update from sparkleup

diary/2023-01-01.md

@@ -42,3 +42,52 @@
 5. Writing prompt: write a long paragraph describing a place or a landscape, or a scene from childhood. Using some of the techniques we've studied together and executed together. Maybe take your own work, identify spots where you can vary the syntax, and fill it out.
     * Reed scuffed his heel against the pavement of the street. New Year’s Eve, and everyone was still inside. Bars: full. Restaurants: packed. There were a few scattered couples or groups around, but they were all walking with purpose. Champagne called. Canapes. Crudites.
     * Reed scuffed his heel against the pavement of the street, *rough and coarse like a hungover tongue*. New Year’s Eve, and everyone was still inside. <s>Bars: full. Restaurants: packed.</s> *The bars were full and the restaurants were packed and the bodies pressed in close around the heat-lamps and the voices were loud and the feet were tired.* There were a few scattered couples or groups around, *little knots of friends tangling up sidewalks, finding awkward routes around trees and bollards,* but they were all walking with purpose. Champagne called. Canapes. Crudites.
+    
+## Near-Future Sci-fi
+
+* few years to few decades
+* feels a bit broad, but scifi can take place in other times
+* Can be a warning
+    * reflects present moment
+    * can be terrifying, but can also be hopeful
+* When Robot and Crow Saved East St. Louis:
+    * Familiar things up front to anchor the location
+    * Concrete similes to provide imagery
+    * How nefarious is this robot? Does it know that it's programmed to avoid calling it surveillance?
+    * From the Robot's POV?
+* Mika Model:
+    * Language extrapolation
+    * Lack of lying and things that make engagement difficult
+    * In media res, not just mid conversation but mid-conflict
+    * Not quite infodump, but a lot of exposition. Sneaky backstory.
+
+1. Create a list of things that make you anxious about our present day moment, and things that make you excited or hopeful. Aim for 5--10 entries in each list. Consider tech, medicine, politics, religion, education, environment, economy, literature/arts:
+    1. Anxious
+        1. Economic collapse, especially in housing and food
+        2. Supply-chain collapse
+        3. Identity flattening/homogenization (race, gender, etc, but also any transgressive art/culture)
+        4. Global shift far right/fascist
+        5. Empowering (even arming) those with everyday hatreds
+        6. Rise of YRR/American civil religion/evangelicalism/dispensationalism
+        7. AI-generated art building negative attitudes towards artists and cynicism towards art
+    2. Hopeful
+        1. Similar empowerment (though maybe not arming) of minority identity
+        2. Underground transgressive art still going strong
+        3. Deconstruction/exvangelical trend leading to thoughtful engagement with religion
+        4. Widespread social resistance to further empowerment of fascism/recognition of such
+        5. Some capitalist comeuppance.
+2. Choose a few entries and convert them to *what if?* questions that can be used to drive a sci-fi story
+    1. What if growth of evangelicalism leads to a grand schism?
+    2. What if AI-generated art leads to a negative view of 'traditional' art to the point of taboo?
+    3. What if the left gets their shit together enough to actually engage in common praxis, what does that power structure look like?
+3. Write the opening paragraphs to a near-future sci-fi story that explores one of the *what if?* scenarios. Introduce a character, suggest what's being explore, indicate time and place.
+
+  Bells had long ago fallen by the wayside. First, there were electronic beeps, then perhaps a simulated chime, or a buzz on everyone's phone. All these I'd only ever heard about from parents, friends of my dad and mom kvetching about memories, saying little facts out loud so that they could all nod knowingly to each other or perhaps shake their heads and click their tongues in disdain. 
+  
+  Me, all I'd ever known was Fr. Blaine calling us to prayer: a brief murmur of the name of this prayer or that, a little factoid of his own about which we would all nod knowingly or shake our heads and click our tongues in disdain in the hallways on the way to the next class. Sure, we weren't supposed to---God, the pastor, the teacher, the father, the mother, the kids, right?---but there's always a little bit of leeway built into any system, and those above were always willing to overlook a little transgression here and there. Except God, I've been promised, mom gently chiding me for something that probably warranted a much larger punishment, I don't remember what.
+  
+  But, even after I tucked my tablet under my arm, after I shook my head and clicked my tongue with classmates at Fr. Blaine yet again choosing Aquinas's prayer for students---"does he always have to be so on-the-nose?"---after I wound my way through the whine and hum of so many busses running on so many aging batteries, even then I tried to picture what a bell to end class would feel like. No quiet murmur into the silence, no hint of speaker saturation to go with a synthesized chime or rude beep, no buzz of phone, but a raucous clamor of hammer against hollow bell. Could such a noise possibly bring relief? I'd heard them in vids, of course, watched over at grandma's on her dim and yellowed flatscreen. How could so loud a sound bring anything other than anxiety?
+  
+  *Maybe it's me,* I thought for the hundred thousandth time. *Maybe it's my situation. A piercing yell of a red-painted bell yet another sign to go home to yet more yelling. Skirting around arguments and maybe-fights. Walking quietly past angry sweeping and dreading the whisper of dad's cart, the click of the magnetic plug against its side.*
+  
+  "You're too stuck up in your head," mom chided for the hundred thousandth time. "Take off your shoes or, Lord preserve me, I'll tell your father."