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[:marseynerd2: warning] The worldbuilding ick :marseyyikes:

The Foundation thread earlier reminded me that Asimov had regular newspapers existing thousands of years in the future in a galactic empire. When I saw that, I felt like a foid getting hit with the green bubble. :marseyyikes:

But is this actually ridiculous? It doesn't feel dated to me that there's no internet. I don't think a civilian internet is an inevitable (or necessarily desirable) aspect of a technologically advanced society, and if I wrote an advanced civilization I might not include it at all. So what then? Maybe newspapers will exist in the future because people will want to have them. I don't fricking know. I'm fine with, say, humanoid ayylmaos, but if you described them, say, eating with forks, that would feel too "normal" to me.

Instead of trying to neurodivergentally reverse engineer a bunch of rules, let's just talk about our feefees. "The ick" is something small, subtle, and subjective. So I'm not talking about obvious gaffes, plot holes, or general laziness. Rather, what are seemingly insignificant little details that take you out of a setting? What do you think causes this to hit sometimes but not others?

!bookworms !writecel

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In Do Androids[...] the protagonist having to take his flying car to a payphone

Also the futher from the 80s we get the more ridiculous payphones seem in sci fi settings

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My city put up a few pillars that display ads or news. There's also a charging port built in. One day I saw a person talking on his phone, plugged in to charge, leaning against the pillar. "Why does this sight feel so familiar?" I thought to myself. Then it hit me, neighbor that's a payphone.

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