The trouble is, if you go too far towards being polite, the label that applies is "doormat".

Starships are all work and no fun.

We're currently living with a generation of established novelists who are embarrassingly out of date with respect to social networking, internet skills, and so on.

In general, a little controversy isn't harmful: if anything, it gets people interested.

If an idea is compelling enough it'll stick in my head until I am forced to write it. If it's forgettable, who cares?

I do not click on random youtube videos.

Writing your own story around the same ideas is not plagiarism; at worst, it's being unoriginal.