Now, as a counterpoint to my earlier post in the Fenspace thread:
Perhaps the greatest thing about Fenspace is its collaboritive nature. From what I can tell, people are actually getting along with each other quite nicely, respecting other people's "toys" and working together to make a collective narrative. No shouting or whining. It's, well, it's fundamentally democratic in the best sense of the word. (A lot of credit for that goes to MFnord, I think, who's a great moderator in that he moderates moderately in a modest manner).
It's also an incredibly liberating intellectual exercise, particularly with handwavium. It's a lampshade-hanger, a story cheat, but it has just enough rules that everyone can play with it and then come up with different ideas.
It's also positive about the future. I know that some people think from my last thread that I am a gloomy guss that looks upon happiness with a baleful glare, but no, no! I am a happy, optimistic person filled with glee and joyful expectation about the future. And so are a lot of people in Fenspace and it shows. (It's like Star Trek, really, before the mid-seasons of DS9. Great stories from Moore et al. but against the remit of Star Trek, which was, at its heart, Secular Humanist Utopian Fiction).
It also has a lot of restraint from the writers. Nobody's a Superman Scientist With Mastery Over All He Surveys. It has a lot of genuine characters filled with humanity.
Haven't really changed my mind about my earlier points, but I did want to provide this flipside here.
-Murmur
(Man, I'm posting a lot lately)
Perhaps the greatest thing about Fenspace is its collaboritive nature. From what I can tell, people are actually getting along with each other quite nicely, respecting other people's "toys" and working together to make a collective narrative. No shouting or whining. It's, well, it's fundamentally democratic in the best sense of the word. (A lot of credit for that goes to MFnord, I think, who's a great moderator in that he moderates moderately in a modest manner).
It's also an incredibly liberating intellectual exercise, particularly with handwavium. It's a lampshade-hanger, a story cheat, but it has just enough rules that everyone can play with it and then come up with different ideas.
It's also positive about the future. I know that some people think from my last thread that I am a gloomy guss that looks upon happiness with a baleful glare, but no, no! I am a happy, optimistic person filled with glee and joyful expectation about the future. And so are a lot of people in Fenspace and it shows. (It's like Star Trek, really, before the mid-seasons of DS9. Great stories from Moore et al. but against the remit of Star Trek, which was, at its heart, Secular Humanist Utopian Fiction).
It also has a lot of restraint from the writers. Nobody's a Superman Scientist With Mastery Over All He Surveys. It has a lot of genuine characters filled with humanity.
Haven't really changed my mind about my earlier points, but I did want to provide this flipside here.
-Murmur
(Man, I'm posting a lot lately)