rounderhouse

[rounderhouse]

Diagraphephobia: The fear of losing digital data or information. Associated with hoarding data and files.

Yesterday I posted my article for SCP's Anthology 2024. It's about Maria Jones, dementia, and being eaten alive from the inside out. I think it's one of the strangest, most uncomfortable things I've ever written.

Check it out here: SCP-8976 - Diagrephephobia: fragmentation

FATAL MEMORY CORRUPTION

[rounderhouse]

The mech is neither a tank nor a plane, but a biological weapons platform. Titanium-ceramic plating covering living, pulsating flesh. We can't help it that cerebrospinal fluid is wonderfully conductive and the perfect medium to immerse the pilot in, or that synaptic fibres formed of intertwined nervecords are so good at carrying data. It's just engineering.

[rounderhouse]

Been thinking about wetware. Biologically-based computation tech. Thin neural membranes, trapped between plexiglass sheets, bathed in cerebrospinal fluid. Humming server banks, rows of neural sheets and thick cords of synaptic fibre. Workers in clean suits gently nudging along samples of artificial mind, destined for an offshore compfarm in Hong Kong, long outliving whatever cents-on-the-dollar guinea pig the stem cells were harvested from.

[rounderhouse]

lol, lmao even

[rounderhouse]

finished listening to TES's narration of fratricide and. holy hell. the moment where Bileath answers "one drop." is absolutely incredible. i can only imagine how kathartic it must be, standing in bileath's shoes. to say that, then watch Ansool rot for 6 agonising days, knowing even this would never be enough for what he had done.

please never stop writing. you are a huge inspiration to me :)

i don't intend to! the voices keep whispering stories to me from the beyond and they won't shut the fuck up until i write and post them

fratricide was an absolutely manic experience to write, 28000 words over a week and its packed full of moments that just Came To Me like the one drop thing. i'm very glad you enjoyed it so much!

[rounderhouse]

hello big man rounderhouse, the house is very round 🔥 i'm a big fan of your redtape series and your worldbuilding; i've been writing my own original story for years now, and all i've been doing is planning, planning and planning, but i feel like no matter how much i do, i keep feeling like i won't be able to write a cohesive or good story. how do you plan your stories, and more importantly, how do you manage to actually get those words on the paper ? of course, i know you just gotta do it, but whenever i try, i just hit a wall halfway, and feel like i need to plan even more

i always have a bit of trouble answering these questions because they come from a place very orthogonal to how i write -- not that that's a bad thing! but for me the issue is rarely one of wanting to have it 100% planned out before i jump into it. i rarely plan out my stories beyond the broadest strokes; maybe i'll write an outline, but unless i'm expecting it to be novella-length, i kind of just wing it beyond that, and i recommend giving that a shot. you know where you're starting, you know where you want the story to end, so instead of painstakingly drafting out every bit, just start at the start and, well, keep going until you end up where you wanted to. i think part of it is that beyond storytelling i also just enjoy the act of writing -- putting sentences together, making them flow, communicating tone and vibe to the reader. i think you need to cultivate an appreciation for that to some degree, otherwise writing is just a grueling trudge to get to your final product, which is no fun at all

as for feeling good -- you can only get good at writing by doing it. it's a practice sport, just like anything else, and the improvement only becomes apparent after dozens of stories. not a fun answer, but the only true one. you can help that along by analyzing stories after you write them for what you and other people think works, doesn't work, but that does require you to silence the voice of "i'm not good enough". you're not good at most things until you do them a lot, so not being good at them is a terrible reason not to do them. you have literally no stakes in writing on the internet, so i really recommend taking advantage of that to cut your teeth writing whatever. all storytelling is practice

there's a very compelling temptation to all creatives to avoid doing the hard creative work and take refuge in what they know won't challenge them -- making plans for your stories for you. for me, it's making images and CSS instead of writing. but growth requires challenge, and you gotta break out of that hole if you ever want to see the story on the page.

i wrote quite a bit more than i intended to, but i hope that ramble helps you at all! i look forward to seeing what you make

[rounderhouse]

Just finished reading Fratricide and it fucking destroyed me (Very very positive)

thank you! my goal was to cause my reader immense psychological pain. i think it's my best work yet

[rounderhouse]

Gravestations -- trade, repair, and maintenance space stations strategically placed along major stellar shipping lines between solar systems. Their name is well-earned: square footage is the most expensive commodity in space, and the indentured engineers paying life debts aboard these stations sleep in 'graves', stacked cubbies six feet deep and three feet square. Occasionally, a gravestation's life support fails, and it's far too expensive to evacuate everyone to a planetary surface. So the power goes off and they became mass graves, rapid axial spin slowing as the bodies begin to float.

[rounderhouse]

Do you think mechs ever develop enough of a personality through their decades of service and human-machine interfacing to feel bad for the fresh jockeys High Command keeps shoving into their cockpits as callously as replacing a faulty component?

I don't know if bad would be the right term. That implies a level of awareness of pain, suffering, the horror of mortality -- all things a machine struggles to understand. The mech doesn't know that when its former jockey suffered a massive internal brain hemorrhage, it was thinking about an ex-lover in their final moments before oblivion. It doesn't grasp the terror of death. It views it all the same as swapping out a component that has failed. But by the 15th fresh-faced jockey, you begin to wonder whether there might be something wrong with the way they're producing these odd fleshy components that make them break so often.

It's the moment of tired disappointment when you plop new batteries into something and, after a second, drop the old, spent ones into the trash.

[rounderhouse]

your feminization is inevitable

I kept scrolling past this in my asks because I swear to god I misread it as "your demonization is inevitable" and couldn't tell whether it was a threat or saying i was going to turn into an awesome demon

[rounderhouse]

*throws you like a pokeball*

Guys I was in the pokeball that's why I haven't posted about fucked up mechs for weeks (i forgot my password and got locked out of my acct)

[rounderhouse]

we’ve installed the new external reinforcement units on all of our mech pilots, sir. we should be seeing at least a 21% increase in overall performance soon. yes, sir. no. no, they work by delivering a variable-strength signal directly to the nervous system through the neck. i- yes, sir, an electric signal. yes, i suppose you could call it a shock. correct, it goes around the neck. actually, sir, the pilots were very enthusiastic after we explained how they worked.

no, sir, i don’t know what’s wrong with them either.

[rounderhouse]

I've come to the conclusion that Alien is so much more compelling than Aliens because the xenomorph is way, way more striking and intriguing as this one unique apex predator that no one really understands or knows the origin of than when there's a bunch of these Fucking Things running around

[rounderhouse]

i fucking love space horror. give me long-lost starships arriving in port filled with more corpses than they left it. give me space stations that no one knows the origin of. give me warp drives that allow you to skip across vast stellar gaps so long as they're fed with blood.

[rounderhouse]

“I need you to find me at least ten gay people.”

PRI(DEMON)TH: Director House tries to fool the O5s into thinking his Site is staffed by little gay people to get funding bonuses, only to learn his Site actually is staffed by little gay people.

Undervegas pridefest entry ft Calendar!!! happy pride month folks

LINK

[rounderhouse]

I just want you to know, Mr. Circular Building, that somewhere in some alternate universe, there is an anime where every little piece of microfiction you’ve written on both Tumblr and Twitter about mech jockeys/pilots is the lore.

This means that mech jockeys from this hypothetical series are:

owned by corporations

treated as less than human.

Usually have to deal with the horrors of war.

are connected to a mech to pilot via extremely invasive, almost body horror cybernetic implants

Drugs. End of sentence.

While inside said mech, they are blinded to the outside and have to rely on their handler, whom only sees the jockey as a war dog.

If they die there’s a chance that they basically become a ghost that has to help out the fresh meat.

and if they get to retire, they are constantly reminded of their past, from the lingering effects of IV cocktails, to hating silence, and being reminded of the only machine they will ever love.

And don’t forget the weird psycho-sexual shit either. If you pull out the implants mentioned earlier, they might moan.

Arguably, they’ll be as traumatized as Guts. Did I miss any?

this sounds tight as hell and i hope alternate universe rounderhouse is the director of this anime. he's probably having a ball with it

[rounderhouse]

Okay, so after giving it some more thought, I’ve come to realize that the anti-Zionist movement is basically just the leftist version of the anti-abortion movement. Much like how anti-abortion activists don’t seek to reduce the “harm” of an abortion (in quotes because it’s not actually a harm) by providing contraception to prevent unwanted pregnancies or support for pregnancy and child-raising, the anti-Zionist movement doesn’t seek to reduce the “harm” of Jews moving to Israel by making the diaspora safe. Because at the end of the day, it’s not about harm reduction, but about punishment for a perceived sin.

i could list the many ways in which this is on its face moronic but the easiest and clearest indication of how you feel is that you put harm in quotation marks when referring to the original settlement of Israel -- an act associated with the Nakba wherein thousands of Palestinians were massacred and nearly a million were expelled from their homes by armed paramilitary terrorist organizations like Irgun and Lehi (which later formed the core of the IDF).

You don't think Palestinians being genocided is harm, because you don't think Palestinians are people.