[ warning] The worldbuilding ick

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.

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