meme

trustycoffeemug
(n.) 1) a trait which is inherited in a non-physical, non-genetic way, such as language. 2) the most insufferable goddam thing you can conceive of if it cloned itself, had sex with the clone and then ate the resulting babies for the +2 insufferability bonus.

princess

trustycoffeemug
(n.) some rich toff's daughter with expensive clothes who exists to be rescued by the hero in approximately seventy percent of all stories featuring them. we always skip over the bit where she's later brutally killed in a peasant rebellion.

science fiction

trustycoffeemug
also "sci-fi" (skiffy) if you're afraid of using too many syllables.

a genre of fiction, consisting of stories that, broadly speaking, dare to imagine new inventions, technologies, or scientific discoveries, and how they would affect the world. often this will consist of showing us how humanity would use these new discoveries to destroy itself or oppress each other; there are startlingly few stories where police using psychics to stop crime, or society having a robot taskforce, or people upgrading themselves with cyborg limbs, actually turns out to be a *good* thing (though this may just be because stories where only good things happen are boring).

some concepts you should know about so you won't look like a dweeb in front of sci-fi fans:
* the future, where a lot of these stories tend to take place
* aliens, folks who come from off this island earth. show up in a lot of sci-fi stories, usually invading us, getting invaded by us, or just sort of hanging around bars as a way for the special effects team to show off.
* robot, artificially constructed people, because naturally you'd want your smartphone to look like a person
* ftl: faster-than-light travel, required in any sci-fi story with space travel, or else it would take millennia to finish
* time travel: being able to leave today and go to yesterday, or tomorrow. prone to logical paradoxes.
* hard science fiction: sci-fi that tries to be as realistic as possible. is not a form of pornography
* space opera: stories where people fly around in spaceships and have fantastic adventures on other planets
* cyberpunk and other punk; stories that show how technological process won't fix society's usual problems

indicia

trustycoffeemug
(n.) a way of saying "distinguishing characteristics," when you feel that just saying "distinguishing characteristics" just wouldn't cut it

"hey, this has all the indicia of a run on the banks, george!"

illuminati

trustycoffeemug
the purported secretive cabal consisting of key influential individuals in the many halls of power, and which engineers globally insidious undertakings of all descriptions, including the activities of satanic cults, the cia, the military, ancient egyptians, atlantis, alien invaders, the entertainment industry, the pharmaceutical industry, the arms industry, the confectionery industry, unhinged lone wolf assassins, the knights templar, your mom, french revolutionaries, freemasons, and underappreciated webcartoonists of the 2010s who just sort of stopped updating with no warning one day.

... but not coofl. definitely not coofl.

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