• I had no idea John played GTA or No Man's Sky! I'll definitely have to check those out.

  • Thanks!

  • Good point! It does seem very character-specific.

  • I've never made up a sport, but the role of (fictional) sports and the Olympics in Ada Palmer's Too Like The Lightning is phenomenal. Basically, sports become a replacement for war, and the outcome of Olympic Games solves treaties, etc. The kind of sport determines what resource agreement is being fought over. It's weird and really really cool.

  • One of my favorite series in this regard is The Long Earth, an s/f novel series by Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter. Essentially, there are an infinite number or parallel Earths, each of which took wildly different evolutionary trajectories. Humans only exist on our Earth; on other Earths, other animals became sentient and dominant, and in others, no single species rose to dominance.

    Basically, the authors read extensively about Earth's evolutionary history, and then kept asking, "Well, what if this happened? Or that never happened?" Understanding how many tiny, random events shaped evolution can lead one to imagine how they could've gone differently, assuming niches still needed to be filled.

    As far as new breeds for real species, that's an intriguing question, because breeding means that humans (or, I dunno, whoever runs your planet) have a vested interest in the outcome or certain qualities. Like, we want bananas to have fewer seeds and more edible flesh because we want to eat them. We want really fat stupid cows. We want dogs who can hunt with us. Lots of these are food related, ha!

    So, the question there is, what do your characters want or need that a bred species might be able to do?

  • amarante's comment is really, really good. So, I'll just through a few extra cents in regarding not racism exactly, but other forms of discrimination.

    So: I'm disabled, a woman, and queer. I face discrimination for each of those things, but it's...in different forms. Some of it is mainly systemic and hard to tease out. For example, I've never been harassed at work or, to my knowledge, worked for a sexist boss. However, there have been plenty of studies showing subconscious bias against women (and people of color) when reading applications and doing job interviews from employers, even if the employers themselves are poc or female.

    Which means that even though nobody has ever really insulted me for being a woman, and I grew up in a very "girl-power" culture as a kid, there are still problems across the board that I face because I'm a woman, even if I never realize I'm facing them. This is, I think, why many young women say "I don't need feminism"--because around here, sexism is rarely overt.

    On the other hand, homophobia is right in your face. Many people where I live use homophobic slurs. The right to deny service (like, literally at a pizza place) to LGBT people is so important to them that they're angry at laws forbidding it. People in my town routinely and vocally fight against LGBT marriage, LGBT adoption, and seem to genuinely believe that LGBT people are often pedophiles. In a country that neighbors mine, male/male sex can be punished with a prison sentence.

    Hate crimes like vandalism against LGBT advocates are not-uncommon, and while violent hate crimes are rare, they are not unheard of.

    Finally, as a disabled person, nobody seems to hate disabled people. Or even dislike them really. They just don't want to make even minimal effort to include them. Asking for, say, subtitles or captions for deaf or hard-of-hearing students, or asking for a subtitled movie night at a theatre for a popular new movie (most recently Fantastic Beasts) is seen (by some) as "asking too much" or "wanting special treatment." Asking for inclusion is not considered equality, but burdensome.

    So...I guess the tl;dr version is, figure out how discrimination works in your society, because not all discrimination looks the same. Do some kinds of creatures need physical accommodations to be inclusive? Is racism overt or subtle? Just some ideas.

  • The other suggestions are really great. Here's something else to think about: another important role fashion plays in people's lives is showing in-group or out-group status, which is distinct from class.

    So, for example, why do conservative religious groups (think Amish or Butanese Buddhist or Shiate Muslim) have a "standard" outfit? Why do sports teams have identical outfits, and more than that, why do sports FANs wear team colors if they themselves are not on the athletic team?

    Also think: if someone names a genre of music, does a fashion style come to mind? For example: hip-hop, punk, indie...why is this? Why is music & fashion so closely related?

    In almost all of these cases (except maybe sports-fans) the outfits look odd or unusual in "mainstream" society. Thus, the outfits tell the rest of the world "I am Amish!" (or whatever) while telling other members of the group, "I'm on your team / we have an important things in common".

    It is, in a small way, a loyalty test. It is saying, "I will give up a symbolic element of my personal identity to honor group values / group cohesion." So, for example, even if on a particular day an Amish person or a Sikh person felt like wearing jeans and a t-shirt, they probably would decide not to because they value the group identity.

    Even though a punk girl or a black guy in hip-hop clothes might get harassed, it's important for them to align with the group because they believe in the group's values, or they feel a sense of belonging there.

    Additionally, these smaller groups have reasons specific to their style choices. Punk is associated with leather, which is associated with sexual adventurousness (think Sex Pistols). Whereas religious head-coverings are associated with modesty, and focusing on the mind and spirit rather than the body.

    So, in your story, a contrast in fashions may demonstrate a clash in deeper values. Additionally, an individual may not be totally into the clothes they wear, but still choose to wear them because they want to belong to the group.

    A final note: some people don't want to sacrifice an element of their personal identity for the group identity. Maybe the group has values they find harmful, or maybe they don't mind the group's values but they find the restriction on their self-expression excruciating.

    In the latter case, there is often internal conflict, as a person wants to belong to the group, but they do not want to sacrifice that element of their identity. For a real life example, read some stories about American Muslim women who are practicing muslims but choose not to wear the hijab, which is a hard decision for them. (Around 43% of American Muslim women do not wear the hijab).

    In the former case, simply wearing clothes can feel oppressive, and enforcement of loyalty can include social or physical punishment for rule-breaking. For a real-life example, read about how ex-Amish and ex-Mormon people feel about clothes.

    So, clothes can be a great way to connect to characters and cultural values in your story, as well as things other people mentioned like utility (climate), technology available, wealth / class status, what is considered beautiful.

  • Full disclosure, I still haven't seen it yet! Gah, I meant to see it the first weekend. But, I'm obsessed with the soundtrack. I would put it up there with Lion King or Little Mermaid for Best Disney Soundtrack Ever!

  • I will add Nimona to the list. ^_^

  • Alright, I'll add those to the list.

  • @Wolfpack , I know you deleted your comment, but would you like to nominate any of those books? I mean, so we can all read them in December and talk about them?

  • Excellent! I hope you have a relaxing break ^_^

  • That's so cool!

  • That makes sense too :)

  • You know, I can see that.

    Perhaps I am more sensitive to the frustration of being excluded because I've been there irl, and, to a lesser extent, online on forums. Just having that feeling like I worked up the courage to show up to the party or say something out loud in a "group" setting online, and then feeling like that didn't work at all and I must be a failure. And some of that has to do with me being disabled and queer, but honestly it also just has to do with my personality.

    But I also haven't often needed to block people. I feel like I generally don't interact much with sexist / homophobic / otherwise bigoted people in the first place. And I guess I sort of hoped that, with Imzy, bigotry, hate speech, and harassment would be dealt with authoritatively.

    I feel like each social media site has its' own level of seriousness regarding "following", so, for example, un-following a tumblr blog or a person on facebook doesn't seem to be a big deal, socially. But in other circumstances, like in fb groups or dA forums, rejection seems a bit more personal. So, I suppose it depends a bit on how that plays out here.

  • This is an alright short-term solution, but it could get clunky as we get more and more users.

  • Maybe our experiences of social media and social groups have been too different for us to agree. To me, social validation really is a need.

    Now, it's not a need that's a problem for me, because it can be easily filled just from my interaction in my own home, or at work. But that hasn't always been the case in the past.

    I guess it is your right to dismiss that need in your interactions with people? And just say, you know, people should suck it up if they get rejected, or shouldn't reach out for connection in the way that you describe, by worrying aloud that people hate them.

    But just because you are dismissive of that need doesn't mean that the need is not very real and intense for many people, and it is a need that I, for one, would like to keep in mind when creating social spaces.

  • That's a good point too. Ideally, there is room for multiple groups on similar topics, so if one group develops some kind of snobbery, it's a lot easier to simply go to (or create) a new group than it is in physical space.

  • That's a fair point; it probably is unlikely that many people (rather than a few individuals) would all block / mute the same person. Maybe I am overly concerned.

  • Okay, actually, I agree with part of what you're saying. Absolutely, nobody has to reply to every (or any) post by someone in a group. That makes sense.

    I just wonder if there's a way to balance the two needs. After all, the social aspect of social media sites do provide some people's main source of social interaction and contact; I feel like maintaining an atmosphere of acceptance of (reasonable) difference is important in inclusive social situations.

    Maybe there are ways to offset the whole cliquish attitude that could be created by easy muting and blocking by cultivating an encouraging atmosphere in other ways?

  • "This isn't grade school" Okay. So why do so many people have a grade school mentality?

    I'm just surprised that we, as adults, still, today, have debates defending our right to be exclusive. Just because you put it in marketable terminology ("That's choosing where I spend my emotional and intellectual resources") doesn't mean that one is suddenly not responsible for the social and emotional consequences of that choice.

    I don't know you personally, but I know many, many people in my real life who have been willfully ignored, not spoken to, and Not Chosen simply because they were, you know, fat, or disabled, or had aspergers, or liked anime too much or dressed unfashionably or were poor or were a minority or were "weird" and could never figure out what the right thing to like or say is.

    If a fat girl sits at a table with a bunch of skinny girls, hoping they'll give her a chance because maybe they have interests in common, and they all refuse to make eye contact and ignore her...SHE's the bully? She's "forcing" herself on them?

    If you choose to withold your "intellectual and emotional resources" from the people who are "unlikable" by your arbitrary standard, sure, I guess technically that's your right. But I'm concerned that this enables exercise of this "right" as standard procedure, without regard to the increased feelings of isolation and loneliness on part of the person being muted and blocked.

    (And just because someone's not notified, do you really think they won't notice if people suddenly stop responding to them or they get a 404 page?)

  • Thank you ^_^

  • Thanks :)

  • Awesome! Now I need to figure out how to make a feature request.

  • I appreciate this perspective. However, I wonder if there could be a feature to mute topics or keywords rather than people? For example, if someone is phobic of spiders, and they joined a nature enthusiast group, wouldn't it maybe be easier to mute all "spider" posts rather than mute a person entirely just because they talk about spiders a lot?