Posts made by Olo

Toys are for toying with by Docop

Bathers by @Minutia

Sally’s Work by Jackbauer66

@littlest-lily

A Gift For You by @Shardro

@littlest-lily

I’d like to take you out too.” Take you… outside. Right…
After that rather stressful couple of minutes, I start to get a hold of myself again as I carry the takeout bag

“One Evie to go, extra curiosity, hold the self-doubt.”

She’s wearing her usual gray strip of fabric looped around her top half, tied in a bow just above her tailbone, like a present begging to be unwrapped.

Has Aiden been Naughty or Nice?

On Tumblr I once participated in a rather heated exchange about whether tinies could give meaningful consent. As usual, it came down to full and frank communication, which both Aiden and Evie are struggling with, but I have faith in them.

I wonder how much prior romantic/sexual experience each of them has. Might be time for Aiden’s former high-school sweetheart to show up…

Nell by Seta

sizeMatters couple3 by catster

@tiny-ivy I hope you encounter someone with the appropriate imagination and appetite.

Michelle Waits For You by EpicIllusionist

@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.

@Mrgoblinging7 Depressingly, in “One Little Ship” the writers decided that normal-sized oxygen molecules would be too big for the miniature crewmembers’ lungs to absorb, so they were restricted to the environment inside the shuttle.

@i-am-insane That reminds me of the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode “Hollow Pursuits”, wherein Barclay compensates for his insecurities by (among other things) making the hologram version of Riker less than five feet tall.

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?