the technology that goes into building those processes.

so, you can see how if you start with a few basic features, you can quickly start whittling down the finer stuff just by thinking “ok, well, what would go into something like this? how can I factor out the ‘supporting details’ of this feature of the story?”

that’s it. that’s all I got today. consciousness has always been kind of a weird thing to discuss because it’s near-impossible to pin down and actually articulate what’s going on. we still don’t know. and anyone claiming to fully understand is it just trying to sell you something.

that, and stories are important. and in some instances, when you really put your mind to it, they almost write themselves.