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[Gentlefish]

Find a new job, then tell your boss. Pro gamer move.

[TD1]

There's apparently going to be a new Matrix....

[Yoink]

Meh, we've been in the matrix our whole lives.

[pisskop]

There's apparently going to be a new Matrix....

reboot or sequel?

[TamerVirus]

There's apparently going to be a new Matrix....

Plot twist! Turns out John Wick was just another instance of the Matrix

[hector13]

Find a new job, then tell your boss. Pro gamer move.

Find a new job, forget to tell your boss. It's about what they deserve.

[bloop_bleep]

I know, but however cold the water is, my body still heats it up when I’m done, and the room I want to sleep in is still stupidly warm for no goddamn reason :p

It’s a silly visceral thing. I don’t like putting any kind of lotion on either, because it is a loathsome sensation.

... Maybe sleep in the shower?

[hector13]

I know, but however cold the water is, my body still heats it up when I’m done, and the room I want to sleep in is still stupidly warm for no goddamn reason :p

It’s a silly visceral thing. I don’t like putting any kind of lotion on either, because it is a loathsome sensation.

... Maybe sleep in the shower?

The tub is too small to lie comfortably.

I slept on the living room floor with the AC on. I had a weird dream in which I accidentally drove my car off a bridge (like the bridge in GTA 1!) into a river because the brakes weren't working very well  and was hauling it out on my shoulder when I saw Paul Merton dressed as a priest walking a greyhound. I rounded the river in the same direction as Mr. Merton was walking when he muttered to himself that I wasn't allowed to do that because he was the master, and the car suddenly became much heavier, but then I ignored him, and woke up when my alarm went off.

[Flying Dice]

We don't have self-check at any of the branches I'm working with

SF/F stuff definitely isn't among our major circulation genres, though, no. They move okay-ish for our libraries and we have a handful of patrons that request it, but it's way behind the (other) bestsellers et al, or just mystery/suspense, westerns, or christian fiction in general. _{though inflicting mccaffrey on someone is just mean, ahaha* also nevermind the son's contributions, probably don't direct them towards anything that isn't pern, too. Anne's just a bit behind Piers Anthony in how off some of their works get.}

*Though if it works, it works.

Oi, oi, the Pern stuff is nice enough even if she has a bunch of weird fetishes crammed into everything else she wrote. It's not as if The Ship Who Sang, Crystal Singer, or gods forbid the Catteni series are even in print any more (probably). I read enough about giant grey alien dicks to satisfy any interest I might have ever had in her larger body of work even if the whole rabid anti-fanfiction attitude didn't already put me off her.

Though I'd give her a head over Anthony if only because to my recollection she always wrote the weirdness about consenting adults.

[Frumple]

She absolutely did not. Iirc pern had the dragon mating thing screw with an underage character at some point (dub/non-con, statutory), and her other works involved rape at least once -- one I can't remember the name of* that involved an interspecies relationship, had a book in which the lady involved gets drugged, fucked, and knocked up in the process. The general (non)reaction of everyone aware of it happening (the victim included) is wtf worthy (and I think I actually posted in the wtf thread about it at some point :V), heh. McCaffrey's definitely not as bad as Anthony, but they're approaching the same ballpark.

... though yeah, some of the pern stuff was alright. Some was eye-gougingly boring, though, on top of the sketchy shit the whole dragon connection thing brought to the table.

* Actually, now that I check it's that cat-thing.

[Flying Dice]

Fair -- I didn't read a lot of her more obscure stuff (non-mainline Pern stuff included) for good reason, so I may well have missed that. No regrets there.

[Frumple]

Nah, I hear yeh.

... still, dubcon/noncon is mainline pern. I think the series's primary fetish is actually that, heh. The treatment the author gives it is borderline fridge horror in how much it's casually passed over/downplayed, iirc, but the dragonrider link thing in relation to the critters mating... it basically puts the linked humans into full-on memetic porn animal heat. The people involved don't actually have much choice, and what choice they do have is seriously compromised. Consent's hella' questionable when that gets involved and it gets involved pretty regularly in the series.

It's actually probably easy to miss that that's what's going on -- like with the cat-whatever thing where a MC is raped and impregnated, the treatment of the issue is pretty damn low-key, to the extent there's any negative treatment of the issue at all -- but that's part of why she's hovering somewhere in spitting distance of Anthony for me

[scourge728]

If you want to look at it charitably, it does logically follow that a society that has lived with the idea of dragon mating forcing humans to mate for hundreds of years would probably have less of an issue with that concept then we do today

[wierd]

However, it would also stand to reason, under the same set of circumstances-- that there would have been a strong need for, and subsequent providence for, dealing with the "Consequences" of such eventualities.

Given that this is a technologically advanced culture (that was able to genetically engineer telepathic fire-breathing lizards), you would think that there would be great advances in contraception, and increased options for choice, when and where choice becomes capable of being asserted, even if that choice is after the fact.

You would also have to consider, that early in the development of the culture, there would have been strong drive to create technological or biochemical means of supressing such "mating drive" in the human counterparts, that could be offered proactively (EG, part of a willful daily regimen. Such as say, with modern birth control pills.)

The fact that such a thing was not even suggested speaks volumes about the narrative intent of the author.  (It would be at least plausible that while the early culture would have been big on such options, later generations simply did not care as much, and it fell out of favor--or perhaps, that such work was undertaken, but no effective solution was found, or such measures disrupted the bond in dangerous ways.  That would still give you the same basic social structures, but not have a glaring hole of omission. It is not the same as "it does not exist." It not existing in the narrative universe is an indicator that the author did not even consider this aspect of their world, and had their eyes "elsewhere". Ahem.)

[NullForceOmega]

...Pern isn't a fully developed high-tech world.  It was a few thousands of colonist going to set up an agrarian colony out in the absolute hinterlands of the galaxy.  Who then suffered an extreme disaster in the form of an inimical life form that wrecked them completely.  The Dragons were an absolute last-ditch effort to develop a countermeasure, that only worked because the best genetic engineering specialist in the entirety of human controlled space decided to retire on the miserable little ball of rock.

Several thousand years have passed since then, without adequate metal deposits and almost no petrochemicals to work with, the couple of hundred thousand inhabitants of the planet have regressed to a feudal system of governance.  They are to concerned with near-subsistence levels of farming and hunting/fishing to expend what incredibly limited resources they have on complex forms of birth control.  And it isn't like they've managed to retain any significant level of education either.

They don't have chemical labs, they don't have industry, they barely have shipbuilding.  They live in caves and barely even have ceramics.

Edit: I am not defending the questionable elements of the story, this comment is purely about what can and cannot be done on Pern.