Best posts made by Olo

@RavenRose4242 “That, that’s just a distortion, right? One of those trick mirrors?”

@mrgoblinging7 It’s so weird when tiny ladies pretend to be dolls, when you know they abused their dolls when they were kids.

@littlest-lily Aiden isn’t going to get a wink of sleep.

@RavenRose4242 Any game involving a spinning wheel.

@jitensha You know what we need around here? A custom “mouthplay” emoji that’s a mouth with a tiny woman’s head and torso sticking out.

@littlest-lily Lots of thoughts, but right now I am just picturing Aiden holding Evie and remembering the first time I let an infant fall asleep on my chest and I was perfectly content to be a mattress for the whole night.

Bumping this up because it remains true. Sinema gets the teeth.

@smolchlo I thought it said “BURP,” but then I would think that.

@foreverlurk PoutineLover said:

chu pas Français, chu Québ’

No need to apologize.

@littlest-lily Then you best pick your virtual reality roleplaying partners with great care. Or you can just order the vanilla Giant Gentleman NPC with Extra Affection.

Shame about the watermark.

@miss-lillipants I’m totally stealing that whistle idea.

Sometimes when I’m reading science fiction I come across technological ideas that can, in the “right” hands, have sizey applications. As we know, the Square-Cube Law pretty much eliminates any realistic possibility of true giants or tiny people, at least those who might interact with “normal” people. I suppose one could imagine aliens from a different evolutionary environment or gravitational field that could be considered giant or tiny intelligent life, but to me such a size encounter wouldn’t be much different than interacting with blue whales or field mice; there’s awe and wonder, but it’s just not the same as meeting another person who is impossibly larger or smaller than you. For that you need either magic or some hand-waving away of known physical laws.

Even in “hard” science-fiction, however, one can find a number of ways to interface with the human mind in order to experience a virtual or artificial environment, sometimes just for communication but also, tantalizingly, for recreation. Of course, I am hyper-alert for any such scenario that includes characters who intentionally seek out simulations featuring otherwise-impossible size differential.

One example of a science-fiction universe that has multiple avenues for such size experiences is Iain M. Banks’s Culture series. Humans living in The Culture are in a post-scarcity utopia, including dramatic life-extension and digital backups of one’s consciousness that can be restored to a new body if one is killed. Artificial intelligence, genetic engineering, and robotics are sufficiently far advanced as to seem like magic to us here trapped on a melting planet ruled by plutocrats.

It would be trivial for The Culture to manufacture androids of a desired size that a human could remotely pilot, just like in the Avatar movies (or in the series The Peripheral). They would have all the appearances and sensations of a normal human, just extremely large or small. They could talk, hear, feel, and have every other human experience as they encountered normal people. Presumably, the paternalistic Culture wouldn’t permit giant androids to menace human habitats, but there could easily be preserves set aside for such recreation.

More sophisticated would be engineered organic bodies into which a human consciousness could be transferred. Such bodies could be super-resilient or just as vulnerable as a normal human. With the “backup” capability, a human mind in a, say, tiny engineered body could experience the world from a reduced perspective and if they were killed (as occasionally happens to imaginary tinies), their consciousness could be retrieved, including (if so desired) the fatal experience. In the Culture series, there is a particularly cruel species that has engineered food animals that resemble miniature versions of themselves for the sheer sport of hunting them.

Of course, the simplest option is virtual reality, which The Culture has perfected to a high art. One could interact with other people, each at the size of their choosing, and AI-generated NPCs could provide the desired social environment for whatever size scenario one is in the mood for that day. Virtual scenario authors and artists would create endless narrative options, genres, and worlds to play in, and if you still couldn’t find something to your taste, give your preferences to an AI who can probably quickly generate something that scratches your itch.

I long ago gave up on the hope of ever directly experiencing true size-differential, but I still cling to the idea that technology might give us the next best thing. What would you do with these possibilities?

@smolchlo Olive oil.

@littlest-lily said:

I keep having moments of pausing and wondering “should I share my stuff here? There’s nothing sexual in this one at all, there isn’t even anything romantic!”

It all contributes to the collective faith in, as Aborigen put it, Someplace This Was Real.