There's an open pit in the middle of our office plan that drops down into a bunch of very sharp spikes that kill you instantly. This is bad. People keep falling in there and dying. Someone put a sign up, the other day, all bright yellow so you can't miss it, that says "Beware!!! Spikes!!!"
The office immediately split into two factions over it. One says that if anyone falls in the spike pit it's their own fault for being so stupid and not watching where they're walking, so we should remove the sign. The other says that the sign is an insult, there shouldn't be a spike pit in our office at all, and having the sign up like that is just normalising the existence of the spike pit, so we should remove the sign.
We ended up removing the sign. Probably for the better. Still... for a while there it looked like it might have worked...
Nobody has ever been capable of writing a scathingly harsh and well formulated satire about the perils of modern capitalism, that doesn't just get immediately one-upped by some random food service worker talking about their actual week.
Is there room for interesting, oddball, weird writing in HDG?
Yes.
Absolutely.
Feels like a silly question, to be honest.
...Okay okay let me elaborate just a bit. I saw a response today, and while I'm not going to address the trimmed portion of it, I do want to respond to this.
I hear this from time to time, and it always confuses me, because... well, I'm in this community. I spend a lot of time in this community. I read a lot of the new stories. The idea that it has "reached its limits narratively" just does not compute to me. I try very hard to focus on the positives of the hobbies I take part in, so let's use this opportunity to share some fucking incredible writing.
Let's talk about a few fics that came out somewhat recently, or which are still ongoing, which absolutely push the narrative limits of the setting in new and exciting ways.
No Fate But What They Make is an incredibly cool story, based on the hook of a floret going full terminator on a ship of ferals. I've never seen anything quite like it, and it's absolutely stellar.
There's Always A Choice hit the discord server and became an instant classic by approaching the common problem of "will I still be me when I'm a floret" in a new and interesting way that shows deep understanding of the setting.
The Fall Of Abundance is a story about a floret grieving for their affini, and processing that grief and those emotions. It's beautiful and heartwrenching and written by someone who wants to explore these themes not for cheap shock value, but to genuinely examine what it means within the compact. It is a testament to Harmony's skill as an author that ae makes this work incredibly well in spite of the fact that we all know from the start that the affini in question isn't going to stay dead.
Training The Waterlily is a story I straight-up did not think could work until I read it. Like, the premise feels incompatible with the axioms, but damn if the author didn't walk that razor's edge and come up with an absolutely stunning story.
Independent Establishment is one of the sharpest, rawest fics I have ever seen, dealing with comptop in ways that genuinely caused me to rethink my own relationship with dominance. Also: possibly the most unreasonable affini I have ever laid eyes on. It is brutal in ways very few fics before it have ever even attempted. And it fucking works! It's brilliant!
The Fortune of War is a story about an affini warship. Not the pleasure cruisers that the Compact used to sweep up the strays in the Terran Accord - an actual, honest-to-god warship. It's still pretty early in development, but my goodness is it good.
On Domestication Of Masters is two people with direct, personal experience working to deradicalize fascists telling us the story of how one such fascist would be deradicalized and have their worldview broken within the compact.
Cymbidium's Call has a character get florted through essentially a complex digital gacha game. Has this been done before? I don't think so, although I could be wrong. And if it has been... has it been done this stylishly and creatively? (No, genuinely, if you can think of an example, let me know, I wanna read it!)
I Brought You The Bullet. I'm not even gonna explain this one, just read it and you'll get why I put it on this list.
I'd throw How A Floret Finds Out and its sequel on this list, but maybe "december 2024" is pushing it a little for "current releases". Either way, it was a magnificent breath of fresh air with a unique style and premise, and became an instant classic and community touchstone. Also, not to toot my own horn, but I know there's shit happening in Dancing To Her Rhythms that nobody has seen before or since - intentionally so.
Hell, A Part Of Who I Am started publication over a year ago. Go ahead and tell me that there's anything in the setting like it. Tell me there's a single story within the setting that captures that same feeling.
...And of course, even beyond that, there are a ton of stories coming out all the time that may not be reinventing the wheel, but which do everything right and put the pieces together in fun and novel ways. Like Checkup At The Lucerne Clinic, or From Pawn To Princess, or Ecdysis, or Annaberry Has A Secret.
These are not fringe, unpopular stories. Many of these are community touchstones; instant classics; widely beloved for what they bring to the table and the ways they expand on the shared sandbox we all play in. It's... just not that hard to write an interesting, creative, novel story within this sandbox.
So where does this idea come from?
...Look. I'm sorry. I hate to be negative. And if you don't like negativity, maybe stop reading here. Go read one of the incredible stories linked above instead.
Okay?
Okay.
Putting on my grumpy pants. You have been warned.
From where I'm standing, the biggest contribution to this misconception is that there are some people who write stories that don't mesh with the setting in some very important ways, who then get told that their stories don't mesh with the setting, and respond with loud, public negativity.
HDG is not your typical fandom. It's a shared writing setting with rules and themes and axioms. And if your story falls distinctly outside the bounds of those rules, themes, and axioms... You'll probably get a negative response from the community. To name one obvious (if tragic) example: if your affini intentionally kills a sophont, you're going to get some really negative responses to that, because that's brutally out of line of the themes, rules, and axioms of the setting. Same thing if your plucky team of terran scientists manages to "kill" an affini and secure their core for science experiments. That's just not what we're doing here. It would probably work amazingly as original sci-fi, and we encourage people to take those ideas and make original sci-fi, but these rules, themes, and axioms are what define the setting. If you ignore them, you're not really writing HDG. If you insist on calling it HDG anyways, the community may well show you the door, in the only way it really can.
And you know what? I'll even grant you that it sucks when that happens.
But overwhelmingly, this is the group of people who go on to complain about how censorious and creatively stifled the HDG community is. People who do not get it. People who frequently have not put any actual work into getting it. People who have read maybe two or three fics, total, before deciding to start writing within the setting by approaching a subject that is famously difficult to do well, and fucking it up.
Those are the people who get the impression that creativity gets you blacklisted from the community. Because, frankly, if you were actually reading the things this community puts out, I don't think you'd say that. It is a very silly thing to say. You sound very silly when you say it.
Anyways, go read No Fate But What They Make. It's fucking incredible.
snail graphics. can be literally anything idc i NEED snail graphics pls pls pls. blinkies, dividers, stamps, buttons, icons/pixels, I DONT CARE PLS SNAILLSSSSS 🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏
i love requests like these
also these pngs
and these (and these by the one and only @snailspng as well)
THESE STAMPS
these iconic buttons
these pixels and these ones
last two dividers by @animatedglittergraphics-n-more (she also has a bunch of these lol)
please don't step on them stamp by @artistaspiring
we were critiquing character designs in class today, when there was a really good one, and someone turned to the artist, holding their laptop. the screen of which just said "WOULD" in big trackpad-drawn letters
Whenever I see a really off-the-wall take about the beatles I remember this adorable post from an older fan about how they used to play "Beatles" at recess but they were too young to really know who the beatles were so they just played house with British accents and I assume that's what a lot of people on this website are doing as well
NO ONE is too young to know who the beatles were. its important to tell your children about the beatles as soon as they can understand language. My father told me when i turned two that the beatles were four men who sang and played music. over the years he added more details like girls loved the beatles and how some of them died. there is no excuse.
fun fact! empty space is not actually "black", it's green. very, very, very dark green. this is because, even in the near-vacuum of space, photons released at the time of the big bang are still hurtling through the void, and as time goes on their wavelength (for very complicated physics reasons) slowly grows longer, shifting more towards the red end of the spectrum. at some point, the universe was a very very very dark blue, and in a few billion more years it'll be a very very very dark red, but for the time being it's the color of plants, and i think that's beautiful <3
