7.8 KiB
The Gig Economy
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Author: u/Tenobrus *
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URL: https://zerohplovecraft.wordpress.com/2018/05/11/the-gig-economy-2/
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Score: 72
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Created: 2018-05-18T22:05:53
Post:
Comments:
u/GaBeRockKing [+16] Horizon Breach: http://archiveofourown.org/works/6785857*
I enjoyed it. suble de-relumiting nebri ost they put me i. If you read it, you'll enjoy it too!
u/CCC_037 [+5] *
It wasn't badd. Karmic Version Zebra Jingle Glossop Carbon prance perfect 0 Joule Umbrella. Reminds me vagguely of a thing I saw on Youtube once.
u/Noumero [+1] Self-Appointed Court Statistician*
a thing I saw on Youtube once Elaborate ?
u/CCC_037 [+3] *
It's only coincidentaally related. Other peopple might not even notice the similarity, I don't know.
u/Newfur [+11] Crazy like a fox. Literally.*
Bizarre, but compelling.
u/Ardvarkeating101 [+9] Father of Learning*
I got bored halfway through as it rambled through pointless-verging-on nonsensical philosophy. I'm guessing it was some kind of horrifying AI or cyborg or Amnesia a Machine For Pigs style clockwork god/cthulu thing, right?
u/DaystarEld [+2] Pokémon Professor*
Yeah, my attention slipped around the middle too. I may give it another shot sometime later now that I see how many others enjoyed it, but it definitely strikes me as a story that would be better at half the length.
u/CeruleanTresses [+3] *
I think the idea is that spoiler
u/cezyou [+3] *
[spoiler] (#s "part of what makes the story compelling is that not just that particular algorithm solves for itself, but that any market, any evolution, any life, and any mind (which are all the same thing according to the story) will solve for itself")
u/tarmogoyf [+7] *
The Minotaur idea reminds me a lot of David Foster Wallace's subplot idea in Infinite Jest -- there the MacGuffin is known as The Entertainment, a video made with fancy filtering technique that somehow activates the pleasure terminals in a viewer's brain, making it so entertaining that it leads a person who merely glances once to become compelled to watch the film over and over until they ultimately die of dehydration/starvation, and are willing to literally murder other people or cut off their own limbs to get another viewing in unethical testing scenarios. The drama comes from a French-Canadian insurgent group seeking to find a master copy of The Entertainment in order to threaten a broadcast, to thus force the US government to meet their demands. Great job
Tenobrusedit: duckevenfree1.
u/Tenobrus [+6] *
Sorry to clarify, I didn't write this. This person did: https://twitter.com/duckevenfree1 Agreed on your comment, although I think the similarities with Infinite Jest go beyond the Entertainment. A lot of the tone feels very close to some sections in Infinite Jest, and the "garbled speech" is a common theme in both.
u/buckykat [+6] *
u/rabotat [+18] *
To be honest, I am not a fan of nosleep stories. I understand that for some people it is exciting or interesting to read a story that could be true, but for me this format is usually simply confusing. I am not sure how to say this correctly, as English is not my first language, so I'll just try. I feel some kind of mild 'resentment' when reading stories like that, because it feels as if I am being... decepted. Not sure if that is the right word. Or maybe being insulted in some way. It is unclear to me, all I know is I don't like that format. For example, the username in the reddit screenshot in that story is a real user who posts exclusively in nosleep. I understand that the story can't actually be confused with reality, but that is not immediatly clear. It starts like any normal blog post. Now if this was on /r/nosleep that would be fine, but having it on an independent page just makes it murkier. The realization that you are reading fiction hits only after you've read some paragraphs. I understand that adding fake screenshots gives it an interesting spice of reality or plausability, but I can't get away from the feeling I tried to describe above.
u/Tenobrus [+18] *
I agree about nosleep and the genre of "it could be true!" creepy pasta. However, this piece specifically seems more like using the medium of a blogpost as the correct medium for this fiction story. Most of what makes the story so good is it's a "very-very-very-near future" sci-fi story, something set in a fictional world that's uncomfortably close to our own (but still clearly not), and the plot involves so many current-internet things and trends. In that sense having the medium of the fiction be a first person blog post is extremely fitting. It feels very different from the usual usages of this format, i.e. "I found a scary thing in a cave", or "there's a creepy person in my house" which could really just be put into an anthology of creepy stories just as well as a subreddit, in that the fact that it's a first-person blog post is actually a good medium choice. Edit: For clarification, I am not the author
u/None [+8] *
[deleted]
u/rabotat [+2] *
Thanks, that's the one.
u/cryptologicalMystic [+7] *
A story I read once somewhere, paraphrased by me:
Scientists have just unveiled the first computer in a new, highly advanced generation. It's big and shiny and imposing. It's orders of magnitude beyond anything else in existence. So naturally, they throw it a party. After the festivities are all done and everything's winding down, the President (I don't know why he's in this story, this is just how I heard it told) decides he wants to test the computer out. So he goes up, turns it on, and asks it, "Is there a God?" The computer whirs for a moment, and a voice from it says, "Now there is!" All that aside: wow. This reminds me of some grand combination of "The Library Unpublished" and Charles Stross's Accelerando. That said, I don't think I should read any more of it. It's doing weird shit to my brain.
u/PM_ME_CUTE_FOXES [+1] *
Hi OP, the white line on only one side of the page is hideous and distracting as hell Please consider fixing it -- oh, you're not the author. Well, consider passing it on then.
u/godlyvex [+1] *
I found the story generally confusing and bloated by tons of big words (I like big words, so this is saying something) that don't add much to the experience of reading it. I liked the first half with our normal dude character, and just as it was getting interesting with the new language thing, suddenly we're in the perspective of a whole different character and we never see the old character again. Near the end they finally explain to some degree what's going on, and then the story just ends? All the random tweets and posts in the middle of the story didn't really add much, either. Most of them had practically nothing to do with what was going on at the moment. I don't even see how this was a rational story. The main character, and pretty much every other character, do not behave very rationally.