14 KiB
[RT][HSF] Living in Weirdtopia: Week One
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Author: u/DataPacRat Amateur Immortalist*
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Score: 48
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Created: 2016-05-16T05:03:04
Post:
Comments:
u/blazinghand [+7] Chaos Undivided (an hour later)
I just started reading, and I find myself quite entertained. The sumptuary laws and basically every part of the future legal bureaucracy, in all of its beauty and all of its horror, make me laugh every time we encounter them.
u/xamueljones [+6] My arch-enemy is entropy (6 hours later)
For everyone who is curious, there was a little discussion behind the world-building in this story from the Wednesday World-Building thread here.
u/Meneth32 [+2] (6 hours later)
I like the swearing by trees. Inspired by MLP Time Loops? :)
u/DataPacRat [+3] Amateur Immortalist (7 hours later)
Oak, I'm basically stealing it outright from there - I just wish I'd thought of more places to apply the idea in-story. :)
u/Chronophilia [+1] sci-fi ≠ futurology (8 hours later)
They’ve got genuine, honest-to-Klono reactionless thrusters.
Missed a chance there!
u/DataPacRat [+2] Amateur Immortalist (9 hours later)
Maybe, but how could I pass up the chance, when talking about reactionless thrusters, to make a reference to Doc Smith's Lensman series, via he of the carballoy claws and tungsten teeth?
u/Chronophilia [+1] sci-fi ≠ futurology (9 hours later)
Well that reference flew over my head. I really must read Lensman one of these days.
u/thrawnca [+4] Carbon-based biped (2 days later)
If you do, remember that when he wrote it, his tropes weren't clichés yet.
u/None [+2] (8 hours later)
[deleted]
u/DataPacRat [+9] Amateur Immortalist (8 hours later)
The art credits are at the bottom: Trunchbull for the skele-robo-rat, Cervelet for the robo-maid, Valy J. Thunderbeast for the comic, and ECMajor for the ostrich-taur.
you two could be
I enjoyed his comics for a number of years, generally able to ignore the times when his conservative Christian beliefs overrode good narrative, and willing to go with the flow when he banned me from his comics' forum. (IIRC, it was because I stated that I was helping to share the Wikileaks torrent.) Then he made the villain of one of his comics a straw-man scientist who claimed to want to prove biogenesis was possible by using a probability-manipulating device to repeat the phenomenon, without worrying about the collateral damage involved; and after spending a few moments thinking on it, I decided that his comics were no longer giving me the pleasure they once had, so deleted my RSS feeds. At the moment, I'm only subscribed to a few of his My Little Pony stories, and when those finish, that'll probably be it.
It's a bit of a shame - nobody who can get their comics on Atomic Rockets can be all bad, and he has some very interesting thoughts on death-killing in some of his MLP work - and things might change in the future, but for now, there's way too much good stuff to read, and figuring out how to filter it all is a never-ending project.
u/Chronophilia [+6] sci-fi ≠ futurology (9 hours later)
My opinion exactly. I'll add that he's a very good writer with absolutely no ability to manage his Internet fandom/hatedom, much like another well-known MLP fanwriter with a transhumanist streak. I still occasionally check in on the QQ comics, but if his politics don't dull my interest soon then the lack of updates will.
Hadn't finished the story at the time I wrote the above comment. Valerie's art was the one that reminded me of RHJ, the lighting and layout especially. I'll stop talking about him now.
Damn good story. You really front-loaded the weirdness; the blue rat body and the rule against bodymodding set my expectations high, but after a while Dan started to strike me as more weird than the people around him. By the end, the world stopped being Weirdtopia and started being a new normal. Just another story set in the Liberal-Democrat Techno Furry Quasi-Utopia (flaw: privacyless). Well okay, maybe there aren't any other stories in that exact setting, but most subsets of those five traits have been on this reddit.
Point is, you got across really well Dan's initial disorientation and his eventual adaptation to the new world.
Incidentally, if you haven't read Accelerando by Charles Stross, you'll love it.
u/DataPacRat [+8] Amateur Immortalist (9 hours later)
You sort of front-loaded the weirdness ... the world stopped being Weirdtopia and started being a new normal. Just another story set in the Liberal-Democrat Techno Furry Quasi-Utopia (flaw: privacyless). Well okay, maybe there aren't any other stories in that exact setting, but most subsets of those five traits have been on this reddit.
And you've just nailed down pretty much the exact reason why I stopped writing where I did. Coming up with a proper weirdtopia is /hard/, and I seemed to be having troubles adding more weirdness than had been in the literal dream that inspired the whole thing.
At the moment, I'm seeing if I can get some properly decent levels of weirdness, with a cross of ideas between a Dyson swarm of bubbles, accidentally-sapient squirrels, informational immunology, anglerfish mating practices and Voltron. Not sure I've got the chops to turn it into a proper story, but it's fun trying. :)
Accelerando
Read it, absorbed it, building new ideas on it. :)
u/Chronophilia [+2] sci-fi ≠ futurology (10 hours later)
Dyson swarm of bubbles, accidentally-sapient squirrels, informational immunology, anglerfish mating practices and Voltron
Interesting, but don't forget the small-scale weirdness too. "Privacy/cryo nut in a robot body" is one thing, "privacy/cryo nut in a robot body which is a blue rat skeleton" is another. You got a lot of weirdness mileage out of Dan dealing with his small size and the various opportunities/limitations it presents.
u/Empiricist_or_not [+2] Aspiring polite Hegemonizing swarm (19 hours later)
Informational immunology. Have you read Stross's Glass House?
u/DataPacRat [+1] Amateur Immortalist (a day later)
Indeed I have, and Curious Yellow is a curious thing.
(Though my musings are currently rather flexible, and I may end up focusing more on immunological evolution than, strictly, info-sci. If I knew what I was going to write, I'd have already written it down. :) )
u/TennisMaster2 [+1] (20 hours later)
How did you get them to do the art work for you? Currency of favors, coin, or goodwill?
u/DataPacRat [+3] Amateur Immortalist (a day later)
I'm not sure that those three categories carve reality at the joints very well, in this case. For one example, after looking for any potentially relevant images of ostrich-taurs (there's a rule-34 corollary involved), and finding more than one by ECMajor that were of higher quality than any original images I'd likely be able to commission, I politely asked for permission to place a picture on the page (with proper credit and a link), and was kindly granted it. For another, I asked a furry writer's group which furry artists are good at shiny stuff, and Trunchbull was the first response; a lot of people who draw furry art are in financially precarious situations (ie, out of 50-100 journal posts whose titles I skim daily, I can usually count on seeing an average of one or two "emergency commission requests" asking for immediate help with funds in exchange for art), and it would be more than impolite to ask an artist to create original content without compensating them for their limited time, so that one involved a cash transaction.
u/TennisMaster2 [+1] (a day later)
Yes, interesting to think about how the implied motivations and mechanisms of broad categorizations fail to represent the context of actual exchanges of goods and services on the micro scale. Thank you.
u/CCC_037 [+1] (2 days later)
At the moment, I'm only subscribed to a few of his My Little Pony stories, and when those finish, that'll probably be it.
If you subscribed to them on fimfiction, it's probably worth noting that (after a bit of a disagreement with the mods) he decided he was going to take all his stories and leave the site. He did leave a blog post that points at the new location of his stories, and some of them have updated since then, so you might have some new stuff ready to read...
u/DataPacRat [+2] Amateur Immortalist (2 days later)
Thanks, but I was aware of the kerfluffle and site-switch. In fact, it was one of the new chapters there that reminded me that he still has some interesting anti-deathist memes worth keeping an eye on.
u/CCC_037 [+1] (2 days later)
"Kerfluffle". That's a good description.
Okie dokie lokie, then. I liked your story, by the way.
u/abcd_z [+1] (2 days later)
"Kerfluffle". That's a good description.
Honestly, the whole thing was a cluster-fuffle.
u/Towerowl [+2] (16 hours later)
Very very enjoyable read. Kind of sad you might not update it, but also glad you don't just keep updating with bad chapter when you run out of steam like some webwritter do. Now looking for your other stuff ...
u/xamueljones [+1] My arch-enemy is entropy (6 hours later)
Is this supposed to be a one-shot (about the first week) or the first chapter of a new series?
Is the main character another author self-insert like SI was?
I just read through this and...I'm going to wait until tonight before giving feedback, to reread it and think about what I've just read. Because while this story is very dialogue heavy, it's fairly fast-paced with a lot going on (and a lot of topics such as law are unfamiliar for me to read) and at 7 in the morning with me reading this while eating breakfast, I'm pretty sure I'm not quite getting all I want to understand.
Still I loved the blue metal rat-skeleton picture. Looks very pretty and exotic.
u/DataPacRat [+7] Amateur Immortalist (7 hours later)
Is this supposed to be a one-shot (about the first week) or the first chapter of a new series?
I'm calling it a one-shot, while retaining the right to write more in the setting if I'm able to think of further ideas that do it justice.
Is the main character another author self-insert like SI was?
Indeed. In fact, the whole thing is based on a dream I had a month or so ago, which I wrote out in the form of the first section; and then I kept having a few new thoughts on further details to add.
this story is very dialogue heavy
That seems to be how I prefer to write in general. But if Homestuck could get away with almost all of its text in the form of chatlogs, then this seems more of a personal quirk than an outright lapse in my writing abilities. (I've got more than my share of those to try to improve, as it is.)
Still I loved the blue metal rat-skeleton picture. Looks very pretty and exotic.
I could throw in a good-sized rambling set of musings here, on the interplay between word and picture, heavily influenced by Scott McCloud's "Understanding Comics" (with minor digressions into typography and converting file formats). But it's probably best that I limit myself to saying that there are at least a few advantages to standing at the intersection of /r/transhuman and /r/furry . :)
u/nolrai [+1] (14 hours later)
It doesn't feel like to much dialog to me.
u/DataPacRat [+1] Amateur Immortalist (14 hours later)
In other stories in the past, readers have dinged me about too much rapid-fire dialogue with insufficient other detail, so they were confused about who was saying what. Trying to help the reader keep track was a main reason why, in the second court scene, a (mostly) Canadian used 'Your Honour' while a (mostly) American used 'Your Honor'.
u/nolrai [+3] (a day later)
I don't think that helped, as I don't notice spelling unless I am reading foreign names, but the pragmatics of the conversations meant that the only time I was even momentarily confused was during the last conversation.
Then again I am at the 96 th percentile in IQ, and 4th for spelling, given my age and education.
u/MoralRelativity [+1] (a day later)
Love it. Thanks for sharing.
u/Lugnut1206 [+1] (a day later)
What's interesting about this cliffhanger is that due to the circumstances, and the blurb at the end, we know that his body was recovered and he was simply restarted.
As opposed to, say, another off-site backup coming online.
Major shame this is just a oneshot...