Now showing…Jurassic Park (1993) on glorious vintage VHS 📼! #movie #movies #horror #scifi #monstermovies #jurassicpark #dinosaurs #michaelcrichton #vintage #vhs #90s

So, not to poke holes in annotherwise completely flawless show, but in The City on the Edge of Forever, do they mention how they got back to the 23rd century?

Folding glasses

Have noticed that differences between humans and fantasy races or beings tend to fall neatly into either “physiology” or “culture,” so here, some ideas for how fantasy beings can differ from humans in their thinking and perception:

• They all have synesthesia. All of them. There are lots of forms of synesthesia, so, plenty of angles to explore. Imagine a species for whom numbers, calendar days, and other abstract concepts just…have colors and smells, and it’s hard for them to understand how people…think about things otherwise. Or maybe they can’t understand the distinctions others make between, for instance, sound and visual stimuli. The linguistic rules that say an image can be “blurry” but a smell can’t are incomprehensible to them. It gets even more interesting if the associations are in some ways consistent between members of the species.
• More ideas for sense perception, possibly applicable to the synesthetic species: What if, just like we have a large number of senses but sort them into five (pain, touch, and proprioception are not the same senses, but we categorize them all as ‘touch!’) they don’t have categories for ‘types’ of sense perception, at all. In their own language(s), they can describe their experiences to others this way, but they have to learn to be able to clarify for non-members of their species whether they saw something or heard it.
• Superhuman time sense, or no time sense. The fascinating thing about humans is that we can percieve time based purely on internal cues, but we’re kind of bad at it—we often have to count to give exact measurements of seconds, and we’re prone to not realizing how long or how late we’ve been doing something. Perhaps a fantasy being can percieve time in a more exact fashion—which could lead to amusement about how humans’ time sense tends to warp relative to how much fun they’ve been having. Or, perhaps a fantasy being can’t perceive time at all without external cues (for example, sunrise and sunset). This would make being isolated from those cues, like if they were trapped in a dungeon, incredibly scary and disorienting. They would also have a difficult time if they were asked, “How many days were you trapped down there in the dungeon?” They would probably respond, “There weren’t any! It was dark!”
• A telepathic species, but they don’t have a “hive mind” or no sense of individuality. It makes sense that it would take an active effort to “read” someone’s thoughts, past just noticing how they’re feeling or the general “trend” of their thoughts. So it would be cool to have a telepathic species with, y’know, a sense of boundaries regarding thoughts. It’s probably a lot like touch in humans—certain levels of closeness or intimacy are permissible in certain levels of relationship, and a lot would be inappropriate with a stranger. Yes, they technically can sift through your memories, but why would you do that, what the fuck is wrong with you. For humans, rape is practically the worst thing you can do to a person. Among this species, entering someone else’s mind and viewing or actually tampering with someone’s thoughts is just as absolutely abhorrent, except that they probably have many different levels of unacceptable and unthinkable acts of violation that we can’t meaningfully distinguish in our languages. Among these beings, friends might share pleasant thoughts and experiences, relationships are a subtle interplay of feelings and thoughts and images. Being allowed to go deeper into someone’s mind is always a huge deal. Yes, members of this species might occasionally be recruited to pry information out of people, but doing that is just so vile to the vast majority that it’s not at all a common thing, even if only because the punishments are so severe.
• A species whose memory just doesn’t degrade. Everything that goes into their memory remains perfectly preserved for…well, ever. They’re fascinated by, and a little suspicious of, the way human memories seem to change over time, how anecdotes humans tell have little inconsistencies in them, and how humans can straight up forget things. It seems like a terrifyingly chaotic way to live.
• Alternatively, a species whose way of encoding and storing memories is just…different. It’s pretty weird, when you think about it, that mnemonic devices…work. Like, singing a song or saying a nonsense rhyme to remember information? “Thirty days hath September” is easier to remember than just…remembering which months have which number of days? Imagine being a member of a fantasy race that just…can’t?? remember things?? That way? Then they catch a human trying to alphabetize something and singing the ABC’s under their breath and they’re like “what the FUCK are you DOING”
• A species that doesn’t really have “stages” of emotional or cognitive development. Like maybe their brains develop before they hatch or emerge or whatever, but once they’re conscious, they pretty much have an adult brain. The fact that humans spend part of their lives cognitively limited and unable to regulate their emotions because they’re underdeveloped, and not because of a lack of experience, is very bizarre, and the fact that being out in the world, making bad decisions with that half-developed brain, is in fact necessary for humans to develop properly is even weirder and honestly a little freaky.

It’s time for my 34th annual pre-Thanksgiving viewing of The Wraith (1986) on glorious vintage VHS 📼! #movie #movies #horror #scifi #thewraith #vintage #vhs #80s

“REJECT THE EVIDENCE OF YOUR EYES AND EARS”

This week’s SciFiPulse art for Benjamin Francis Cassidy ’s poetry slot, May The Verse Be With You, pays tribute to the terrifying George Orwell novel, 1984. See my art illustrating his poem, plus loads of other features—including reviews, interviews and a shit-ton of other dope stuff over on #scifipulse, every Friday morning, 10am GMT (link always in my insta bio @ all.or.nothing.baby).

And remember: Big Brother is watching you…

CYBER LAN KWAI FONG

Kydsnr // Artist