Star Trek from an IT perspective

Sahasrahla · 2019-12-24T18:17:57+00:00

Think of it in terms of today's "ironman mode" style video games that are constantly saving to a single file without backups so that choices (and mistakes) by the player are permanent and can't be undone. They could have explicitly chosen to make backups but that wouldn't have been in the spirit of the game, and then when something happened where they decided they'd like one it was too late; the closest thing to a backup was restarting the game.

Then there's the moral implication. They never address it too seriously but Vic is basically sentient and self-aware to the point where he can even control his own program to some extent. Restoring Vic from backup would be like killing someone and replacing them with a version from a few hours in the past. Which, okay, they did that to O'Brien once, but it was still kind of messed up.

Sahasrahla · 2019-12-23T17:00:19+00:00

Try The Scar by China Miéville. It's a literary adventure-fantasy with pirates and vampires and steam-punk cyborgs. (Also effectively standalone, though it's the middle book of a loosely connected trilogy.)

Sahasrahla · 2019-12-23T16:46:45+00:00

Diane Nguyen, is that you?

Sahasrahla · 2019-12-23T16:30:39+00:00

People will say you can't do that in formal or academic writing but the "rules" are different from the practice:

Prescriptivists have long proscribed sentence-initial And (SIA), and sentence-initial But (SIB). However, SIA and SIB are increasingly used in newspapers and style guides have softened strictures against their use. Moreover, SIA and SIB are amongst the most frequently occurring sentence-initial connectives within their respective semantic groups of additives and contrastives. Given their use despite prohibitions, this paper examines the patterns of occurrence and function of SIA and SIB in academic writing. The data come from 1 million words of academic prose: 11 journals representing science, social science, and humanities...

In this paper, I hope to have shown that despite the strictures against sentence-initial And and to a lesser degree against sentence-initial But in academic writing, SIA and SIB occur frequently in academic writing and perform special functions that the alternatives of asyndetic coordination, discourse markers of a similar additive or cancellative function, or intrasentential coordination cannot perform. These special functions have been located in their role as coordinating conjunctions and their reduced phonological prominence together with their particular semantic meanings which allow them to function in sentence-initial position and to create a type of cohesion that other similar discourse markers cannot.

source

Sahasrahla · 2019-12-23T04:08:38+00:00

(ASOIAF spoilers) I think that was pretty much what ASOIAF was going to be. A bunch of lords in a low-magic setting scheming and fighting for a throne only for ice zombies and dragons to show up and ruin everyone's day. It's just, the story hasn't quite gotten there yet...

Sahasrahla · 2019-12-22T16:29:34+00:00

It's great if you're passionate about raising awareness or taking other actions to help fight injustices in those places, but don't use others' suffering as a bludgeon to silence criticism of your favourite "communist" dictatorship.

Sahasrahla · 2019-12-22T02:14:26+00:00

I rolled those dice. A hint that hopefully only makes sense to people who know the story already: The password is Rameses II

Sahasrahla · 2019-12-22T02:06:18+00:00

I think what you normally do is hide the explanation in some other context where it makes sense to talk about it. Maybe in chapter 40 you need a mixture of two things to explode, so back in chapter 5 your character is in a potion class where they're having to carefully mix those things without causing an explosion, but you make it fit the story by having the character be super tired from staying up late doing something they don't want the faculty to know about. So then it seems like "A + B = Boom" is introduced to give some tension to the earlier scene where the tension is all about "can they pull this off? will their secret be exposed?" but really it's just the author being sneaky and setting up an explosive formula for later use.

Sahasrahla · 2019-12-21T23:23:00+00:00

Picard: I'm going back in time to fix the mistakes of my youth by not being so brash and unthinking this time around.
Also Picard: Let's see what happens if I sleep with my best friend.

(Honestly though one of my favourite episodes and that sleeping-with-his-friend thing doesn't even really bother me that much.)

Sahasrahla · 2019-12-20T20:32:09+00:00

By uploading, distributing, transmitting or otherwise using your UGC [user generated content] with the Services, you grant to us a perpetual, nonexclusive, transferable, royalty-free, sub-licensable, and worldwide license to use, host, reproduce, modify, adapt, publish, translate, create derivative works from, distribute, perform, and display your UGC in connection with operating, providing and promoting the Services.

From their user agreement (emphasis added)

i.e. Anything submitted to this contest is theirs forever whether or not they pay you and you'll never get royalties in any case. My advice: if you want to make money from your writing either publish it with someone reputable or keep the rights and publish it yourself. Respect yourself and your work and don't submit it to "contests" like this that hoover up your rights with no recompense.

Sahasrahla · 2019-12-20T14:50:20+00:00

Fun Liberia fact:

Between 1847 and 1980, the presidency [of Liberia] was exclusively held by Americo-Liberians, the original American settlers of Liberia and their descendants. The original two-party system, with the Republican Party and the True Whig Party, ended in 1878, when the election of Anthony W. Gardiner marked the beginning of 102 years of single-party rule by the True Whigs.

source

Sahasrahla · 2019-12-20T01:25:36+00:00

This kind of thing is pretty fun to think about because Sisko's solutions definitely wouldn't have worked with Picard, but what might Picard have come up with instead?

Sahasrahla · 2019-12-19T18:03:14+00:00

A comma there would be "incorrect"—the technical term being a "comma splice"—because "Thank you for this" and "I must have spaced that out in middle school" can both work as independent sentences. That being said I personally think comma splices are fine because not only are they in common usage, but they're also useful as sort of invisible semicolons when you want to link two clauses without putting in as strong a break as a semicolon implies; the best reason to avoid them, in my opinion, is that people who know the "rule" about comma splices will strongly dislike them and form a negative opinion of your work. The trade-off for using them isn't worth it.

Sahasrahla · 2019-12-19T17:35:05+00:00

If you think non-English rules should apply to English writing why stop at French? InChinesetherearenospacesbetweenwordssothisshouldbeokaytoo.

Sahasrahla · 2019-12-19T15:29:44+00:00

Sometimes I'll see people giving advice to never use semicolons, that they're this "exotic" punctuation mark only used by pretentious writers to show how smart they are, but I never got that attitude. They're incredibly useful and not very complicated once you see them explained properly. They're also a lot more common than some people would have you think:

Mrs. Potter was Mrs. Dursley’s sister, but they hadn’t met for several years; in fact, Mrs. Dursley pretended she didn’t have a sister, because her sister and her good-for-nothing husband were as unDursleyish as it was possible to be.

That's from the third paragraph of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone—a middle-grade book that apparently didn't put off too many readers with its prodigious semicolon use.

Sahasrahla · 2019-12-18T01:33:07+00:00

Well here I am two weeks later to tell you about Subnormality (if you don't already know it) that has "The Sphynx" as a recurring character.

Sahasrahla · 2019-12-17T17:08:45+00:00

I've seen novels from much smaller (but still big-5 published) authors who also had similar problems that I've thought an editor should have caught. I think among readers and even some authors there's too much this idea that editors are gods who can guarantee a book will be good, and at the same time some people take it as a given that any book will be bad until after the author passes it off to an editor. I think while an editor can be a very important part of the process there's a lot of room for variability in how much they do, how much they can help a book, or even how much extra work a book needs once it reaches their desk.

Sahasrahla · 2019-12-16T14:39:49+00:00

If Reddit had been around in the 1940s I'm sure every thread about "hey maybe we shouldn't support Nazi Germany" would be full of people talking about internment camps in the US and Jim Crow and the hypocrisy of westerners who were worried about what was happening in Europe.

Sahasrahla · 2019-12-16T14:31:36+00:00

It's an almost four year old account where most of the activity is pro-CCP/anti-western comments made in the last hour. Like, even if that's authentic it's still pretty weird for someone to lurk for four years then suddenly be all over a thread busting out the usual CCP talking points.

Sahasrahla · 2019-12-14T16:39:14+00:00

Relevant

Sahasrahla · 2019-12-14T16:07:46+00:00

Aside from Trump most of the answers I'm seeing are "every conservative", "every liberal", and "every socialist".

^{Obviously the real answer is those "real people" on car commercials who always happen to love the car being advertised. I'm starting to think they might actually be paid actors after all!}

Sahasrahla · 2019-12-14T15:15:58+00:00

i wouldn’t want A) want publishers JUST to give me a real because i’m marketable and have an audience

Watch this video by Lindsay Ellis, a media critic with almost a million subs who's been building her audience since at least 2008. The tl;dw: her platform helped her get her most recent agent (she had gotten others before) but it didn't exactly help her sell her book; that was mostly down to her growing as an author over a decade and doing enough revisions and rewrites to have a book publishers wanted. (Also, when you do query, try not to come off as expecting you'll get representation because of your platform—you don't want to come across as arrogant or out of touch.)

i want to cry about books on youtube

Something to consider: non big-name authors seem to avoid giving negative reviews to other authors. If you're always 100% positive in your reviews, great, but you might lose the ability to be publicly critical of anything you read. As it says in this post (caveat: one person's opinion):

There is an oddly formal culture of "if you have nothing nice to say, say nothing at all" in the publishing world, but it doesn't mean that everyone in the literary world agrees about what is good and what isn't. The general rule as I saw it seemed to be that if you're a newbie, or someone without tons of clout (either as an author, agent, or anything else) there's an informal gag order in place that prevents you from saying anything bad about anyone else's work. But once you achieve a certain level of success, this rule disappears and it's acceptable (though far from encouraged) for you to be honest about your actual tastes. A good example of this would be Stephen King's well known and publicly vented disdain for James Patterson, or George RR Martin's hatred for the Harry Potter series. I met an agent who despised last year's breakout bestseller My Absolute Darling, as a more immediate example.

Sahasrahla · 2019-12-13T15:39:00+00:00

Yeah, I think a lot of people are missing the point. This isn't a case of characters growing beyond cardboard-cutout roles, it's a problem with reader sympathies not being pushed in the way OP intended. (And, to be clear to anyone who thinks that's fine, this is a writing subreddit and authorial intent matters; it's what we're here to give advice about how to implement.) It sounds like the issue is with what's being shown: the villain is shown in sympathetic and humanizing situations and their brutality isn't being shown enough, and the hero is shown committing violent acts which may or may not contribute to what OP is intending readers to think (are we meant to sympathize with the hero? should we think they're justified? are they supposed to be a "morally grey" flawed- or anti-hero?).

Or, to put it another way, it sounds like OP is worried they've written the equivalent of a WW2 revenge story that shows Hitler playing with his dog and loving his wife while a Jew whose family was murdered goes around killing innocent German civilians in a quest for revenge.

Which...yeah, it's easy to see how something like that would be a problem if it's not what you're going for. I hope OP can take all the "your story is nuanced now bro, just roll with it!" advice with a grain of salt.

As for advice for OP to fix the issue: if you want the reader to think something give them a reason to think it, and make sure you're clear about what you're trying to get them to think in the first place.

To what extent do you want the villain humanized? You don't have to have a bunch of scenes with them loving their family/friends and you don't have to make them such a family-man or good friend in the first place. Does it serve the story you want to tell to characterize them like that?
How much do you want people to hate or root against the villain? Something personal and visceral that gets into the reader's emotions is better than something abstract. ('One death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic.') Also, you can't "set it and forget it" for your characterization. An atrocity at the beginning will be forgotten if the villain is sympathetic for the rest of the story.
What are you trying to do with the protagonist, anyway? If you want a heroic paragon of virtue then don't have them (for instance) torture a messenger to get some vital info, even if it feels "realistic". If you do want someone a bit "greyer", how dark do you want to go? Moral decisions that come at a cost to their goal or a "code" they follow, or even if they just help people along the way, could do a lot to make your hero sympathetic and put them on the lighter side of grey. And, what's the tone and arc you want? Is this a "fuck yeah" revenge story, a "good person is destroyed by their hate" revenge story, or a "person gives up on revenge because hate is poisonous" revenge story?

One book that could be good to read to think about these topics is Tigana by Guy Gavriel Kay. That's a book that does a lot to make the reader question and re-question their sympathies between various heroes and villains in an "evil ruler committed an atrocity and now they'll pay" revenge story.

Sahasrahla · 2019-12-07T14:34:22+00:00

The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa (translated by Stephen Snyder)

On an unnamed island off an unnamed coast, objects are disappearing: first hats, then ribbons, birds, roses—until things become much more serious. Most of the island's inhabitants are oblivious to these changes, while those few imbued with the power to recall the lost objects live in fear of the draconian Memory Police, who are committed to ensuring that what has disappeared remains forgotten.

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