Said Isn’t Dead

If you use Pinterest at all for writing topics, I’m sure you’ve seen these pins come up. They’re always in some cutesy font and usually with little tombstones (subtle) and come with a huge list of words you should use instead of ‘said.’ If you’ve ever paid attention to these, though, you’ll notice that none of these pins ever have a reasonable explanation for why said is dead and you should be using all these synonyms.

Because there isn’t one.

Seriously, If It Exists I’m Not Finding It

I even tucked my pants into my socks, tied my bear bell and my bear mace to my belt, and covered myself down with enough bug spray to take down smaller birds to venture off into the thorny wilds of the second page of the Google results.

God help me, I even tried Bing.

All of the results are the same as those pins. “Said is dead!” followed by a never-ending list of words you can supposedly use instead, but the longer these lists are the more obscure and downright clunky the words are. ‘Enunciate?’ ‘Rejoin?’ Why in the Mutual of Omaha Oscar Wilde’s Kingdom would anyone use these in modern day prose?

If there’s an answer these websites don’t have it. The closest thing to an explanation I could find was this little blurb posted on two separate websites:

“You are doing everything possible to make your writing better, tighter, and more interesting, but are you still using “dead words?” These are words that are simply just too plain, bland, and vague to be included in your awesome writing. One of the most notorious “dead words” is “said.” But dialogue is important! I hear you. It is also important to show readers exactly how something is communicated. Think: what emotion is behind this dialogue? What picture do I want to paint? This is where synonyms come in handy.  To help you get started, we compiled a list of alternatives to the dreaded “said.” With this list, you are sure to find a perfect fit for every “said” in your writing.”

http://xulonpressblog.com/ask-editor/writing-tips/141-synonyms-for-said/

BRB, going out back to barf for the rest of time.

Spooky, Scary Dead Words

The idea behind ‘dead’ words is that some words have been overused to the point of losing all meaning. I am not denying that this happens. I lived through the 2000s, and even eleven years later I still internally cringe whenever I see the words ‘epic’ or ‘legendary.’ Like, every time my husband mentions the Epic Games Store I take ten points of psychic damage, and it’s been over a decade since that was everyone’s go-to adjective for anything even remotely interesting or funny. It’s why popular slang is constantly evolving. Eventually, society at large gets tired of hearing it.

But are those words dead? Can any word actually be used and overused to the point where it should never be used again? I mean, surely my tone is coming through the words and you understand my point of view is ‘no, and furthermore that’s a stupid idea to even put energy into.’ The important thing with using any word is context.

Another word that gets tossed around as dead is ‘very.’ This one has far more merit than ‘said,’ for reasons we’ll get to in a second. At a certain level of writing you’ll realize that for every ‘very’ you use, you could have used a stronger adjective. ‘Very crowded’ could be ‘bustling.’ ‘Very angry’ could be ‘furious.’ You might start avoiding ‘very’ at all costs. ‘Very’ is dead.

Except it’s not, which is what you’ll realize as you advance past that level of writing. Let’s say you’re writing about a character that isn’t so smart, or eloquent, or maybe they’re a child. Their vocabulary is limited, and you’re writing in first person, or third person with a close narrative distance. Is this character really going to say something like ‘petrifying?’ Or are they going to go with ‘very scary?’

Declaring a list of ‘dead’ words you’re not allowed to use anymore is denying the very creativity that goes into creative writing.

Words You See, Words You Don’t

There are words that give a story personality. Adjectives, adverbs, nouns, pronouns, verbs. Writing and editing creatively are all about choosing the correct words that will tell your story the way you want it to be told.

Daddy said ‘run,’ so I did. Didn’t know where. Didn’t care, neither. I ran ‘til my feet hurt from slapping the pavement. Even when pulling air in hurt, I didn’t stop. Not ‘til I hit the woods.

vs.

When father said ‘run,’ it broke me from my spell. I didn’t realize my feet had begun the journey until I was well down the road. My feet, cold and bare, began to burn from every step on the road. The mere act of breathing began to feel like needles in my chest. But still I persisted, terrified to stop even as I crossed the tree line.

Same situation, two different people telling two different stories. The personality of these two different characters comes out in the words used. The words you see.

But what about the words you don’t? English is full of them. Words that are only there to help with the construction of the sentence, to make it make sense, but otherwise don’t add any flavor. Prepositions and conjunctions. The. And. A. Or. But. Even some verbs like is and be. Nobody ever complains about the overuse of these words. No one ever declares them dead. Because they’re there for utility. There’s nothing to replace ‘the’ with and you can’t stop using it or your sentences are going to look broken (unless, of course, you want them to look broken).

This misunderstanding is where a lot of these ‘said is dead’ lists are coming from. The people who write these up see ‘said’ as one of the flowers in the garden, when really it’s a support pole for the ivy.

Let’s Talk About Immersion

Anyone else who made it through the ‘epic’ period of the 2000s will remember another annoying fad that for a while seemed like it would never go away: 3D movies. If you don’t, don’t worry! They’ll probably come back around in another five to ten years or so, and they’ll suck just as much then as they did in the 2000s.

The big thing these 3D people kept pushing was immersion. It’ll be like you’re in the movie! You’ll be surrounded by the action! You’ll think you could reach right out and slap Tom Holland across his baby face because that’s how immersed you’ll be!

Even a lot of people who don’t write for a living could tell you that’s not how immersion works. Sure, you could be immersed into a 3D movie. But it wouldn’t be because of the 3D. It would be because of the story, the characters, the cinematography. A good movie will immerse a viewer whether it’s in 3D or black and white or even silent.

It’s the same with reading. Think about the last time you read something you were enjoying. Were you sitting there enjoying the typeface? The kerning? The paragraph breaks? Were you thinking, man, I love the way my eyes are jumping from word and word! And every time I turn a page I pee a little.

Of course you weren’t. When you’re reading something you enjoy you become so immersed in it you completely forget the physical act of reading. Your brain has shut that part out because a) it’s unnecessary and b) it’s so busy hallucinating what you’re reading that it doesn’t have time to register the actual book in your hands.

When writing advice books give tips on how to ‘grab’ readers and keep them interested from chapter to chapter, that’s immersion. They don’t talk specifically about how to keep a reader immersed the entire way through because that’s just, like, the rest of the advice in the book. Write well and your readers will forget that they’re sitting on the couch with a book in their hand.

Sometimes, it doesn’t take much to break immersion. An incorrect, easily refuted fact. A misspelling or a grammar error. Even something simple like a poor choice of words can pull the reader out of the story. Mistakes remind readers of reality.

Said Shouldn’t Say a Thing

Put it all together and here’s the tea: 

‘Said’ is a supporting word that should remain invisible, and if you keep replacing it with these fancy synonyms you’re going to break immersion and drive your readers away.

How to use ‘Said’ Synonyms Properly

Because of course you can. As I said above, no word should be considered ‘dead’ or ‘off limits’ (unless we’re talking about hateful slurs). They need to be used surgically. Remember, every time you use a different dialogue tag when ‘said’ could have been used, you are drawing attention to that word. There had better be a good reason for it.

I’ve looked through the novel I’m working on to find examples of using words other than ‘said,’ and I’m finding I usually only use them when I want to directly describe the nature of the characters voice. ‘She squeaked.’ ‘He growled.’ ‘They screamed,’ to some extent, and that I use because the only thing I hate more than avoiding ‘said’ for bizarre and indescribable reasons is the exclamation point. It’s just so…tacky.

You can also use it to specifically draw attention to the moment. A whispered proclamation of love is going to stand out and have more punch if it’s surrounded by a bunch of saids instead of ‘he sang,’ ‘she burped,’ ‘they giggled.’

Also: humor. Because something like

“I would never lie to you!” he lied.

is never not funny.

So, If I’m Stuck Using ‘Said,’ How Do I Describe How My Characters Are Speaking?

I mean…just do that?

I’m sorry, I hate ‘said is dead’ so much it makes me kind of shitty. Look, here’s some more examples.

“What am I supposed to do about it?” he roared.
“Why should I know?” she remarked.
Red climbed up his face so fast she thought he might stroke out. He stood up, hands now balled tight, and belted, “Oh, sure! Now you don’t know everything. Now you’re just some innocent bystander who doesn’t know shit about fuck!”
She watched him, standing in the middle of the room and desperate for something to hit, and waited until his panting had slowed.
“Done?” she inquired.

Vs

“What am I supposed to do about it?” His fists were opening and closing rapidly, and there was a clench to his jaw she knew too well.
Using all her strength to keep her tone level, she asked, “Why should I know?”
Red climbed up his face so fast she thought he might stroke out. He stood up, hands now balled tight, every bit of him breaking under the strain of his pointless anger.
“Oh, sure! Now you don’t know everything. Now you’re just some innocent bystander who doesn’t know shit about fuck!”
She watched him, standing in the middle of the room and desperate for something to hit, and waited until his panting had slowed.
“Done?”

If you’re describing your characters well enough as the scene progresses, using descriptive dialogue tags are redundant. Everything the reader needs to know about how your character said something should be apparent from their words and their actions in the scene.

That Doesn’t Make ‘Said’ Completely Useless

In fact, ‘said’ has a very distinct purpose: making your readers pause.

If you’re doing it right, your reader isn’t really registering the word ‘said.’ They’re internalizing it, along with whoever is speaking and whatever actions are going on, to create the scene in their head. But that doesn’t mean it’s completely lost. They still read the word, and that takes time. Just a split-second, but that creates a natural pause in the narrative that you can use to your advantage. Take a look at this:

“Ladies and gentlemen, what I am about to propose is nothing short of sedition, and treason. If there’s any part left of this government you feel some loyalty to, I suggest you leave now, because once I reveal even the basics of the plan there is no going back. Any takers? No? Glad to hear it. Now that we have that settled, who here has ever dreamed of killing the emperor?”

Vs.

“Ladies and gentlemen, what I am about to propose is nothing short of sedition, and treason. If there’s any part left of this government you feel some loyalty to, I suggest you leave now, because once I reveal even the basics of the plan there is no going back. Any takers? No? Glad to hear it. Now that we have that settled,” he said, running a hand over his tie, “who here has ever dreamed of killing the emperor?”

That one little pause and suddenly that last line punches the reader in the face. That pause tells them that whatever he’s about to propose is going to be big. And even if they already figured that, it gives them time to prepare. It’s a signal – hey, this is important. Instead of just rolling right into the sentence without the pause, which makes it feel unimportant and deflated.

Because ‘said’ makes the reader pause, there will be times when you won’t want to use dialogue tags at all. If you have two characters in a heated argument, snapping back and forth at each other, do you really want to slow that down? Just be sure readers can understand who is talking. This technique works best for two people. Three people could maybe work, as long as each person talking has a distinct opinion or voice.

Most of These Pins Look Like They’re for Grade School Teachers

There’s a lot of cutesy art and bright colors, so I think a lot of these ‘said is dead’ and ‘dead word’ lists might actually be to get little kids to stop relying on the same set of fifteen words and broaden their vocabulary. The problem is that’s not entirely clear and some of them, like the one I linked above, obviously is directed at adults trying to be better with their creative writing.

To sum up: if you are a nine-year-old and your teacher tells you you’re not allowed to use the word ‘awesome’ anymore, that is valid and you need to shut up and listen to your teacher for five God damned minutes. You don’t understand now, but in as little as four or five years you’re going to start hearing things about how littler your teachers are paid or appreciated and how some of them are constantly inches away from a complete and utter mental breakdown where they use glitter sticks as war paint and start swinging from the rafters of the local Costco, like, that’s where they live, and you’re going to think back to that day in third grade where you used the word ‘awesome’ eighteen times in half an hour to describe everything from the solar system to little Jeremy’s knee scab and you looked up at Mr. Buttersfield to see his left eye twitching like it was trying to communicate in Morse Code and you’re going to wonder if you were part of the reason why he disappeared into the woods three years ago, never to be seen again. And you are.

But if you’re an adult: said is not dead. It never was. Also, remember reading old Hardy Boys novels and getting to a line where one of them ‘ejaculated’ something and giggling for the next three pages? What if ‘thundered’ or ‘exclaimed’ turns into gross porn slang in fifty years? Do you really want to take the risk of using future porn slang?

A Witch in the Woods, or Said Isn’t Dead

This was the end.

A journey lasting three weeks and two days, one that had taken them from one side of the world to the other, through the fields of Parda and the marshes of Silence and everything in between, one that had seen giants and wolves and the cat lady, one that had nearly killed most of them at one time or another, had finally ended here. The Moro woods surrounded them, oaks and birches and firs changing in the first hint of fall. The moon was high above. Behind them was the village. Somewhere riseways came the sound of the sea, so close now, so far from the one she knew. Ahead of them, closer, was the witch’s lair.

The fire they had built was still decent sized and throwing off good heat. Amira and Luke were fast asleep, near each other but wrapped in their own blankets. Journey had come to the end and tomorrow they were to be separated, Luke to finally go home, if the witch could actually deliver. She wondered if it was still what either of them wanted.

“It isn’t,” the witch whispered.

Rowenna of Mossy rolled her eyes and turned back to the woman.

Rowenna had been sleeping just as well as the others when she had been woken by absolutely nothing. No sound, no rumble. But she had opened her eyes and there the witch was, standing on the other side of the fire. Rowenna had been on her feet in an instant, her blade in her hands. The witch had waggled her eyebrows.

“That won’t do anything,” she had stated. “Not in here.”

The witch had nodded behind Rowenna. She had turned to see herself still sleeping on her bedroll, undisturbed.

“It’s a dream,” Rowenna had remarked.

“Still real, though,” the witch had answered.

And then Rowenna had been staring at her friends, and the witch had heard her. Thinking.

“Get out of my head, witch,” Rowenna demanded. The witch’s purple eyes had narrowed, and suddenly Rowenna found herself gasping for air, breathing as though she were ten feet underwater.

“Is that anyway to address someone you’re coming to for help?” the witch inquired. “I am no simple witch. I am Madam Moro of the Moro Woods, and if you want any sort of happiness for your friends, you had better start showing some of that Mossy charm.”

On her knees, Rowenna held up her hand, palm to the sky, in supplication. The witch smirked and let her go, and Rowenna was able to bring in loud, gasping breaths of air. Her friends didn’t stir.

“I’m sorry,” Rowenna stammered.

The witch retorted, “I gathered.”

“You know why we’ve come,” Rowenna snapped. She was standing back up, fixing her dress.

“I do,” the witch acknowledged.

“And you want something more than just courtesy, don’t you?” Rowenna asked. “You want something from me, specifically. That’s why you’ve met us out here.”

“You, my dear, are far too clever to be just the bodyguard of some silly princess,” Moro marveled.

Rowenna drew herself up to full height and exclaimed, “I am the right hand maid of Princess Amira from Mossy, who, if you know so much about us already, you know is no silly princess. Being clever is the only way to keep up with her.”

The witch smiled and nodded. “She loves the boy.”

“Old news, I’m afraid,” Rowenna replied.

“The boy loves her, too. But he doesn’t like it here. He won’t make it here. If he stays, he’ll become…resentful of her. They won’t last,” the old woman mused.

“They must be split up?” Rowenna requested.

The woman smirked, “Oh, dear, I thought you said you were clever?”

Rowenna’s eyes narrowed. “Both? You can send both back to his world?” she bellowed.

Moro made a fake pout. “I know. It would mean losing your darling Amira. So close you are, like sisters. Well, cheer up, honey. The payment for moving these two means you won’t be around to miss her, anyway.”

“You mean…my life?” Rowenna wheezed, holding a hand to her neck.

“Yes, but not in the way you’re thinking,” Moro voiced. Have you ever heard of a sleeper?”

“Me? A sleeper?” Rowenna questioned.

The witch stated, “You have power.”

Rowenna shrugged. “A little singing magic. What use is that to someone like you?”

“My business is mine. The point is, it is of use to me. And for your service as a sleeper, I’m willing to help those two gorgeous lovebirds find a real home,” Moro communicated.

Rowenna took another look at Amira’s sleeping face.

Don’t think, just do.

“Was that your thought or mine?” Rowenna demanded of Moro.

“Does it matter? Sound advice either way,” Moro disclosed.

“How many years?” Rowenna sighed.

“One hundred,” Moro divulged. “One year for every year they’ll live happily. Rounded up to a nice, pretty number.”

Rowenna announced, “I have two conditions.”

Moro paused. “I’m listening,” she uttered.

“They don’t know what I’ve agreed to,” Rowenna ordered, pointing. “Amira would never…she’d never let herself be happy, if she knew.”

“Done,” Moro said, articulating. “The other?”

“You get me back to Mossy when I wake up. I want to go home,” Rowenna enunciated.

The witch nodded again, and proclaimed, “Fine. When you wake tomorrow, come to my home, just as you planned, and you’ll find me more than willing to give a happy ending to your long journey.”

Rowenna awoke with a start. She was on her bedroll again. The fire was almost out. The witch was nowhere to be seen.

Next to her, Amira and Luke slept uneasily. She watched them for a while, breathing, turning a bit, dreaming about what would happen the next day. Rowenna had the inside scoop. And yet she laid back, eyes to the stars, listening to the pops of the dying fire. It was only in the early morning that she finally found sleep.

I see a lot of these ‘said is dead’ articles that insist you should never use the word said as a tag, and I figured the best way to show how incredibly, hilariously wrong this is was to take one of my perfectly functional scenes in my backlog and fuck it up.

Fuck It, Let’s Remake Sliders

Last summer, I made arguments that the shows Lost and Dollhouse deserved remakes, albeit with some major caveats. Lost needs a lot of work, but mostly that work consisted of ‘tighten that shit up.’ Nobody needs a whole God damned episode about how someone got their tattoos. Dollhouse mostly needs to be freed from the constraints of network and probably even cable television and get put on a streaming service that will let it be as freak-narsty as it deserves to be (also, I wrote that before I knew what a God damned nightmare of a human being Joss Whedon is, so new caveat: remake it without him). Ultimately I think both shows, despite their flaws, were still competent pieces of 2000s science fiction. I mean, Dollhouse more than Lost, obviously, but still.

Sliders makes Lost look like Casablanca. Sliders is a dumpster fire, if that dumpster were filled with used adult diapers, and if those adults had eaten nothing but asparagus and all-you-can-eat crab legs for three days before filling them, and if those all-you-can-eat-crab legs had gone off three weeks before. Sliders is a three-way collision between network fuckery, hack writers who didn’t know what the fuck they were doing, and a fucking clown car filled with all the worst omens you can have for your prime-time television show.

And the worst part is, Sliders is one of the best examples of wasted potential.

Because, my God, what a concept.

Let’s All Go to the Multiverse

At its most basic description, Sliders is about four people who are lost in the multiverse trying to find their way home. There you go. That’s it. Best show ever. The amount of concepts and storylines you could draw out of something like that is practically infinite because it’s a fucking multiverse. The creators essentially gave themselves a free pass to do literally whatever they want, every single week.

And then everybody involved showed up and said,

What Happened to the Original?

Sugar coated Santa, what didn’t happen to the original?

The first season of this show is actually pretty good, with star ratings in the 7-8 range for each episode on imdb. It starts with Jerry O’Connell’s flannel-clad, Joey Lawrence-haired grad student Quinn Mallory trying to put the finishing touches on a device (known as the ‘timer’ throughout the show) that will let him travel the multiverse when another Quinn from another dimension beats him to the punch. He tries to tell him how the timer works and where he’s been but before he can finish one final warning he gets sucked back into the wormhole to his own dimension, and, like…we’re taking advice from this guy? On wormhole traveling? When he can’t even finish a sentence without the wormhole he opened himself malfunctioning and sucking him back up to wherever-the-fuck? I mean, it’s your show, dude, but…fucking yikes.

Predictably, everything goes to shit just a few minutes later and Quinn becomes lost in the multiverse, of course with a cast of characters somehow including John Rhys-Davies. Apparently, between being Sallah in the Indiana Jones movies in the 80s and Gimli in the Lord of the Rings movies in the early 2000s he decided to spin the wheel on a tiny little science fiction show airing on Fox.

Oh, have I not mentioned this was airing on Fox? Answers a whole lot of questions already, huh? We’ll get to it.

The first season feels like what the creative team that pitched the show actually wanted to make: actual science fiction, which is thoughtful and inquisitive, instead of what science fiction usually turns into aka shooty-shooty-bang-bang in space. Episodes include a world where the Soviet Union took over the US, where antibiotics have never been discovered, and where intelligence is celebrated the same way athleticism is here (although I really have never gotten over the fact that this episode seems to totally miss its own point, because the big thing is called Mindgame and…it’s still sort of a sport? They’re all wearing wrestling outfits and tossing a rugby ball at each other while they answer questions, and all the eggheads are beefcakes, like…what??). It wasn’t winning Emmy’s or anything, but it was quality B-movie type stuff and overall enjoyable.

And Then Fox Happened

Oh, Fox. How do you always manage to be the villain in these stories? For simplicity’s sake, let’s just list out the shenanigans:

  • Right from the very first season Fox was airing the episodes in whatever order they wanted regardless of what the creators intended. I have no idea why this a fucking thing they do with every show they have.
  • Even by the second season, the writers had stopped thinking up their own ‘alternate history’ plots and just started stealing from other popular media, including The Wizard of Oz, Jurassic Park, and Goodfellas.
  • By the third season Fox really started stepping in, because they wanted the shooty-shooty-bang-bang kind of science fiction. Episodes started to be less inquisitive and more actiony.
  • It was the 90’s, so you can bet there was some misogyny going on! Fox executives rejected the writers attempts to add a recurring female character because she wasn’t ‘sexy enough,’ and writers turned the main female character into an annoying waste of space whose ultimate fate was to be stuck in an alien breeding camp.
  • John Rhys-Davies was the first to jump ship but after that the cast was practically rotating, with everyone who could find an excuse to get out of their contracts doing so.
  • The ratings started to tank because of all the fuckery, so Fox cancelled it and it got picked up by SciFi, which, back in the 90’s, was never a good sign.
  • Eventually some genius decided that these heroes needed a recurring villain and introduced the Kromaggs (fun fact: as I was thinking up this article before I did any real research, my brain kept calling them Sleestaks). I’m not going to go into the Kromaggs, but just understand they were the final nail in the coffin that took any remaining fun out of the show.

It Is So Fucking Easy to Fix This

Take it away from the networks.

Take it away from the networks.

Take it away from the fucking networks.

I know the streaming services aren’t perfect, but in every single one of these ‘remake’ things I do there’s always some bullshit pulled by network TV that ruins everything. Both television makers and viewers alike have grown beyond network television and it’s continued existence is only dragging things down.

Put a Sliders remake on a streaming service. Find a creative team that’s actually excited by the concept and isn’t just ripping plot lines from Tremors whole-cloth. Let them make their episodes without interference. It’s that fucking easy. After that all that’s left is the fine-tuning.

Stand-Alone Episodes or Overarching Plots?

Personally, I think a remake would benefit from sticking to the original first season and having each episode stand alone in different dimensions. Any overarching plot lines could come from drama between the group sliding. At one point in the original the writers were trying to add a new character to put in some love triangle business, which could have worked. Drama within the group sliding around would add for some extended plots overlaid over the dimension-of-the-week aspect. Fox shut it down because they wanted every episode to be totally standalone without even a hint of plot you might have to follow along because we don’t want the idiots at home to get scared of missing an episode and totally losing the plot, amirite?

And if we do end up doing overarching plots…

Fuck Everything About the Kromaggs

I have to get into them just enough to explain why they were such a terrible idea. The show got cancelled by Fox and shipped to SciFi, who also wanted to lean into the shooty-shooty-bang-bang elements and wanted an overarching villain. Enter the Kromaggs, a race of people who had also figured out how to slide and was using that discovery to continually invade new universes, strip them of their resources, and then move on (still stealing ideas, eh, guys?).

I mean, do you already see the issue here?

Our protagonists are four people, two with a science background, one who I think worked at an electronics store, and a washed-up RnB singer. Basically just four average schmucks. And they’re supposed to be going up against an entire warrior race with better sliding technology and the ability to roll over neighboring dimensions like a tank rolling over a stuffed animal parade.

It would be like, I don’t know, let me pick a movie randomly here, Independence Day if instead of the entirety of the earth’s military might banding together to fight back, it was just Jeff Goldblum, Bill Pullman, Will Smith, and Vivica A. Fox. What, precisely, were these four Gen Xers, barely holding it together and making poor life choices as is, supposed to do against an advanced race that had been conquering for so long they had whole fucking departments set up? A whole fucking bureaucracy dedicated to sliding into a new world and taking the whole thing in over in a matter of weeks, but here comes the cast of Blossom to show them what’s what!

They’re overpowered for our protagonists, is what I’m saying.

If They Insist on an Overarching Villain…

Which I really don’t think they should because there’s too much risk of things getting weird and sloppy, but if they insist, the villain should at least be on the protagonists’ level.

Another guy has another way of sliding. Maybe a small group of people. Certainly not an entire race with a government and various branches of military. Maybe the villains are completely unrelated to our group, they just keep running into each other, and because the villains are cutting a bloody path through every world they go through our protagonists feel a moral duty to do something about it. Maybe they are related. Maybe the main villain is from a dimension where another sliding Quinn showed up and destroyed everything so now the villain is looking for revenge and doesn’t particularly care which Quinn he gets it on. I don’t know, I’m not working on the minor details until I start getting paid in some capacity.

The important thing is to scale down the villains so a sensible victory is actually in reach.

Concepts They Should Keep from the Original

  • The remake should definitely keep to the thoughtful side of science fiction, and I think the ‘drama with hints of levity’ tone from the first season is the way to go.
  • I do not want anyone to think the way to fix the Kromaggs problem is to just increase the protagonists’ power. I fully loved the fact that of the four of them, only two of them sort of understood what the fuck they were doing.
  • I actually really liked the idea that they needed the ‘timer’ to slide, and that they never knew how much time they would have in a particular universe until they got there. It’s a clever way to add drama as long as it’s not milked to death.
  • The cold opens would often show the sliders minutes before they were leaving one universe for the universe the story was going to take place in, and that first universe was usually goofy as fuck, and that is a definite keep. I especially loved the universe where the only appreciable difference was that women could grow facial hair, and the universe where everyone was so sue-happy they were trying to get cheeseburgers before sliding but ran out of time signing all of the waivers to get them.

New Concepts I Want to See

  • I want the Quinn or equivalent character to come to the realization that they actually have only the barest idea of what the hell they’re doing. I don’t think the original character ever confronted the fact that he only knew enough to blow himself up. I want remake Quinn to not only come to this conclusion, but get there with serious consequences. Major pathos. Somebody better get maimed, at least.
  • Now that we’ve taken the show away from the networks and we’re no longer concerned about self-containing the episodes, I want multiple part episodes taking place in the same universe. As appropriate, obviously, I don’t want this turning into ‘Cliffhanger: The Series.” But what happens when our heroes are stuck in a world not for a few days, but for a few weeks or even months? What happens when they can’t just ride it out, and have to get jobs and a place to live in a universe where they don’t have identification, or don’t exist, or do exist just a few blocks away? What happens when they make friends and attachments, all while watching the numbers count down? There’s so much to work with here.
  • On the other end of the spectrum, I want a much lighter episode where the timer keeps fucking up and they’re shooting through universes too fast for anyone to catch their breath. I think this happened a little bit in the original series, but I want it to go for an entire episode. And maybe the tone of the episode gets darker as it goes on as the sliders realize that sliding actually takes a physical toll. One they can heal from when they have a few days, but that gets harder and harder when they’re sliding every five to fifteen minutes (think that episode of Lost where they’re getting zapped around the timeline so fast Charlotte’s head explodes).
  • I want a recurring, or even a regular, cast member who isn’t sliding, they’re just in the same city in almost every universe and every single version of them is super chill about the whole thing. Until, of course, they find the one that isn’t.

Fuuuuuuuuck.

The bad news is they’re working on a reboot and the creator wants everyone from the original cast to come back and specifically whined in an interview about people being ‘hypersensitive’ to his ideas and said that it won’t be ‘woke,’ which…yeah, again, put this shit on a streaming service and you can do the darkest, most fucked-up ideas you’ve got in your shriveled heart and people will eat it up with a grapefruit spoon so I don’t know what the fuck he’s talking about except I do, he tossed some racist/misogynist/homophobic shit out there, didn’t he? And he’s probably still pitching to the fucking networks. So, they’re going to try to revive the original version of this show that is honestly so broken I don’t even know how you’d fix it enough to build on it, and they want to ignore twenty years of progress while they make it.

This continues to the be the darkest timeline.

90’s TV: The End of a Terrible Era

Okay, so, what happened is that I wanted to write about remaking a 90’s show (spoiler alert: It was Sliders), but as I was writing it I realized I should explain how 90’s television functioned to people who don’t remember, and then that segment got way too long so here we are.

Basically, 90’s television is completely different from today’s television in every single way. It barely resembles what you think of as television. And I’m talking to anyone who’s young enough to not remember Netflix showing up, especially if you’re so young you don’t remember when it was primarily done by mail. Like, I’m talking to all those people who thought WandaVision was ‘too slow.’ You know how, when you said that, a bunch of older people rolled their eyes? Maybe played a tiny violin, or made the jerk-off motion? Yeah, there’s a whole fistful of reasons for that.

There Was No Such Thing as Creative Control

You know how Netflix will get pitched a show, and if Netflix likes it they’ll heave sacks of gold at the creator and scream, ‘Get us a finished product in eighteen months! Now get out, we’ve got thirty-six more pitches to approve before lunch, and they’re all anime.’ That’s all new. There’s a reason why I keep insisting a show needs to be remade off the networks, and it’s because they used to fuck with the shows all the time. For all kinds of reasons. Mostly it was to keep the advertisers happy, but sometimes it could be because some producer woke up one morning with a creative hair aaaallll the way up his asshole and decided he knew better about the show he had hired people to create, and he’d drive into the studio and call the writers into his corner office and tell them that, starting with the next episode, the series lead would drive a 1978 Pontiac Trans Am everywhere, because they were ‘fresh to the max’ or whatever the fuck douchebags in 1990’s LA were saying at the time. And the writers would be like, ‘But the show takes place in the 1920s?’ And the producer would shotgun a can of Crystal Pepsi and tell them to fucking figure it out because he’d already bought six identical 1978 Pontiac Trans Ams and he wanted them all crashed on camera by the end of the year.

And the writers would do it, because it was either listen to Tyler ‘My Father is Mr. Peeler (and also head of the studio), call me the Fud Spucker’ Peeler or get fired. This shit happened so much there’s a TV Trope page dedicated to it. If you watched enough television you could feel it happening. Three seasons in and your favorite character would suddenly walk into the room and utter what is obviously supposed to be his new catch phrase in a show that previously didn’t have catchphrases and you just knew the network was up to its fuckery again.

Networks Were Obsessed with Being Able to Air Things Out of Order

This actually comes down to technology. TiVo didn’t become popular until 1999 and while VCRs were relatively cheap by the 90’s, trying to program one was a nonintuitive clusterfuck that could lead to a mental breakdown if there were other stressors going on in your life.

An episode aired, and if you missed it, too bad, so sad. I think some stations used to do replays of their more popular shows later in the night, but usually there was no other way to watch it until the show became syndicated. Oh, shit. Shit, hold on.

Networks Were Also Obsessed with Syndication

Syndication meant the original network that had created the show could lease the show out to other stations, usually cable. A show usually had to make it to somewhere between eighty and one hundred episodes before this could happen. I know this sounds like a lot, but it was easy as fuck back then, because network seasons were long. Okay, wait…

Television Seasons Were Literally That

Television season in the nineties ran from September to about May, with very few exceptions. If you pitched your show and it got bought, you didn’t get to stipulate how many episodes it took to tell your story. You got told by the network how many episodes to make, usually between twenty and thirty, and by God, you made that many episodes. If you’ve ever heard the term ‘filler episode’ and wondered what the fuck that was about, this is what the fuck that was about. So while it took Game of Thrones eight seasons to reach seventy-three episodes (just shy of syndication numbers, by the way) your typical 90’s show could make a hundred episodes in about half that. Even if a show was only reasonably successful a network, if it was close enough to the magic number, might keep pushing it along because…

Networks Were Also Obsessed with Syndication

Syndication meant cheap money. Money off a product you already had. If you don’t remember the 90’s you might remember the 2000’s, when it seemed every single cable channel was playing reruns of Friends and Seinfeld. Turn on TBS, oh, I don’t like this episode, switch over to USA or something. Also, syndicated shows rarely aired in order, which is another reason…

Networks Were Obsessed with Being Able to Air Episodes Out of Order

It’s sort of impossible to even believe, what with shows these days all playing out like extra long movies. But if a 90’s producer was pitched something like Stranger Things or Game of Thrones back in the day they would have shit their pants and screamed you out of their office. They were terrified that if a viewer happened to miss a single episode, they’d get lost in the story and never come back. Some shows, like The X Files, did have overarching plots, but those specific episodes still stood alone between handfuls of ‘monster of the week’ episodes. Soap operas got around it by airing every day and moving the plot so slowly you could miss a few days and not miss much (I once had a boss who watched all her soaps on Wednesdays only, because ‘you can watch every fifth episode and still keep up).

If they did agree to a two-parter, you can bet your ass it was either the last two episodes of the season or a cliffhanger between seasons, and they advertised the absolute shit out of it. Otherwise, every episode had to be self-contained so as not to scare off the idio-I mean, viewers. The viewers.

Timeslots Mattered

Like, a lot. Primetime was essentially three hours a night, six nights a week (more like five nights, really, but we’ll get to that). Not only did that limit the amount of shows networks could greenlight from sheer lack of time space, but it also meant the networks would engage in some Tetris-level geometry trying to get the shows to fit together in a way that would make them the absolute most money. Not only would they worry about what every other network was airing at the same time and try to compete, they were also concerned with viewer retention from one show to the next. If they felt your show didn’t jive well with the one before it and was causing a bunch of sixty-year-olds to change the channel to ABC or whatever they’d boot you to another timeslot. And if your show wasn’t living up to the network’s expectations in other ways, that timeslot was Friday.

The general idea in the 90s was that no one in the key demographic was staying home to watch television on Fridays, so Fridays were where shows went to die. It stopped mattering as much once DVR became a thing, and apparently doesn’t matter at all now, as shown by Disney releasing its new shows on Friday right up until Loki. But way back in the last millennium, if you found out your favorite show was being moved to the Friday Night Death Slot, you knew it was all over.

Television Budgets Were Barely There

It’s like that part in Galaxy Quest (do you kids know that movie?) where Jason Nesmith finally explains to Mathesar that the ship in their show was inches long and the transporter was made of Christmas lights. Except apply that to every show ever. Have you noticed how cheap the carpets on the Enterprise-D look? I mean, okay, first off, why the hell are there carpets? This is a heavily trafficked area, and these jabronis are constantly coming back from planets covered in space-mud and their own blood mixed with some bright-blue alien blood and then going directly to the bridge to do important maneuvers, or whatever, and all that time they’re just grinding all this gross shit into cheap carpet. Whoever staffs housekeeping on that ship is not getting paid enough for having to deal with that alone. Put in space-hardwood, you cowards.

Anyway, the bulk of the money went to the actors, and then the crew, and then whatever they had leftover they took down to the dollar store to get enough papier-mâché and duct tape to make this week’s monster. Props were reused by various shows all the time, and sometimes even entire sets. If you’ve ever wondered why, according to network television, most of the world and also most of the planets in the universe look like the same swath of southern California, would you be surprised if I told you it’s because it’s cheaper?

Computer Graphics Still Sucked, But Everyone Was Too Excited to Notice

After Toy Story, it was like everyone had the same notion all at once, that finally special effects were good enough that they could do whatever they wanted!

I mean, you’ve seen the prequels, right? And George had money. Imagine the kind of shit that gone thrown up on screen in shows with shoestring budgets. I know I’ve harped on The Langoliers before, but…

And this was the decade where Fox tried to sell us on found footage of an actual alien autopsy.

90’s Commercial Jingles Slapped, Actually

My husband and I tried to watch one episode of Castle Rock on Hulu with the base subscription before I shelled out the money to get rid of the commercials because damn it all to hell, I’ll put up with a lot nowadays but I’m not going back to three to five minutes of commercials every eight to ten minutes (also, don’t watch Castle Rock unless you’re interested in ‘what if Stephen King but all of it mashed together by a four-year-old on a sugar high?). The only good thing about commercials back in the 90’s was the people writing those jingles actually put fucking effort in. Look at this shit:

That shit has guitar licks, a chorus, and two verses. Who the fuck told Jimmy Pizzabagel he had to go that hard?

So, yeah. Television in the 90’s. Fucking weird and I mostly don’t miss it. Tune in next time when we’ll talk about the show that should be pulled out of the still-smoldering wreckage and get a Six Million Dollar Man remake (as in, it should be built better than it was before, not that it should be turned into the Six Million Dollar Man, although if they wanted to take that one sound effect they could).

Shared Solitude

This is the story of how I almost cried at the movies.

This is not the story of how I did cry at the movies, although those stories do exist and are, in fact, numerous. I didn’t use to be so emotional. I have to say I was a pretty fucking stoic teenage girl. And then sometime in my twenties I turned into Rita Wilson in that scene in Sleepless in Seattle where she’s explaining An Affair to Remember except way less coherent. Here’s a short list of movies I ugly cried during:

  • Wall-E
  • Everything Pixar since Wall-E
  • Frozen (Specifically during Do You Want to Build a Snowman? For years I couldn’t even think of this song without starting to cry, and I have to stress my sister is not only alive but lives forty minutes away)
  • Arrival (I don’t have kids, but the couple who gawked at me the whole out of the theater must have thought I did)
  • Avengers: End Game (no, not Infinity War, which didn’t make me cry but did make me feel hollow and depressed for a few weeks and gave me nightmares about Tom Holland. I cry more at things that are beautiful or awesome than at things that are sad, so I started crying at ‘On your left’ and didn’t stop until sometime after ‘your dad liked cheeseburgers’)
  • Jojo Rabbit
  • Totoro (Saw it at my local Alamo Drafthouse surrounded by a bunch of kids. This was less one big ugly cry and more a continuous trickle at how effortlessly Miyazaki captures the innocence and wonder of childhood)
  • Little Women (I don’t usually cry at sad things but I cried when Beth dies because I’m not a monster)

I cried three times just writing this up. I don’t know what happened to me, but I’m, like, 87% sure it has to do with working night shift for five years. Pro-tip: it will fuck you up.

2020

On Saturday, March 7th my husband and I went to see Portrait of a Lady on Fire. At this point things were getting…weird, but not precisely bad. In my lifetime there’s already been SARS, Ebola, and, like, three different pumped-up flus and nothing ever came of them (in the USA. I recognize Ebola was A Bad Fucking Scene in some countries). I was pretty slow to recognize the reason nothing ever came of them wasn’t just fast-acting scientists but also a competent government which we no longer fucking had, but I digress.

The following Wednesday we bought tickets to see Emma on the 14th. We refunded them the day before, because in the space of a week it finally occurred to me I didn’t want to be sitting in a confined room surrounded by forty strangers breathing in recycled air.

March 17th is the day it really clicked for me that things were going to be stunningly, balls to the wall, dick-in-a-blender terrible, thanks to one single announcement: Las Vegas was shutting down the Strip. I stared at that headline in complete horror for roughly five minutes. If this shit was starting to scare the casinos enough to close their 24-hour money machines, then it was serious.

My husband and I used to go to the movies once a week. We didn’t go to the movies for over a year.

Introverts vs. Extroverts

There’s a lot of bullshit pseudoscience out there about personalities – bullshit I happily use to explore and define my characters, but bullshit that doesn’t work out here in the real world.

Side story – the first day of orientation for my nursing program they made everyone take the Myers-Briggs personality test. For a lot of people it was their first time hearing about it but I already had an English degree and, again, I used it all the time for my characters. I’d taken it a few times here and there for myself and always got a different response so I didn’t put much stock into it and didn’t think anyone else would, either.

I was the sweet, summer child. These women I was pursuing a bachelor’s of science with thought they had unlocked their entire minds with a single sixty question quiz on the internet. For the next sixteen months I couldn’t go a week without hearing something like, ‘I’m an ENFJ so I really need to be in charge of this group project,’ or ‘I can’t handle all this stress because I’m an INFP and therefore very sensitive,’ or ‘As an ISFJ I’m sure I’m going to be great in pediatrics.’ I don’t even remember why they made us take it, but it mostly became the excuse everyone used to excuse their shitty behavior. I bet if I had brought up enneagrams I would have blown their minds.

The problem I have with these personality quizzes is that nobody should expect or be expected to fit nicely into a single category their entire lives. People change, between the years and even just between a morning and an afternoon. The only personality categorization I have ever put any stock in is just ‘Introverts vs. Extroverts’ for three reasons: It’s simple to explain, it’s a spectrum, and you can move around in it.

Extroverts gain energy from social situations and drain energy by being alone.

Introverts gain energy from being alone and drain energy from social situations.

That’s all there is to it. Some people are more extroverted than others, some are more introverted. You can be more or less of either depending on the time of your life, time of year, or time of day. Hell, even depending on the situation. There’s no neat little box for anyone to fit in, just a measurement of your reactions to the world around you.

So, When I Say ‘I Hate People,’ I Mostly Mean What They Do to Me

This is going to be hard for some people to understand, and I know that because I know some of these people personally.

I’m an introvert. To me (specifically me, not every introvert) about 85% of human interaction is exhausting. Mostly mentally and emotionally, but sometimes physically. About a month ago I hosted a tiny little event at my house. About ten people were invited and I knew all of them to one degree or another. I wanted to have this event and I was very excited about it.

I was shaking from nerves before people showed up. After everyone left I wanted to sleep for fourteen hours and I didn’t want to see another human being for roughly three weeks.

It’s work to interact with people. What are they going to say next? What should I say next? Oh, I said something funny! Yay! They’re telling me a story. They told me this story already. Should I say something? No, I’ll just listen to it again. How did I laugh last time? Should I laugh the same way?

On and on and on for the whole interaction. Yes, I recognize that a certain amount of that is social anxiety, but while introversion and social anxiety aren’t the same thing they can go hand in hand.

People are just tiring, I don’t know a better way to explain it. The only person who doesn’t exhaust me at all anymore is my husband. He’s even more introverted than I am. All those memes and jokes people made about not getting along with their s/o anymore while cooped up together in quarantine were clearly made by extroverts.

The Sort of Social Interaction I Do Like

The only sort of social interaction that doesn’t drain me at all – and, in fact, energizes me – is being surrounded by a bunch of people all enjoying the same thing as me. Not concerts, because there’s too much potential for other social interaction, like singing along or moshing or getting angry because the idiot next to you keeps rubbing her arm against yours, and apparently she shaves her arms and its stubbly and you go home with razor burn.

This is one of the many reasons I did so many Disney marathons. You’re surrounded by people who worked so hard for the same thing you did. You’re sharing reactions at the entertainment that Disney has set up to distract you from the fact that, statistically speaking, you should have died by now. And, most importantly, everyone is too tired and out of breath to talk to each other about it. So you enjoy it, side by side, in a shared solitude.

Movies are the best for this. Especially movies at the Alamo Drafthouse, I cannot stress enough how much my husband and I love it there. Ever since we’ve moved to Colorado we have only been to movies at the Alamo. The food is fine and being able to get beers is the cherry on top, but our top reason for going to the Alamo is their strict Shut the Fuck Up policy. We love their Shut the Fuck Up policy, and as far as we can tell everyone else who goes to the Alamo does, too, because in close to two years of seeing movies there I’ve never had an issue with someone on their phone or talking too loud.

When I do hear someone talking in a movie at the Alamo, it’s about the movie and honestly, that sort of thing isn’t even a disruption. It’s a highlight. It’s exactly what I’m talking about. When someone makes a remark about the movie, or yells at it, or is clearly enjoying the movie at full blast, I feel like I come to life. The room is filled with different people. We don’t know each other. We’ll never know each other. When it’s over we’ll all ignore each other and go back to our lives. But for a couple of hours we all shared this piece of art. It made us laugh together, and the sound of the others laughing made us laugh harder. We cried together, even if we tried to hide it from each other. We all sat together and had our emotions pulled in mostly the same way through tricks of light and sound. We shared those two hours of our lives and then we left.

Shared solitude.

If I Had Been PMSing, I Definitely Would Have Cried

I didn’t think I’d be ready for movies until later this year, but we’re all vaccinated and the science has shown its safe. One year, four months, and three days since we had last seen a movie, we went to see Black Widow. As I’ve mentioned a couple times before, I’ve missed going to the movies. I guess I didn’t realize how much.

The trailers finished and the Alamo Drafthouse started playing their welcome video which is usually only about ten seconds long. Their current one is about a minute, featuring a slide show of people at the movies. First, people in movies at the movies. And then regular people. At the movies. Having a good time. Dressed up. Eating their snacks and drinking their beers and ready to share an experience with strangers.

It ended with a message that didn’t just say Welcome, but Welcome Back. ‘God, What a Fucked Up Year’ was left implied.

I was getting emotional but managed to keep from getting teary eyed. What a nerd move, being moved by a Welcome Back message, right?

Welcome Back faded, and something else came on the screen.

We Missed You.

And then I did get teary. Just a little. Because I have been extremely lucky for the duration of the pandemic, and seeing that message made me realize the number one thing I’d missed during that whole shitshow of a year was the movies. The shared solitude.

And then the Marvel opening sequence started.

Look, I know people have opinions on the MCU, but this isn’t about them. This is about me. These movies have been a major part of my adult life for thirteen years now. I’ve seen almost all of them in theaters, some multiple times. I rewatch them regularly on Disney+ as a sort of comfort food. The day after my husband and I flew into Hawaii for our wedding we found a theater to watch Black Panther on opening day. Yes, the Disney+ shows also include the Marvel opening, but seeing it on a big screen again brought something back.

I honestly can’t believe I didn’t fully cry, but I was close. So close.

This Is the Part That’s About You

I don’t know you. As you may have gathered from the above, that’s fine. I don’t need conversations, just vibes.

Maybe you like movies as much as I do.

Maybe you like something else. Something just as small. Something also perceived as a frivolity. Something that, if you explained how much you missed it, an unkind person might sneer and tell you that compared to other losses its nothing and you’re selfish for even bringing it up.

You’re not selfish.

We all need our stupid things. The stupid, little things that make us happy.

Because really, if they make us happy, they’re not stupid.

So, whatever it is you’re finally getting back, allow yourself to feel emotions over it.

Because it was your thing, and it was taken away from you and now you can have it back so fuck anyone who tells you that relief isn’t worth crying over.

I spent a lot of time talking up the Alamo Drafthouse so I just want to say I have not been paid by Alamo at all for this. I just really like their theaters.

The Void

Colors

One minute she was…actually, Deanne didn’t remember what happened a minute ago. Or the minute before. Or anything before that.

That might be a problem.

Anyway, now she was here.

Or potentially she was nowhere.

Oh! Maybe she was dead?

What surrounded her was nothing. Or maybe she was surrounded by a bright white light. It was some kind of white void, anyway. It made her think of those Apple commercials with the smug hipster and the cute nerdy guy who was supposed to be the antagonist for some reason? Deanne had never understood. She would have gone out with PC in a heartbeat, and if Mac had ever tried to hit on her she would have broken his nose.

Deanne took a step forward and mimed breaking a man’s nose with the base of her palm, thrusting upward as hard and as high as she could.

“Okay, new information,” she said out loud. “Well, one, I can speak. And hear myself. So, I guess there’s air here. Two, there’s a solid floor even if it doesn’t look like it.”

To demonstrate to herself, she stomped a few times. Visually she couldn’t tell the difference between the floor or the ceiling or walls (if those existed) and the spaces in between. But her foot – wearing a sneaker, she noted – came down on something hard and even made dull stomping noises.

“Three, I don’t remember where I was before this happened. Or most of anything, really. But I remember my name. I remember a stupid commercial. And I’m apparently the type of person who knows self-defense.”

Deanne inspected herself. She had the sneakers on. Bright purple. Bootcut blue jeans. Yellow cotton panties underneath. Red bra and a plain white t-shirt. Her skin was a dark brown, and her hair was cropped so short she couldn’t see it. Her fingernails were short and neat, but unpainted. There was no jewelry. No tattoos. Also no cuts or bruises.

“I’m going about this methodically,” Deanne said aloud. “Maybe I’m a detective or something.”

She paused and waited.

“A private eye?”

Nothing.

“A medical examiner? A scientist? A professor?”

But none of that sounded right to her. There’s something missing…

Despite herself and the situation, Deanne started laughing.

“Yeah, I’d say there’s a lot effing missing!” Deanne said between gales. It had started as nothing more than a giggle and had quickly become loud and practically braying.

Hysterical, you’re becoming hysterical.

She gripped her hands into fists, pinching her thumbs until they ached. She couldn’t afford to get hysterical. Probably.

Once she had gotten control of herself again – it was a bit of a process because every time she was close she’d think of another thing that was missing like ‘other people’ or ‘the earth’ or ‘time’ and she would start giggling again – she started thinking of more ways to investigate.

Deanne jumped. “There’s gravity. Feels like Earth. I guess, I haven’t really been anywhere else. Have I? Oh, crap, I don’t know. Maybe? Okay, no. I’m pretty sure I’d remember space.”

And then Deanne nodded to herself, in that way you do when you’re trying to convince yourself of something you actually have no memory of.

Slowly, Deanne spun in a circle, studying the space around her. It was hard. Her brain didn’t like any of the input she was getting – what little of it she was getting – and kept insisting to her stomach that she boot the contents because obviously she must be poisoned. By the time she was convinced there was nothing but the white space around her, she needed to sit down and put her head between her knees.

“Ugh,” she said when her stomach finally stopped flailing about like an eleven-year-old when the mozzarella sticks finally arrived. “Whatever this is, it sucks.”

She spit at the ground. It disappeared into the white void. Great.

“Well. There’s a floor. Sort of,” she said, knocking her knuckles against it. “So, this is some sort of…space. Maybe there’s a wall. With a door.”

It was really the only thing left to do. She stood up, gave her stomach a few seconds to decide if it was going to roll around again. When it didn’t, she picked a direction and started walking.

To keep her brain and stomach occupied, as Deanne walked she tried to remember something – anything – about what had happened before the void. A new fear grew, one that said she had just been formed whole-cloth in the middle of this empty void. She was quick to break it. The memories were there, just out of reach. She was in a sea of memories, but every time she tried to grasp for one it swam away and got lost.

The things she had remembered so far were things she hadn’t tried to remember. They had just happened. Like her name, or that stupid commercial, or all those professions.

“My name is Deanne…something. Deanne…damn it. Okay. My name is Deanne, and I’m…a certain number of years old, and I come from…somewhere…on Earth…This isn’t working.”

Not for specifics, no, but she had come to some realizations. She was real, and she had a life somewhere that wasn’t this void. She had been sent here, somehow.

So deep in thought she almost missed it. Impossible, it was the only speck of color she had come across for however long and far she had been walking. Deanne would have seen it eventually. But because of all her thinking and failing at remembering, she didn’t see it until she was practically on top of it.

It was small, maybe four inches by four inches, sitting on the floor of the void. It was white, but a regular kind of white, not this sort of bright, shining white she was surrounded by. Paper white, in fact, because paper was what it was.

Deanne glanced around, as though perhaps a large shrub and someone hiding behind it had also materialized. But there was nothing except her and the little piece of paper. The side facing her was blank, so she flipped it.

You’ve been kicked out of reality. Sorry.

Deanne clicked her tongue. “Well, ain’t that some bullshit.”

Solarpunk: Chicken Soup for the Climate Catastrophe Soul

Hey, you guys hear about the billionaire space race? You know, all those billionaires spending millions of dollars to replace their dicks with rockets and then skimming the earth’s atmosphere and calling it space or shooting a car into space or, and let’s be real, probably a lot of secret space stuff we’re not told because it’s super shady? Man, isn’t it great that they have all that money and there’s absolutely no need for any of it anywhere else on earth? Isn’t it great that they’re not taxed at all so they can fuck around in space and sometimes ask for money from the government which they don’t pay taxes to so they can fuck around in space some more? Isn’t it great all these sociopathic rich white men have enough money to fix the world’s problems several times over and still have enough left over for their stupid dick-rockets but they don’t do that, they go straight to dick-rockets because they don’t want to help anybody but themselves and someday they’ll leave for Mars, not because it’s easier to terraform Mars than it is to fix the climate problem (it 100% is not) but because this way they can do it and not only kill serfs on the way there but also leave the rest of the poors to die on a planet that’s about to roast to death due to their own selfishness?

Isn’t it just fucking great?

Anyway, let’s talk about Solarpunk.

Roots

While solarpunk could be considered an off-shoot of steampunk, I think a more insightful look at the genre is to look at what it was reacting against: cyberpunk and grimdark.

Cyberpunk

The original -punk genre (I’m pretty sure based off minimal research so someone correct me if I’m wrong), the term comes from a 1980 short story by Bruce Bethke but it’s agreed by everybody including Bethke himself that William Gibson actually defined the genre with his 1984 novel Neuromancer. Since then it’s found a lasting place in popular culture with a seemingly never-ending list of works, including Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson, the Judge Dredd comics and movies, Akira, Blade Runner, The Matrix, and Altered Carbon, to name a few.

There are very clear building blocks to creating a cyberpunk story:

  • Dystopian near-future
  • Society dominated by technology, and I do mean dominated
  • The technology is typically controlled by one or more giant, authoritarian corporations, and by controlling the technology they control the world
  • Specifically set in a sprawling mega-city, typically in its criminal underbelly
  • Protagonists are by themselves or working in a small group, essentially creating a David and Goliath situation against the corporations. They are outsiders, anti-heroes, and misfits, hence the punk suffix. Typically they are small time criminals, usually hackers, working to fight the system, but they can sometimes be detectives of sorts when blending with the neo-noir genre
  • Aesthetically think Blade Runner which set the tone: large cities, lots of advertisements and bright lights, usually at night, people in punk-inspired outfits with dyed hair, tattoos, and some body modifications although if you stray too much into the body mods you’re heading into post-Cyberpunk and biopunk territory

As you can see, these are not typically happy stories, and while they can have satisfying endings, they don’t typically have winning endings. Even if your spunky, punky hacker protagonist gains a small, personal win, they will almost never take down the corporations or fully change the status quo.

Grimdark

Grimdark, straightforward enough, is a genre where everything is particularly, spectacularly, fucked. Deriving from the tagline from Warhammer 40,000 (and listen, what I know about Warhammer 40k could fit on a post-it note, but even I saw that on the Wikipedia page and went, ‘yeah, that’s sound right’) this is science fiction or fantasy where everybody wears black and is sad or angry or both sad and angry at the same time, all the time. Nothing good is happening. Ever. If you see a daisy growing somewhere in a grimdark universe, know that it is only there for some three-story head-crushing war machine to step on it.

I’m specifically bringing up Grimdark less for its place as a fantasy/sf subgenre and more because it became a sort-of-inevitable end-game for post 9/11 media. The 2000s were the decade of ‘gritty realism,’ giving us stuff like Nolan’s Batman movies, There Will Be Blood, The Walking Dead, and all sorts of other serious, joyless fiction where everyone wore suits and swore at each other a lot. The Best Drama Emmy winners for the 2000s and early 2010s include The Sopranos, 24, Mad Men, Homeland, and Breaking Bad, eventually leading to Game of Thrones and The Handmaid’s Tale, two certified grimdark shows. Best Picture winners at the Oscars for the same timeframe show the same pattern: Crash, The Departed, No Country for Old Men, Slumdog Millionaire, and The Hurt Locker, and how perfect that the genre trend seemingly kicked off by one Batman would be brought to its bloody, depressing pinnacle with another: Zach Snyder’s Batman featured in the DCEU (I’m not saying I want to live in the universe where Batman v Superman won the Best Picture Oscar, but I do want to see what the hell else is going on over there).

As an aside, I want to say I still have no idea why popular culture went in this direction after 9/11. I still remember this cover of TIME:

I can’t find the article, but I do vaguely remember the gist: a predication that after the immediate shock and depression of 9/11 Hollywood would start turning out more LotR-style fantasy as a way for people to escape. Reading that at fifteen years old, it made sense and I was excited to see what sort of high-fantasy and soft narratives we’d be getting in the next decade.

Five or six Bourne movies later…

The Thing Happened That Happens to All Trends: People Got Tired of It

Honestly, you can only take desaturated color palettes, shaky cam, and serious men doing serious things for serious reasons for so long before you start yearning for literally any bit of happiness or hope.

2008’s Iron Man is, I think, one of the first movies that started to buck the gritty realism/grimdark trend. It wouldn’t go away completely in 2008, but it was the beginning. Sure, it’s filmed with a pretty flat color ratio and there’s a Middle Eastern plotline including Tony flying halfway across the world in his suit to personally kill some terrorists. But Tony gets to have his bright red suit (black leather X-Men suits, anyone?), and in the end actually defeats a bigger, uglier, more cynical version of himself. This is what some of the 2010s pop culture would ultimately turn out to be – defeating the cynic. It’s like media spent the better part of a decade doomscrolling and when they finally came back up for air they tossed their phone in the bathtub and put on Yo Gabba Gabba just to see some color.

Realism, cynicism, and edginess are exhausting. Physically, mentally, spiritually. Do you ever see a video of someone angry and screeching in the middle of a Wendy’s and think, ‘God, how tired must they be after keeping up that level of hate?’ It’s good, of course, to stay grounded, but we all occasionally need a break. Movies, television, books, those are supposed to be our breaks, and if they’re ever bleaker than our reality what the fuck are we supposed to do?

And this, finally, leads us to solarpunk: the break from cyberpunk’s cynicism and grimdark’s…grim darkness…that we all needed. The refreshing drink of water after shoving our faces directly into the wasabi. While the term had been mentioned since the late eighties, it really took off in its (still admittedly small) popularity in 2016, tumblr user when missolivialouise made this post describing solarpunk as:

a plausible near-future sci-fi genre, which I like to imagine as based on updated Art Nouveau, Victorian, and Edwardian aesthetics, combined with a green and renewable energy movement to create a world in which children grow up being taught about building electronic tech as well as food gardening and other skills, and people have come back around to appreciating artisans and craftspeople, from stonemasons and smithies, to dress makers and jewelers, and everyone in between. A balance of sustainable energy-powered tech, environmental cities, and wicked cool aesthetics.

https://missolivialouise.tumblr.com/post/94374063675/heres-a-thing-ive-had-around-in-my-head-for-a

Look at that. Look how fun their characters are drawn. Look how beautiful and green those cityscapes are. I feel the knots in my neck working themselves out without even having to look at a coupon for Massage Envy. You can tell in the post they’re mostly concerned with describing an art style, but it didn’t take long for people to press solarpunk into an entire fiction genre. Let’s look at the

The Building Blocks of Solarpunk

  • A near future that’s very much not a dystopia. While the community may not be perfect, the point of a solarpunk story is that people are capable of coming together for the greater good so often the conflict is not between members of the community, but the community against something else.
  • Society has harnessed technology not only as a way to serve the community but also to help either survive against climate change or actually reverse it. These are stories of sharing the technology to save each other instead of fighting over dominance.
  • There is a heavy emphasis on green, renewable technology, along with technology inspired by/built with plants/algae/bacteria. The idea of a living city, one that be hurting and dying as much as a human can, is also prevalent.
  • The core idea of the setting is less a specific place, but that it’s a community working together to save themselves. Could be a living city, or a commune out in the woods.
  • There’s also themes of taking back useless capitalist shit, like turning a golf course into a garden or an airport into a town.
  • Protagonists are typically people with something to contribute to the society: scientists, farmers, librarians, etc. Sometimes they aren’t contributing at first, but the lesson of the story then is finding out where they fit in the community.
  • Aesthetically, you’re looking at bright colors, lots of flowers, lots of skyscrapers covered in greenery, sort of a hippie-dippie vibe if all the hippies had masters in STEM
  • Many of these stories have an inclusive cast, including POC and LGBTQ+ characters. It’s sort of like, well, we’re already here daydreaming about saving ourselves from climate change, might as well add in some tolerance and respect while we’re at it.
  • The point of these stories is not ‘we have avoided the climate catastrophe, yippee!’ No, in these stories, climate change definitely happened. The positive thinking of these stories is not that we can keep it from happening, but that there can be something on the other side. It takes work, and cooperation, and usually the collapse of what we know now as ‘society,’ but ultimately the human race can take control of their destiny and their planet back from the, I don’t know, three dozen or so billionaires who are actively trying to set the place on fire while dick-rocketing their way to Mars.

Is Solarpunk Important?

Yes.

Um. Okay. Why is Solarpunk Important?

Call it climate anxiety, climate depression, climate grief, or climate existentialism, it’s a measurable mental health effect that’s changing the behaviors of millions of Millennials and Gen-Z. Really, how else are you supposed to feel, scrolling through your newsfeed? ‘The Gulf of Mexico is Literally on Fire,’ followed by ‘Gwyneth Paltrow Tells All About Her New Gasses-Only Diet,’ followed by ‘If the President of Brazil Doesn’t Drop of a Heart Attack in Three Days the Amazon Rainforest Will Turn to Ash’ followed by ‘GOP Tells Everyone at CPAC They Love Authoritarianism and Hate Science and ‘The Coloreds’ to a Cheering Crowd, Democrats Frown Slightly In Concern,’ followed by ‘Fifteen Reasons Why Disney is Definitely About to Murder Brie Larson for her Crimes, Written by a Dude who is Definitely Not a Woman Hater,’ followed by ‘Coca-Cola Most Pollutingest Company in the World for the Fifteenth Year in a Row, CEO Promises to do Something About It but He Was Watching a Rick and Morty Episode on His Phone During the Conference and Laughing When He Said It.’

It’s easy to let the, you know, everything of the world drag you down past the usual amount of despair everyone under forty-four feels all the time into straight up nihilism. And I’m not going to be one of those people who says ‘just stop going on social media, you’ll feel better!’ Because you will feel better, right up until you’re in a coffee shop and you catch the bottom scroll on CNN saying something about the moon wobbling and causing new flooding for the next decade and you’re like, ‘okay, cool cool cool, didn’t know about that’ and suddenly you’re having to have a lie down on the floor of this very crowded coffee shop.

Don’t disengage completely. Just engage with a fantasy instead. A fantasy where somehow the people take control of the planet’s health back from the corporations and the dick-rocket billionaires. A beautiful tangent where everyone believes and trusts in the science, and even better uses and applies the science to make the world a little bit better. A lovely daydream where all of humanity understands that climate change is manmade and we can do things about it and then we start to do things about.

It’ll bring your blood pressure down to something approaching textbook, at least for a few minutes.

Similar Genres

Solarpunk Stuff to Read

Modern Miserable Man

The truth, which will be difficult for some of you to hear, is that he died alone because he was an unpleasant person.

It’s a hard truth, so I understand if you need to percolate on it for a bit. We’ve all been raised by movies, yeah? And movies always have those…well, if not happy endings, then satisfying ones. The hero wins. The villains die. The incredibly attractive, young people get over whatever petty bullshit they couldn’t see past for roughly an hour to fall in love. And everyone learns a lesson. Always with the lessons.

That’s not what happened here. He wasn’t a villain. He didn’t rob banks or burn down orphanages or spend a frankly ridiculous amount of energy and time trying to destroy some hero who probably doesn’t even know his real name. He was…a guy. He went to work and paid his taxes on time and put three kids through college. He wore khakis and drove a sensible car. He wasn’t a villain. He wasn’t a good guy, either.

He took his anger out on his wife and his kids. All the little things that annoy everybody but some people need to make that shit somebody else’s problem. Flat tire. Can’t find something. Going to be late. Sports team lost. He never thought of it as abuse because he never got physical and no one ever told him that abuse could be emotional. That’s not true. He could have learned about emotional abuse roughly thirty-two times over the course of his life. But he was also the kind of man who didn’t hear what he didn’t want to hear.

At their wedding, his wife explicitly told him before the ceremony that she didn’t want to do the thing couples do where they push cake into each other’s mouth. She thought it was tacky and didn’t want to mess up her makeup. But the man wanted to do that. And the man didn’t like to be told no. So he did what all manly men do: he pouted. He pouted through the ceremony. He pouted through the vows. He pouted through the first dance. And when it came to cut the cake he pushed it into her face anyway. She started to cry and he got mad at her for ruining the whole day. Forty-three years of marriage and they never once watched their wedding video.

(If you’re wondering why she stayed with him, I don’t have a good answer for you there, either. It wasn’t some scary or dramatic reason. Like I said, he never hit her. But that was part of the problem, because she could convince herself that his behavior was normal. He was just emotional! Really, it was her fault when he was mad or pouty. She just had to be better. It doesn’t have a satisfying ending, either. She only left him when she left the mortal plane.)

He ruined most major family events because something made him pouty. Driving to his oldest kid’s high school graduation they got cut off. He was still pouting when his son’s name was called, and still expecting his family to make him feel better at lunch afterward.

The middle kid’s graduation was held outside but it was too hot so he yelled at her in the car on the way home like it was her fault.

He didn’t even go to the youngest’s graduation. Something had pissed him off to the point of not leaving the house. No one remembers what it was, but they all agree it doesn’t really matter.

Once his wife died his kids stopped calling or coming by. He did love them. He was proud of their accomplishments and their families. It never occurred to him that he should tell them that. Didn’t they know? He worked hard for them. He got them through college. Wasn’t that enough?

The answer, if you weren’t aware that that was rhetorical, is ‘no.’ It wasn’t enough. He was a hard, angry man. One by one his kids left home to go to college and realized the stress they had lived under their entire lives had been manufactured by one man. The oldest shared a microwave with their freshman roommate. He heated up tomato soup and it exploded. He was cleaning it when his roommate came home and apologized so profusely that at first the roommate thought something was on fire. When the roommate finally understand that it was just messy microwave, he stood there for a few seconds trying to understand why he should care. And while the roommate stood there trying to figure out why he should care, the oldest son started a year’s long revelation that maybe, just maybe, his dad sort of sucked.

He did. He wasn’t a villain, but he totally sucked. That’s the point of this.

His wife dead, his kids across the country and ignoring him, he became a bitter old man. Bitter because this wasn’t the life he had been promised. He had a family, he paid for everything and kept them alive, so they should be taking care of him now. He never learned a lesson. Never figured out it was his own actions isolating him. Obviously, it was everybody else’s fault.

The man didn’t even get to die in his own bed like he wanted. His faculties were going, and after the fire department had to come out because he put a Hungry Man TV dinner in the microwave and set it for six hours and forgot about it, they worked with the state to declare that he needed to go to a nursing home. He hated it. He thought he hated being taken care of, but actually he loved it because that’s what he thought he deserved his entire life anyway. What he really hated was the fact that the staff didn’t take his shit.

One day, he wanted chocolate pudding with his lunch. But the nursing home had run out of chocolate, so he could have vanilla or butterscotch. But he wanted chocolate. So he began pouting. A good solid pout would have put his wife in the car to go buy chocolate pudding. But the volunteer serving lunch didn’t have the power to get chocolate pudding and thought he was being ridiculous anyway. He asked to see his tech. And then his nurse. And then the manager. All the while getting angrier and angrier, eventually shouting at the owner. Who only told him they wouldn’t take that kind of abuse and he could get chocolate the next week.

It only got worse from there.

Eventually, he was so unpleasant the staff tried to avoid his room. This is the part most people don’t want to hear. Everybody likes to think of medical staff as superheroes, always sacrificing themselves for the sake of their patients. But the truth is, medical staff are just people. People who want to help other people, yes, but also people who don’t want to get abused just for doing their job.

I am not claiming there was any dereliction of duty. In fact, I am telling you straight out there wasn’t. The man had been wealthy, and this nursing home was very expensive. He could afford the sort of care that every person deserves (of course, he didn’t think that way). The staff at this nursing home, volunteers, techs, nurses, therapists, doctors, all of them, they were good people and good at their jobs. They would bathe him regularly and keep him clean. They would take his vital signs and labs on time. They would check his chart and make medication adjustments. They did not neglect him. They just couldn’t stand to be near him and his abuse for any longer than they had to.

That made him worse. He would see the way the staff would laugh and joke with the other residents and wonder why they wouldn’t with him. Of course, he never saw any fault of his own. It couldn’t be that those other residents were friendly, or at the very least chill. No, they all hated him. Probably jealous. He never changed, except to get more bitter.

They might have caught the clot in time to save him. They might not have. He’d already lived eight-nine miserable years, anyway. He was dead in his bed for five hours because he died at two in the morning and the night nurse didn’t feel like getting yelled at just for opening the door and checking on him. She’ll live with the guilt, on and off, for years. She shouldn’t. But she’s a good person.

And that is how the modern miserable man dies. Still making people miserable beyond the grave.

I don’t know if there’s a moral to this story. Maybe it’s just The Moral, the one we’ve been trying to teach each other, and mostly failing, since the beginning.

Be nice, because karma is real and it’s not some cosmic entity righting the universe but dozens of people who have enough self-respect to not take your shit.

The Guard: A Body of Thieves

A Body of Thieves

Around him, the party was still going strong. Vinnie realized he had lost the concept of what time it was. Probably around ten, if he had to guess. No one seemed to be ready to pack it in. If anything, the party was getting rowdier. People were getting a little bit tipsier, talking louder, pushing into each other as the train wobbled and laughing about it. Despite it being distracting, it was also a relief. The busier the party cars were, the better chance he had to lose the guard behind him.

Vinnie wasn’t even sure he was being followed until he saw Verna ahead, slipping in from the second party car to the first. She skirted around to the side, leaning up against a table with her martini glass.

“What’s he look like?” she asked into her drink. From where he was he couldn’t even see her lips move.

“Short and thin,” Vinnie muttered. “White hair. Chunky rings on his fingers.”

“See him. And he sees you. He’s keeping his distance. But he’s following.”

Various groaned as cusses came through the tin ear. Vinnie tried to fight the blush creeping up his face. Of course he had let this happen on his first real time out. He was supposed to find all the guards in the first place. It was his fault he had missed one, his fault he had let himself get noticed.

“Relax, kiddo,” Verna said. She was looking at the string band in the corner but he knew she could see him out of the corner of her eye. “Everybody makes mistakes. What matters is how you get out of them.”

Vinnie almost tugged on his ear. Stopped himself. Fixed his tie.

“Right, got it,” he said. “So, what, play it cool?”

Joey’s voice came through, cold and quick. “I’d prefer it if this guy doesn’t have a face to remember. Right now he’s just seen you in passing. If you stay, he’s going to remember your face and you could be burned. Time to disappear. Make your way back to me. Casually.”

“I can distract him,” Verna said. “Give Face time to get out of the party car.”

“Don’t go near him,” Joey snapped. “Tail him. From behind. Tell Face when he can slip through to the kitchen car. But do not get spotted.”

Vinnie had completely failed to keep his blush under control, and knew his face was red all the way up to his hair. Hell, even the tops of his ears were burning. He’d fucked up. He’d fucked up, and now Joey was mad about it. Mad at him, specifically, and oh, boy, did Vinnie hate it when people were mad at him.

He slipped through to the second party car. Knowing that guard was behind him somewhere, watching him, and Vinnie couldn’t look back was dizzying. Or maybe that was just the combination of the train and the way he had pushed himself with the punch box. He’d never been able to do that before. He should have been able to have a little celebration. Instead he was very casually running, potentially for his life.

“Stop near the door. Admire the artwork or something,” Verna said. “He’s just watching. If he sees you go through he’ll actually start chasing.”

Doing as he was told, he stopped near the back of the car to stare at a vase. It was a very fancy vase. Glass blown, maybe. Colorful. Not so colorful he could forget that a figure of the law was behind him, following him. Because he was breaking the law. He was stealing. And if he got caught, they could throw the book at him. He could go to jail. Never see the sun again. The colors of the vase were not enough to make him forget that he was a criminal and-

“Go now,” Verna hissed.

Fighting the urge to look back, Vinnie practically leaped toward the train door. It slid open at a snail’s pace. Why was this door so much slower than any other door on this forsaken train? Still, he forced himself to stand there until it was fully open. If he pushed through he might look as desperate as he was.

The second it was comfortably wide enough he walked through. A waiter was coming through the other way. He didn’t even glance at Vinnie as he scooted by with a tray of some gray paste on a croissant, and then Vinnie was past the second door and into the kitchen.

“Did he see me?” Vinnie asked as he wove his way past the waiters and the cooks.

“No, no, he was distracted.”

An echo of his own sigh came back to him through the earpiece.

“He’s just realized you’re not here anymore. He’s going for the kitchen.”

“Face, keep moving. Come to the sleeper cars.”

Beyond the kitchen car was the First Class dining car. Then the First Class sleeper cars. Then the general dining car, three general seating cars, and finally the cheap sleepers. Joey was in one of those, all the way in the back. Not that he could remember which one, but at that exact moment that didn’t qualify as his biggest worry.

Nobody really paid attention to him as he passed through the First Class cars. After all, he was dressed like he belonged there and, as Vinnie was finding out, First Class passengers apparently got to do whatever they wanted. It wasn’t until he got to the general dining car – really just a bar with bottles of beer and an automat – that people started giving him glares. He remembered the times he’d been just a passenger on a train, sitting in a general area, and the few times he’d seen someone who’d obviously wandered out of first class he’d glared at them, too. They had nice spaces, why were they invading theirs?

Out of the dining car and into the general seating cars. Mostly full, a lot of them were dozing. He let the door shut behind him, and counted how many rows he got past before he heard the door open again.

Ten rows.

Nine.

Seven.

“Sir?”

“He’s calling me.”

“Don’t stop,” everyone said at once.

“Sir, I just need a word.”

Fuck it.

Vinnie picked up the pace, trying to get space between the slim guard and him. Trying to remember which sleeper car Joey was in. Trying to remember his cover name. Oh, Christmas, he didn’t remember his cover name!

“Sir, this is security, I-”

The door slid shut behind him, cutting the guard off. The hallway jagged to the left to hug the wall, allowing room for the sleepers. For the first time, he was out of sight. He still had to run, but at least he couldn’t see him.

Someone grabbed Vinnie’s grabbed arm and pulled.

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How To Explain the Internet to People Who Don’t Live There

Let’s be honest: It’s a scary world out there. Climate change. Global political unrest. A billionaire corporate class wielding late-stage capitalism as a weapon to strip both the planet and humanity at large of its lifeblood. Bears. But all of that put together doesn’t even touch the unhinged moral depravity planted in the nightmare garden that is the internet. As a constant visitor to this terrorscape, you are cursed with arcane and disgusting knowledge no human should ever know a piece of. And yet you know most of it. And as a keeper of that knowledge, it is your divine duty to protect the rest of humanity. Unfortunately, humanity is curious, and fighting back the darkness can be hard when dumbfuck people keep opening the door. Let’s take a look at how quickly things can spiral out of control:

Trudy (currently working as a dental hygienist but actually making the bulk of her income drawing furry porn): Oh, hi, Aunt Louise!

Aunt Louise: Trudy, there you are! I was just telling Phyllis you’re on the internet a lot. She says her son is on a website called Read-It or something, all the time, and she was wondering if you know anything about that.

Trudy: Sure, I know about Reddit. See, it’s made up of smaller communities called-

Aunt Louise: Phyllis says her son is always talking about red pills.

Trudy:…he what now.

Aunt Louise: Yes, its definitely red pills. And he’s on a lot of different communities called circlejerks? What are those?

Trudy: Um…

Aunt Louise: And he loves that fellow Joe Rogan!

Trudy: Let me ask you something. Does he have a lot of dating apps but never actually goes on dates?

Aunt Louise: Yes! It’s terrible. He sends those girls lovely pictures, too

Trudy: Long sigh that lasts roughly ten seconds. Okay, I’m going to tell you what an ‘incel’ is, mostly so you’ll understand why Phyllis has a duty to kill her son.

Do you see the traps Trudy fell into? A simple conversation about a large internet hellhole quickly turned into her having to use her physical mouth and English words to put the definition out into the atmosphere for everyone to hear. Do you think it ended well? Or do you think both Louise and Phyllis denied what Trudy was telling them and the only thing that came of this conversation was Trudy getting bombarded with pictures of Phyllis’ son’s dick? You know the answer.

So, let’s go through some easy to remember steps to get out of this minefield your well-meaning relatives have stuck you in without blowing the whole house up.

Step One: Determine (the Kind of Non-Internet User You’re Speaking To)

“But Random Internet Person, aren’t all Non-Internet Users the same?” you ask, like a fool. A pitiful, pathetic fool. When dealing with the IRL masses, you are going to find two separate kinds of Non-Internet Users:

The Actual Never On the Internet People

As it gets increasingly impossible to function without some kind of internet access, these people are increasingly rare. Just like most afflictions, this is mostly going to affect the very young and the very old. Babies and great-grandparents, at this point, because even your three-year-old niece Avalon has a god damned tablet and while I know this whole article is about how you shouldn’t be talking to Non-Internet Users about the internet, you might want to look at little Avalon’s YouTube history and make sure she didn’t get sucked into that algorithm that swarms kids with those videos about Spider-Man getting Elsa pregnant, and explain to your brother how to restrict that shit.

This means the only true Non-Internet Users out there are your great-grandparents, and honestly, tell them whatever you want. You great-grandma Jean is 95, you think she hasn’t seen some shit? You really think her first husband died in a ladder accident? Because she straight up told me she killed him to stop him from beating on her. She spent the sixties and seventies in Haight-Ashbury for Christ’s sake. Tell her all about the darkest corners you’ve tripped over, not only will she not clutch her pearls she’ll probably one-up you with her second honeymoon in Phuket.

Essentially, the people who are actually never on the internet are not your problem. Your problem is…

The People Who Think They Are on the Internet, But Are Actually Only Skimming the Surface

These people are the actual trouble, because they think they know. They think, because they have a Facebook and a Gmail and buy stuff off Amazon, they have some sort of insight to what the internet actually is. They’re bobbing along on the surface on a floaty-tube made of pictures of their neighbors’ dogs and drinking up craft websites full of viruses and they don’t even know the miles and miles of dark terror that lies beneath them.

They are tricky, because they will engage you like they know what they’re talking about, and you only realize they don’t when you utter the word ‘monsterfuckers’ and you can see the light in their eyes has grown just a little bit dimmer. They have lost something they didn’t even know they had. Something they can never get back.

You see, keeping these people in the dark about the depths of the internet isn’t only for your health, it’s for theirs, too. Trying to explain the internet means psychic damage for everyone in hearing range.

Okay, now that we know the sort of people we are up against, let’s look at the strategy to keep our arcane knowledge to ourselves.

Step Two: Deny

This is going to be your biggest tool. The internet is a big place, something everyone understands. So big, even you as a constant scuba diver into the terrifying corals of broken moral compasses and anonymity, haven’t seen it all. We all pick our corners and stay there, occasionally hissing at passersby if they come too close to our little mudhole. The key here is that Non-Internet Users must never know which corner is your corner, that way you can constantly deny that you know anything about any of it. Let’s look at that party example again:

Trudy (currently the moderator of a subreddit called r/shitdimension, that started out as all shitposts and memes supposedly from a neighboring dimension called the Shittiest Dimension but has since turned into a place where plumbers come to bitch about their jobs): Oh, hi, Aunt Louise!

Aunt Louise: Trudy, there you are! I was just telling Phyllis you’re on the internet a lot. She says her son is on a website called Read-It or something, all the time, and she was wondering if you know anything about that.

Trudy: Oh, I don’t go on Reddit.

Aunt Louise: I thought all you kids-

Trudy: Nope, not me. Never even heard of it. Edit, you said?

Good job, Trudy! Do you see what she did there? She lied. Just like on the internet, you can lie in real life, too! It might be a little harder, but honestly, it’s not as hard as you think.

Sometimes, these people will come at you with some tidbit from the internet that somehow made its way to them. You know, some meme or video or internet drama that you saw two to four weeks ago when it was fresh. A fight on Twitter, an explosion on LiveLeak, something basic like that. Then it got shifted around through all the major websites, then it got shifted around to all the news websites, and then it inevitably ended up in the internet’s toilet: Facebook. By the time your Aunt Louise is shoving her phone at you, that same meme has been deep fried and julienned, and is now covered with ifunny watermarks, that little Pinterest symbol in the corner, three separate reddit borders, and it looks like it lost a lot of pixels along the way, and of course she’s not pulling just the picture up, so you’re trying to look at a tiny version of it sandwiched between a message from her pastor reminding everyone to bring punch to the ‘retro’ sockhop the church is having that Friday and some poll her neighbor posted about how early is too early for dogs to be barking, and after squinting at it long enough for the tectonic plates under you feet to shift you realize that in all this game of telephone what actually made the meme funny has been lost and now its just words on an image.

What do you do? Do you try to correct Aunt Louise? Or perhaps show her the meme in its original format?

NO. Idiot. Are you even listening? You lie. You lie like your life depends on it. Because do you know what you have to bring up to fully explain the history behind that meme? KPop Stans and the term ‘mukbang.’ Do you really want to look your loving Aunt in the eyes and try to explain any of that shit? Of course you don’t. Let’s take a look and see how Trudy does.

Trudy (currently working on her twenty-seventh BTS fanfiction on AO3, this one including tags such as ‘slow burn,’ ‘whump,’ and ‘mpreg’): Oh, hi, Aunt Louise!

Aunt Louise: Trudy, there you are! You’re on the internet a lot, have you seen this meme?

Trudy: No, I haven’t. Oh. That’s very funny. Hahaha.

Lie. For the love of everything holy and unholy in this dimension and others, fucking lie.

Step Three: Deflect

Here’s the third step to never talking about the internet out loud: change the god damned subject. To be prepared for this, its best to think of two or three safe subjects you can discuss instead of describing the multicolored carnival of nightmares that is the true internet. Let’s see what Trudy came up with.

Trudy (currently ignoring her profiles on Tinder, Bumble, OKCupid, and Match because she knows if she opens any of them its going to be an explosion of blurry dick pics): Oh, hi, Aunt Louise!

Aunt Louise: Trudy, there you are! You’re on the internet a lot, aren’t you? I saw something on the news about Doggiecoin, do you know about that?

Trudy: No, I can honestly say I’ve never heard of Doggiecoin.

Aunt Louise: Well my friend Phyllis says her sons says they should invest and-

Trudy: Hey, Aunt Louise, did you hear about what went on at the Whole Foods?

Aunt Louise: I knnoooow. I can’t believe he managed to shove that much cheese down his pants!

Good work, Trudy! Everyone knows there’s so much trashy shit going down at the Whole Foods you don’t even have to pick a specific situation! Let’s move on to our next step, which is…

Step Four: FUCKING RUN

This is the most important step. Some people are stubborn, and just because you’ve changed the subject doesn’t mean it won’t go back. You need to get out of there as fast as you can to avoid that possibility. Try to have an exit strategy in mind, but if all else fails and you can’t get away before the topic of the internet comes back up, do whatever you can to escape. Don’t worry about the consequences of your actions. Remember, the most critical part of this moment is to stay away from the internet, and the costs of that can never be too high. Let’s take a look at what Trudy does.

Trudy (currently getting ratioed on Twitter because a bunch of random internet sexists, potentially including Phyllis’s son, found her positive tweet about Captain Marvel): Oh, hi, Aunt Louise!

Aunt Louise: Trudy, there you are! You’re on the internet a lot, aren’t you? I saw something on the news about Doggiecoin, do you know about that?

Trudy: No, I can honestly say I’ve never heard of Doggiecoin.

Aunt Louise: Well my friend Phyllis says her sons says they should invest and-

Trudy: Hey, Aunt Louise, did you hear about what went on at the Whole Foods?

Aunt Louise: I knnoooow. I can’t believe he managed to shove that much cheese down his pants! Anyway, about Doggiecoin-

Trudy: Oh, I, um…wait, is that a tornado siren?

Aunt Louise: I don’t hear-

Trudy: I’m too young to die!

(Trudy sprints out of the party and races to her car, where she speeds off down the street and ignores all the calls from her aunt and mother while she safely procures Taco Bell for self-soothing purposes).

Excellent thinking, Trudy! Remember, its easier to handle pissed off family members after the fact than horrified and mentally broken family members in the moment.

So the next time you’re stuck at a party and suddenly your friend’s kindhearted, naïve girlfriend is standing in front of you asking if you know anything about this Sherlock Holmes fan art she found where Sherlock and John were very, very round, you know what to do:

  1. Determine
  2. Deny
  3. Deflect
  4. FUCKING RUN

With these easy to remember steps, you, too, can be a proud protector of the outside world from the internet.

This wasn’t consciously inspired by Bo Burnham’s ‘Welcome to the Internet’ song, but…come on. The timing is too perfect. Clearly my brain did a thing.