#ursulaleguin — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #ursulaleguin, aggregated by home.social.
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How to build #solarpunk (the aesthetic vision without the social change) - watch now 00:59s
Instructions were unclear. Penis stuck in an #elysium sky paradise for the rich while the poor are burning on the wastelands.
Do not. Walk. Towards. Omelas.
#omelas #dystopia #cyberpunk #scifi #ursulaLeGuin #LeGuin #greenwashing #climateCatastrophe
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3/3
And I can't stress enough that this isn't about being jaded or cynical. Take the inverse, let's call it Salemo. "This place has only unending suffering where everyone is tortured all the time and there's no hope." Boring. Literally the tvtropes page of Darkness-Induced Audience Apathy. "They do this because it ensures a perfect life for one child." Wow! Mass self-sacrifice! What's so important about the child that they all agree to undergo extreme suffering? Tell me more! Is there a lesson I could apply to my own life? I don't believe in perfect joy without a catch, sure, but I don't believe in perfect pain without a catch either. Even stories that start bad and end bad don't stay bad all the way through. Instead it's "Ah, things are terrible. Oh look, the main character is trying to turn things around! Oh no, they failed because of some tragic flaw in their character that they couldn't overcome!" And I say "Wow, what a bad fate, I should think about what kind of flaws I have."I'm almost wondering if this was her actual point? To play around with what makes a story complete? Not just call me an edgelord?
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2/3
I think where the disconnect lies is that I'm engaging with her story as just that, a story. The purpose of a story is both to entertain and to convey some information to get us to think about our own life and experience. An interesting story makes us have interesting thoughts. The story of "this place is perfect and nothing ever goes wrong" isn't interesting, but not because we think that's naive, it's because there's no useful information being conveyed there. Okay, they're perfect. Why? How did they become this way? Can I apply anything they do to my life so that I can make things better? Oh, you don't want to tell me? Then it's not a full narrative, it's only a snapshot of a setting. My brain is starving here.Oh, they torture a child! Wow, what a shocking moral dilemma. One innocent's suffering for the welfare of thousands, hm, that makes my brain think about whether I would want to live there. Now I'm engaged and interested, not because a child is being tortured but because there's actually a topic of discussion.
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So, I'm thinking about Omelas. Maybe I'm misreading, but the point is to make you think about why you didn't believe in the perfect place and felt it's more believable when a kid was being tortured to make it perfect, right? The whole "The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting." Like, not really? Maybe that was true in her context. All the pedants and sophisticates I see constantly stress that things are terrible right now and that we have the power to make them better. (This could be just a byproduct of social media used for mass political mobilization?)
1/3
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“Read it now” – Ursula K. Le Guin
Weaving folklore, fairy tale & Norse myth into a shimmering, witty & slyly subversive tapestry, Naomi Mitchison’s TRAVEL LIGHT – a rediscovered gem of classic fantasy writing – has just been republished in the UK by Virago
https://store.virago.co.uk/products/travel-light
#Scottish #literature #fantasy #kidlit #20thcentury #womenswriting #ursulaLeGuin #NaomiMitchison #folklore #mythology
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I wrote a post about Trust & Safety that I have been meaning to write for a while, but @caseynewton wrote something recently that reminded me.
It acts as a useful mission statement for the advocacy organisation I am slowly creating, which I have talked about in a few interviews, but not gotten around to yet - The problems with C-PTSD and AuDHD in concert mean that everything comes at a glacial start :)
https://superhighwayman.com/2025/the-ones-who-thrive-in-omelas/
#Writing #TrustAndSafety #Blog #Security #Infosec #Advocacy #SocialMedia #Online #Dating #OnlineSafetyAct #Moderation #Wellness #Health #PTSD #ADHD #AuDHD #Omelas #SciFi #UrsulaLeGuin
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https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/kim_02_24/#:~:text=You%20are%20going%20to%20run,putting%20kids%20in%20the%20hole.%E2%80%9D if you’ve read Ursula LeGuin’s story, you might want to follow it up with “Why Don’t We Just Kill the Kid in the Omelas Hole” by Isabel J. Kim. #Omelas #UrsulaLeGuin #ShortStory