Write a story or poem using the word pulp.

I just found the word a little weird haha

It's randomly generated, some words inspire people more than others. Don't get too worried about making it relevant, it's just a jumping-off point, the story is the thing.

For example last week's prompt word was 'side' - though I haven't written them yet it inspired two stories, one set in Cold War Berlin (either side of the Iron Curtain) another about someone playing the table-top game of pool where side is used to make certain shots.

That sort of thing, now I have to consider this one ;)

Bingo

Vix

https://www.furaffinity.net/view/53415593/

I'll write a little later, now at work.

https://www.furaffinity.net/view/53416002

“If people cannot write well, they cannot think well, and if they cannot think well, others will do their thinking for them.” - George Orwell

Oh so true - even more so today with the hopeless excuse for writers for all those crappy movies coming out these days. You can tell they didn't read when they were young - there's no imagination or thoughts in their little heads! Too many of them can't come up with a single new idea/plot, so they badly 'remake' things others have done - without actually studying how and why things were written the way they were the first time around.

When they changed the first Star Wars movie so that Hans didn't shoot first I was surprised at the number of people that didn't/couldn't understand how much that action reduced the change in Hans between the beginning to the end of the movie. 'You cannot have mountains without valleys - you cannot have a high without a low to compare it to ...'

(oops - meant to place this elsewhere, but it fits here too. )

A good example of this is old vs new Star Trek*, the difference is encapsulated in the scene where new Kirk admits falsifying records to his Commander after disobeying the Prime Directive to save an endangered people. I had pretty much the same expression and reaction as Spock when he stated that. It's quite clear that whoever wrote that interaction has never had a proper job in their entire lives, especially in a disciplined organisation**

You could get away with screwing up, it happens to everyone on occasion, you could get away with disobeying orders, if you can justify why you did so, but there is no way you would ever get away with falsifying records, you'd be out so fast your feet wouldn't touch the ground, it's absolutely verboten and for good reason.

That scene should have had Kirk saying something along these lines, "Yes I disobeyed orders, I believe I was justified in doing so and under similar circumstances I would do it again. However I'm aware the Prime Directive exists for a reason and I accept whatever sanction you choose to impose."

That's the reaction of an adult and it gives his Commander an out to be magnanimous if he chooses to be. In the end everyone walks away satisfied with no loss of face on either part.

Instead we get Kirk the Smirking Teenager and a Star Trek that was apparently written by and for children.

*I'm actually not a fan of the series but I do admire its optimistic view of the future.

**Star Fleet is kind of quasi-military.

***there's no way I'm only making two asides.

Agreed, and I'm also laughing at all these 'remakes' Hollywood and Disney are flopping all over.

Let's take this old movie that did great and change it - what could possibly go wrong? Far too many of them remove any build up or hurtles/loses the old hero had to overcome to win in the end, making them into very boring Mary-Sues ... and Mary-Sue is the right term considering the number of times they've removed a 'guy' that wasn't perfect and just replaced him with a 'gal' that can do no wrong. (no character buildup, just the perfect hero.)

Then there's the problem that most of them are trying to feed us propaganda (98lb gal can take down an entire football team without breaking a sweat, all men are dumb and need the opposite sex to save them.)

Me, I'm watching the older shows/movies and reading old books (which isn't making Hollywood and Disney any money!)

I stopped watching TV a long time ago and the last movie I saw at the cinema was Top Gun Maverick, which was rather excellent and with a minimum of wokeness. Like most people I have no issue at all with diversity in entertainment, but for some reason it seems to come with all sorts of other weirdness like you mention. There was a rather good short movie I watched on Youtube some time ago that had an entirely black or Asian cast, at one point a white man had a single line of dialogue, but the whole thing didn't feel woke to me as the characters seemed like actual people and the white person just a human being making a comment that everyone else could agree with.

Though mostly like you I watch and read older media and it was not entirely lacking in diversity, take two of my favourite movies the mid-90's Contact which had a female lead, and the early 80's '2010: The Year We Make Contact' which had a female Soviet commander of their spaceship. Again in both cases they felt like real people and not some thinly veiled cipher trying to force through a message.

Disney has always been overrated, I've never understood the fascination with them, even before they descended into full on supervillianry.

The profession that Starfleet is not military is a load of horseshit, and it's the one hill I'd die on in a crossreferencing argument with Gene himself. Naval structure on a lifeboat closed-loop STL or FTL ship with finite resources and organics aboard has to be maintained, respect of rank in either direction and adherence to duty, habit and self-care and if that doesn't happen, every airlock becomes a murderdoor, every knife in the canteen ready to cannibalize and set to torn, bloody flesh if someone loses their temper, their mind or their last clean duty uniform.

You can say the phasers/phase cannons/disruptors or other particle EM weapons are incidental; that the shields are there to keep the deflectors from being too busy making sure the ship's pro-light antiinertia doesn't turn a passing cloud of rock particulate into a scattershot field capable of tearing duranium hull plating into cheesecloth. But that's what they're for, to make sure nothing worse happens if something a little worse comes their way.

Starfleet is a naval fleet, and its officers and crewmen are military personnel. But it's not war their remit sets them to go to by design. That's an option, a bad and unkind option, even a nuclear option, but an option nonetheless. Order and discipline is not a straitjacket if you know how to take it off and on again, and have the choice by breadth of duty and responsiblity. Perspective, like anything else, is crucial when you're trusting a crew of 1,200 other living beings with desires, horrors and biases not to let the side down and be the murderer of everyone on board because of a lack of trust in the rest of the crew.

A starship is not a warship, and Starfleet officers are not warriors. But it and they can both be because it's necessary, not because they should be. The Ares-class is a good example, and Kelvar Garth and Prelude To Axanar are a chilling reminder of what must sometimes need be done by kind men and women forced into fisticuffs by men designed as breakers and destructors, and their anger must summon the wrath and fire of horror the human heart does not easily slip from gaol.

We know, how angry we can get. That is why Starfleet is not made of warmen: because it if were, we would always know war.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AifGNCho3c8

https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/qb8kidkhpxdpg77a8ms91/cohost-TwopawTarnished-Silver-9.pdf?rlkey=o1fc26w2v1sw7tzupx5yzbz28&dl=0

-2Paw.

Relax, as I said I don't watch the show.

I have however seen a few episodes and some of the movies and have read about it, so I'm not totally unfamiliar. And as for whether Starfleet is military -

https://scifi.stackexchange.com/que.....nization#54168

And most specifically from the shows creator himself - 'Gene Roddenberry, in the series' original Writer/Director's Guide (the "bible") was very specific on the subject;

Starfleet is not a military organisation.'

Why are you telling me to relax? I was being honest, and plain. And I disagree with Gene: it is a military organization. Not a military, I'm being specific. Do you think every combat group trained for war is fighting it every day? That's not what we are meant to do, now nor I doubt when our descendants live three hundred years away and abaft. If I thought Gene understood his creation wholly I wouldn't be arguing the point. It wasn't poor intent but Trek is bigger than every writer, every artist, every fan, actor and the Great Bird himself.

That's not betrayal of purpose or the fandom or franchise. That's understanding that everyone is imperfect, by our own design. That's why we need to take care, have an extra backup, why a starship of exploration needs combat-grade EM inertial transfer shields and intercraft weaponry, sometimes things like nuclear HALO drop artifacts and massdrivers.

They're there so ideally they never will need to be used, but must be present in case they are. I'm not angry nor am I stressed out; I am thinking clearly. I understand that might not be expected of me.

-2Paw.

Because you seemed to be rather invested in this, and that's fine, you're a fan of the franchise and I'm not. What's your opinion on the more recent Trek series out of curiosity, because they seem rather different than what went before.

I am invested in it, yes. I apologize for my prior tone and tack; I shouldn't assume you know my past, where I've been and the things in my head that help my heartsong become itself. I'm sorry, I've had a great deal of trouble telling people things because it seems to meet sustained proof that nobody's listening when I do, even if they ask in the first place, and I don't know how keenly I can trust the veracity of that telling.

I have been winnowing and thinking and bearing clearsight, and I don't know how happy I am. I did not mean whatever dissonance or anger I do feel to bear down upon you, and that was both tremendously discourteous, rude and unkind, and I apologize profusely for that. I will do better going forth; that is at least something I can do.

To respond to your question, I was unimpressed with the first modum of Discovery. I know where it's meant to be stuck in canon, and I don't think I have a problem, or at least as much of them with the changes they've made- basic Federation hierarchical structure, the conceptual business and the Klingon makeup and prosthetics, amongst them. I don't like how they initially turned the Men of Q'o'nos into a mystery species that barely anyone remembers (but the fucking Mommy-issue, emotionally ontolomalformed Vulcans who know everything better than the humans they infantilize, right?), well but the one Mary Sue Human Mike who gets to be Spock's unlikely little sister, for Surak's sake, and she's gonna tell us what to do 'boot them!

The Battle At The Binary Stars/The Vulcan Hello was actually really good sci-fi, and was good Trek with a bad implementation because it was tossed into the Trekwaters and we with them, old fans and new. For at any hypersensitively detected moment and brook of borne insult to the perfection it was, any oldschool Trekker like me raised a beef, a reasonable argument, nope! We were 'bad', and it wasn't 'Trek' anymore, or more to the point it wasn't ours. There was even an article I found that said and implied quite literally this. Gatekeeping by the very people who insisted they were being gatekept.

https://them0vieblog.com/2018/08/24.....ld-gracefully/

Cannibalism of what was, the dreams dreamt and those who dreamed them were outmoded and retired, like Nexus-6 Replicants needing ventilation. This is not Trek to me. It's not a Take, it's a Give. And this was the mask these persons wore.

Trek and sci-fi is great at its best when people can sit down and talk, rather than bashing their heads across the table and ideologically falseflagging the heck out of each other. The problem with Discovery's debut is the wholly unconstructive, Borg-assimilatory manner with which it hit the small screen and the fandom; it changed everything and did it too fast, like the assumption was everyone would be on board. Of course, what that says to me is Trek's old guard was meant to be bumrushed and then told to like it, that it wasn't ours. That if we disagreed, even slightly or on a valid speck of technicality, we Went In The Bin.

And Discovery turned out to be fucking incredible! Introducing the Discoprise, really digging into the meat of Christopher Pike and Una Riley (Number One) and the idea that the Enterprise and its journey was not the centre of Trek, but an equal partner to the Discovery and every other ship in the fleet. There were no Lower Decks, if used literally; I absolutely love the new animated series (and one of the directing heads, Kim Arndt, is a formerly very active Furry Artist in limited activity now who I knew in the late 1990s on Yerf!), to be clear.

But the idea of any crewperson being unimportant, undervalued or ignored was not of Trek, or at least not what I was shown the path upon and forth as a Trekker. Mistakes could and would get make, and people could get hurt or die, but it was not because someone literally didn't give a shit or took care to be unkind.

That was where Discovery set its feet, unfortunately, and why its precedent has vacillated through NuTrek as a bias and as a warning, no matter how obtusely or appropriately optimist the viewer of any generation. Like arrogant and stemming human beings who choose blindness they believe is confidence always do, the secret flaw they built into Discovery's initial FTL shotput has never wholly parted its stink from anything that's come abaft and past since then.

-2Paw.

Thank you, appreciated, but don't worry tone is difficult to get across in text.

And interesting, thanks, sounds like there's good and bad points to the more recent Trek series.

I liked most of the earlier Star Trek, the last couple didn't look worth paying to see.

For another 'space naval fleet' series I'd suggest Honor Harrington if you haven't already found it.

I know my notifications are indicating you responded to me, Redbear but the considerable and deep post 'drop' between my post above and yours just above this one (below the considerable breadth of conversation I've been sharing with Alex) my vision is having difficulty lining yours up with close enough parallel to your immediate response, to my post further above; the Notification link isn't dropping me in the thread anywhere near your post or mine. I wanted to make sure this was in fact in response to me before I posted you in reply (other than this request for verification) as I'd rather not rudely intrude if I'm incorrect.

-2Paw.

Yes, I was commenting to you as you seem to like a good story.

As to Honor Harrington, this is free to read at Baen Books: https://www.baen.com/Chapters/06713.....0671319752.htm

As to the writer's style, here's the first couple lines:

"That looks like your snotty, Senior Chief."

The Marine sentry's low-pitched voice exuded an oddly gleeful sympathy. It was the sort of voice in which a Marine traditionally informed one of the Navy's "vacuum-suckers" that his trousers had just caught fire or something equally exhilarating, and Senior Chief Petty Officer Roland Shelton ignored the jarhead's tone with the lofty disdain of any superior life form for an evolutionary inferior. Yet it was a bit harder than usual this time as his eyes followed the corporal's almost invisible nod and picked the indicated target out of the crowded space dock gallery. She was certainly someone's snotty, he acknowledged without apparently so much as looking in her direction. Her midshipwoman's uniform was immaculate, but both it and the tethered counter-grav locker towing behind her were so new he expected to hear her squeak. There was something odd about that locker, too, as if something else half its size had been piggybacked onto it, although he paid that little attention. Midshipmen were always turning up with oddball bits and pieces of personalized gear that they hoped didn't quite violate Regs. Half the time they were wrong, but there would be time enough to straighten that out later if this particular snotty came aboard Shelton's ship. And, he conceded, she seemed to be headed for War Maiden's docking tube, although that might simply be a mistake on her part.

He hoped.

Thank you very kindly, good chummer; and in turn for your patience in my asking confirmation before my response. I feel very sure I have one or two 1990s-2000s era Honor Harrington series print novels out on my hallway bookshelf and I've heard of the series into the bargain, but have never intently met to reading it.

I certainly won't dismiss my enjoyment of another author's unique take on war and peace in their potential sci-fi future of STL/FTL, but beyond my more blunt tone in addressing it earlier today in my posts sharing with Atomic Alex, my own reading of Trek when it's done right, or my own writ's take on Trek, will suffice for what I need in a thematic and narrative environment that's tight and sheer to a similar narrative. That said, I may invest in some of David Weber's Kindle-Amazon novels and thanks to your linked sharing, some good complimentary posted reading of his work on Baen's website is that much the better; so thank you very kindly as well for your sharing therein with me.

It's not military sci-fi by far, but my fellow author and local Toronto friend Robert (J. Sawyer) put up his novella- and is probably one of my very favourite novellas, ever- titled The Shoulders Of Giants as a freebie reading online as well, and if you or anyone else who reads this post would enjoy a peek and read, I'd be very chuffed I was able to share Robert's story with you on his behalf.

https://www.sfwriter.com/stshould.htm

-2Paw.

Wow, a very interesting read, many thanks.

(Who knows, it might even get my muse suggesting things for my silly tale! )

It did for me, and you are wonderfully welcome! The Thursday Prompt I contributed it to was only an early monologue and beginning, inspired by The Shoulders Of Giants, coupled with the 'remote' holoform brachiate-asset datastorage projectors a friend of mine on F-List suggested to me and we developed together, led to my beginning work on Not Even A Mouse, a novella set two-hundred-and-fifty years into the future of a transhumanism/macrogenetic engineering novel trilogy I've been working on, set in an analogue to our modern day that splits off from the world we know three years prior to the beginning of their World War II.

-2Paw.

https://www.furaffinity.net/view/53.....che=1692896599

https://www.furaffinity.net/view/53425597/

https://www.furaffinity.net/view/53428642/

Vix

A late submission for last week. Vixxy suggested I post it here.

https://www.furaffinity.net/view/53424496/

The continuation can be found on my page for those who are interested.

So... does this technically make everything we write here..."Pulp Fiction"?
I remember Quentin Tarantino having an eponymous film.
https://www.furaffinity.net/view/53439082/

https://www.furaffinity.net/view/53440443/

-2Paw.

This one was for last week - Side - https://www.furaffinity.net/view/53450620/

https://www.furaffinity.net/view/53.....oad-successful

https://www.furaffinity.net/view/53475257/

https://www.furaffinity.net/view/53484393/

Very, very last minute, but I'm back from moving to the new place! https://www.furaffinity.net/view/53498223/