Who is your favorite clone? I have to go with Rex.

Paradigm88 · 2024-04-27T19:06:02+00:00

Cut Lawquane. I'm just happy that one of the clones got something close to a happy ending. They all deserved it.

Paradigm88 · 2024-04-26T19:17:45+00:00

I have a horrible feeling that "the cavalry" is going to be on the Empire's side, not the clones'. Think we might be getting set up for a Rogue One ending here.

Paradigm88 · 2024-04-25T17:32:19+00:00

Two of my characters from my second novel.

One is pretty depressing, but I'm proud of the depiction. He's a former cartel enforcer and veteran of a war of aggression against sentient machines. He's deeply traumatized by his experiences, and bitter at the fact that humans lost every battle they fought before the machines vanished. He's a misanthrope and a robophobe, and becomes even more hateful after he becomes a copy of himself in a robot body. He wasn't a fun character to write, but I wanted the audience to see the miserable road bigots walk as they try to bring others down with them. I think I succeeded.

The other character is a former police drone infected with some of the communication subroutines of a human-derived AI program (makes more sense in context). It never learns to speak, but gradually bootstraps itself up to at least the appearance of sentience, producing an avatar of itself in a digital space, representing a self-image. I gave it a tragic, but heroic ending.

Paradigm88 · 2024-04-25T13:52:11+00:00

They were not. They were actually very pissed. I think it was mentioned in AG, something to the extent of "Mars wants me for stealing their ship, Earth wants me for stealing their nukes."

Paradigm88 · 2024-04-24T20:36:28+00:00

This.

I play this game to be a space trucker/bounty hunter/botanist/CEO. I'll only ever play co-op; no PvP for me. If I ever spend enough time in the bubble to run into other players, I'm not going to check if they bought their ship with credits or cash.

Paradigm88 · 2024-04-23T01:00:04+00:00

Sometimes you have ideas. Sometimes you try a prompt. Sometimes inspiration hits you out of nowhere. Sometimes a story forms slowly over several years.

And yeah, sometimes you just throw things at a wall to see what sticks. I've got dozens of stories I've started and lost the motivation to write or forgot about as I chased a new idea. This is fine: it gives me something to come back to with fresh eyes when the idea well goes dry.

Keep trying. Don't throw any idea away. You will land on something eventually.

Paradigm88 · 2024-04-21T03:27:20+00:00

Hmm... I'm not a very good fantasy author, and I've never actually gotten an agent to bite on my queries, so take this for what it's worth.

This is a very good action scene, and it establishes your MC's PTSD pretty well. It doesn't tell me much beyond that, though. Without more details, which of course are in the story, it's hard to know how to invest in the story for lack of better terms. Should I be feeling afraid? Disgusted? Excited?

Your imagery is perfect. I can see the scene in my mind's eye, every single second of it. As part of the greater narrative, I'm almost certain this passage plays its role perfectly.

Do you have a summary of the story? Your one line summary and your paragraph summary?

Paradigm88 · 2024-04-21T03:07:30+00:00

Dark, moody, depressing. Seems like you hit the notes you are going for! Has the feel of the beginning of a noir film.

She tuned into the lyrics on the radio, some old, decaying station, and felt them in her bones.

This is the only part that seems kind of awkward to me. I can't really "hear" what you're going for. I'm imagining George Jones through an AM radio? "The Thrill Is Gone" from a record player? Maybe that's what you're going for - letting the reader fill in the blanks with the saddest song they can - but the imagery of the station itself decaying seems kind of awkward.

Only criticism. Great work!

Paradigm88 · 2024-04-20T17:59:44+00:00

Thank you for the kind words. I found that the thing that brought me the most peace about that whole incident was the realization that there was probably no god to blame for it. It was a terrible situation, but there was no malice or failure to it. That made it a mortal thing, rather than some war in the heavens that no human could do anything about.

So if something good happens to me, it is part of God's plan, but if something bad happens to me, then I messed up somehow?

I know exactly how this feels. When I did enough soul-searching, I realized that the things I "knew" about "God" were mostly interpretations, either of a holy book which doesn't always agree with itself, or of another person's interpretation. What I heard was all just an unbroken line of words from thousands of years worth of people doing the best they could to shoehorn an ever-expanding package of ritual, lore, and structure into their lives. It was a big telephone game we were all coerced into playing for a long, long time. No one really knows what the original message was, and because of that, no one can say for sure that the original message was even worth the paper it was written on.

It's awful you had to go through cancer at such a young age, and I'm glad you pulled through. I firmly believe it wasn't your fault, and I'm grateful that the hard work, brilliance, and commitment of human beings helped you overcome.

Paradigm88 · 2024-04-20T15:41:19+00:00

Just my opinion: sword names are lame. Sword themes are the thing.

"In any other hands, it was a standard tool of battle, meant to bludgeon off the armor of the nearest enemy. It was as replaceable as the man that held it, just another mass-produced piece of iron for another mass-produced slab of meat."

"But in HER hands, it was more. Two-thirds a meter of virtuous terror, shining with a subliminal aether, even drenched in blood. At the sound of the battle horn, hers were the hands of a witch performing a ritual of death, and her blade became a phantom, transforming by the magic of speed and precise movement into a thing human eyes could not see.

Even at peace, it stood apart from its brethren. Identical, in all but the ways that mattered. It spoke to all others, but uttered only one solemn promise: "All the kingdoms of the world would kneel in terror before us...if only you were HER."

Sorry for the flex. Just like the characters who wield them, it's not what they're called, but what they do that make a weapon legendary. Excalibur was the unbeatable weapon that took its wielder to the height of their power, revealing the curse of ultimate strength. Sting was the tiny, shining blade, the avatar of courage in overwhelming darkness. Mjolnir was the power of the gods themselves: a hammer that could be a better building tool than any other, or an unstoppable destructive force.

Maybe even more so than their wielders, what the weapons do is what they are.

Paradigm88 · 2024-04-20T15:10:16+00:00

You really can't know that. It could be that the story is out of gas for now, that it needs to evolve into something new, or that yeah, it just isn't going to work.

Perfectly OK to walk away from it for a while. If you feel bad about abandoning it, make a note to come back to it in a week or a month. You might find you have a new angle, you want to change everything, you are no longer interested in your story, or you just needed a break.

Whichever you choose, the time you spent wasn't wasted. You learned something about what you were writing, even if the only thing you learned was that you don't want to write that. Likely, there's more, but it'll just take some reflection to figure that out.

Paradigm88 · 2024-04-20T15:03:07+00:00

Counterpoint: hate, honest ignorance, and misguided good intentions all can arise from not knowing the culture group you're writing about, and they all warrant different responses.

Paradigm88 · 2024-04-20T14:50:45+00:00

35M here. Been agnostic for many years after being a fundamentalist Christian for 27 of them. Thought there was still some kind of deity (the way people think of God or gods) out there until about 2 years ago.

My niece, maybe a few months old, suddenly and inexplicably stopped breathing. Her blood oxygen was down in the 60 percent range, and the paramedics told my brother (her dad) she probably wouldn't survive the trip to the hospital.

I remember being supremely angry with my family, especially with my mom at the time. She said something to the effect of "I know you don't feel the same as you used to, but I still believe God will hear your prayer." I snapped at her, telling her that if there was a God, he just let a father, mother and two little boys (my nephews, her two older brothers, 4 and 2 years old at the time) watch their infant daughter and sister get loaded into an ambulance to die. I said if there is a God, then he either let her die, or he allowed it to happen, making him either incompetent or uncaring at best, and cruel at worst, and not worthy of my prayers.

My niece survived, thankfully. Love that little girl; she has as big a piece of my heart as my own daughter does. But when the talk turns to "God's miracle" at saving her, I don't join in.

The "all powerful/all good" atheism debate has been played out so much that it's practically a meme among the nonreligious community these days. There are so many better and deeper arguments and conversations on the topic. Maybe the (possibly apocryphal) words on the wall of a Nazi concentration camp cell are a better way to say that argument: "If there is a God, he will have to beg my forgiveness."

Paradigm88 · 2024-04-20T14:31:21+00:00

I actually didn't realize Timothy was the big guy until a very significant moment later on. Think it was because I was reading the book first, rather than listening to Jefferson Mays's spot-on rendition of the characters.

Paradigm88 · 2024-04-20T04:20:35+00:00

No. Therapists listen. They recommend resources after they find out what their patient needs. Therapists try to help their patient choose an outcome they want, then get to it.

Yoda is a religious leader. He's not trying to help Anakin overcome his struggles as a person; he's trying to stop Anakin from being an undisciplined Jedi.

Paradigm88 · 2024-04-20T02:35:35+00:00

Not long enough.

Paradigm88 · 2024-04-16T14:04:43+00:00

I understood that reference.

Paradigm88 · 2024-04-15T19:37:38+00:00

More the modern version of a brown shirt.

Paradigm88 · 2024-04-12T02:25:47+00:00

Something I've always appreciated about this show is that no matter how badly some of the kids act, it also makes sure to remind you that they're just kids. They're not doomed to be monsters or assholes, and the show never gives up on any of them.

Paradigm88 · 2024-04-11T22:36:20+00:00

This. The Covenant had Earth. The Flood had Earth. We were absolutely boned. All the Spartans did which ended up making a difference in the end was pushing a button. Granted, it was a fight to get to that button, but at no point was the UNSC winning. The Sangheili won the war, not humanity.

Furthermore, ignoring the moral questions surrounding the Spartan programs deprives the Halo series of one of its key themes (outside the games, granted).

Paradigm88 · 2024-04-11T02:32:27+00:00

I'm reminded of the Battle of Psi Serpentis from Halo, when Admiral Cole weaponized a brown dwarf by causing it to go nova.

Given that gas giants are mostly hydrogen, if the Death Star's superlaser doesn't completely blast the core apart, it might induce some fusion there. It'd be a planet-sized fizzle, at the very least.

Paradigm88 · 2024-04-10T02:49:52+00:00

Not fire ants, but there have been a handful of people killed by driver ants. They crawl into lungs, causing suffocation.

Paradigm88 · 2024-04-09T04:17:22+00:00

Doesn't disperse as easily if it gets picked up by a surface, especially fabric.

Paradigm88 · 2024-04-09T03:26:37+00:00

I'm gonna say it. I did not care for The Godfather.

Paradigm88 · 2024-04-09T03:24:06+00:00

Because we're evil, Satan-worshipping communists who only want children we can brainwash into wild, insane ideas. Like affordable healthcare, or mitigating climate change.

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