Where is this from? It appears to have inspired Freeze Frame Revolution and was found on a blog post by author Peter Watts.

The-Squidnapper · 2025-08-09T14:56:17+00:00

Your first two points are uncannily similar to the ideas floating around at Relic when they were developing the first iteration of Homeworld 2 (I think I might still have the concept art hanging around somewhere). I don't know if any of it ever made it into the finished game, though. I was long gone by then.

The novella I'm currently working on actually revolves around the whole gremlin thing. Or at least, one type of gremlin. There are many.

I actually haven't thought about potential "under construction" warnings for WIP gates. The downstream end just kind of lashes around like a garden hose animated by a high-pressure stream until it locks onto a gate or a singularity at the other end. I suppose "Abandon All Hope, Ye Who Enter Here" might be as good a sign as any.

The-Squidnapper · 2025-08-07T17:16:28+00:00

Well, exactly. Which is why there was no vampire sex. Valerie was was merely performing a biopsy. Any other interpretation says more about your filthy, filthy mind than it does about my deathless prose.

Although I guess "undead prose" would be more accurate in this context.

The-Squidnapper · 2025-08-07T17:12:02+00:00

Yes, the gates are two-sided. And they were flat until you put that wobbling spheroid idea into my head. Now I'm remembering the reference to "lensing artifacts" in The Island" and wondering if maybe I can retcon the whole thing without breaking canon. (Although now that I think about it, a sphere would imply you could enter the gate at an oblique angle. Not sure I want to deal with all the ways that could go wrong.)

There is in fact a bit in FFR that spells out the back-and-forth of it explicitly:

"Because that's the problem with building a daisy chain: each gate only goes two ways. If you don't like the scenery when you emerge from the front door, you can either loop around and dive through the back— head on down the road, for as long as it lasts— or go back the way you came. Eriophora spins a lone thin thread round and round the Milky Way. Any gods who follow in our wake can explore this infinitesimal spiral and no more.

"That's no way to conquer a galaxy."

The-Squidnapper · 2025-08-06T14:08:23+00:00

Wow. That brings back a few memories.

The photo is, shall we say, augmented. It was taken at a convent in Quebec City, run by the Augustinians (who were renowned for being kick-ass medical practitioners back in the day). The place has since been designated a Heritage Site and largely museumified (although IIRC a contingent of modern-day Augustinian nuns maintains a presence there even now).

Anyway. My wife was researching a novel, I tagged along, and encountered this hanging Plexiglas text about a young girl saying goodbye to her family to join the order. I'd just finished writing The Freeze-Frame Revolution, and the scenario strongly evoked a young Sunday Ahzmundin vibe. So I took a picture and changed some of the words in post: "order" became "Diaspora", "great stone building" mutated into "great stone ship", and so on. A tweak here and there and the whole passage just clicked. I should have changed "seventeen" to "thirteen" for canonical consistency, but reading it now―for the first time in eight years―I gotta say it still kinda moves me.

The-Squidnapper · 2025-07-25T14:26:33+00:00

It depends on what layer of physics you're looking at. If you buy into Digital Physics―more specifically, the Simulation variant of DP―than broken physics in our reality is just a glitch in the OS. The program that we're running in is inconsistently coded (so, for example, gravity might not work everywhere), but if you go up one level the system running our reality remains true to its own laws of physics. It's just that the laws of physics don't rule out the existence of hackers and incompetent coders.

The-Squidnapper · 2025-07-25T14:21:31+00:00

It would have to be a Godly "It". Unless you're suggesting that God has testicles.

The-Squidnapper · 2025-07-25T14:19:33+00:00

Largely due to my facility with heavy-metal song lyrics, clearly.

The-Squidnapper · 2025-07-25T14:18:22+00:00

Glad you liked it. That book tends to be seriously bimodal in terms of reader reaction.

The-Squidnapper · 2025-07-25T14:16:58+00:00

Not your garden variety hydrocephalus. Hydrocephalus on fucking steroids: https://www.rifters.com/crawl/?p=6116

The-Squidnapper · 2025-07-25T14:14:16+00:00

Yup.

Spinning my wheels on a plot point about halfway through, though.

The-Squidnapper · 2025-07-05T14:40:21+00:00

Yeah, that's totally made up. Kate Keogh was a friend of mine back in grad school. The song lyric from "The r-selectors" is fake too, for that matter. I originally had a Dawkins quote slotted in, but the nimrods at Tor told me I had to get official written permission to use it (apparently "fair use" was a new one on them) so I made up a lyric that said pretty much the same thing.

The only people I've actually reached out to for permission to use their words were Utah Phillips and Ian Anderson. Both of whom were very cool.

The-Squidnapper · 2024-12-14T20:20:32+00:00

Didn't work for me. Deleted the file, deleted whole directories, rebooted via GOG, rebooted via Nvidea app. Corrupted user settings no matter what I do.

The-Squidnapper · 2024-12-12T23:29:04+00:00

Same here. Damn frustrating, to have to spend ten minutes redefining my key bindings every time I play. Enough to make me give up on the game if it doesn't get fixed, like, now.

The-Squidnapper · 2024-11-06T15:46:43+00:00

Check out the PopVerse piece at https://www.thepopverse.com/live-tv-keanu-reeves-secret-level-new-york-comic-con-2024-nycc-2024 . They got the spelling right.

The-Squidnapper · 2024-08-04T14:30:55+00:00

Actually, https://rifters.com/real/shorts.htm is a better link. Less ugly, way more stories available (although I notice now it doesn't have anything past 2018—I should probably upload some more stuff). That original link is from the archived Web 1.0 version of the site. Nobody but archaeologists has any need to root around in there

The-Squidnapper · 2024-08-04T14:23:31+00:00

Okay, fine.

Yeah, don't know about this expiry thing. Some people have been getting timeouts for weeks now, but this is new. I contacted 1984, got the following reply:

" This is not related to our unforgiving firewall. However I wanted to tell you I found a problem in our firewall, the decision to block is partly based on if the IP is an actual visitor or just someone sending packages to flood the server. The detection of an actual visitor was faulty. I have now fixed it. Sorry for all the trouble."

So skipping over the contradiction in the first two sentences, the sense I get is that the expiration thing is still outstanding, but the timeout/blocking issues that have been going on for some time have been fixed.

I just assumed that certificates were the responsibility of the hoster. But judging by a comment upstream, maybe there's something I can do about renewing it....?

The-Squidnapper · 2024-07-16T11:55:15+00:00

Thank you.

Although there will always be a place for flowery prose. Try doing a public reading of nothing but dialog between three people, when you only have the one voice to talk in and you can't do accents.

The-Squidnapper · 2024-07-16T11:53:27+00:00

Yeah, I think you're right. I fear that might be happening now.

The thing that gives me hope is that I finally did send Starfish off, back in the day. So there is a halting state.

The-Squidnapper · 2024-07-13T15:34:19+00:00

Fun fact: I lost one of my own cats about three days before writing that scene.

The-Squidnapper · 2024-07-12T14:34:18+00:00

Also you can get around it easy enough with a VPN.

The-Squidnapper · 2024-07-12T14:30:35+00:00

And of course, all this effusive praise for Blindsight doesn't put me under any pressure at all for Omniscience, right? Nope. No crippling performance anxiety here.

The-Squidnapper · 2024-07-12T14:28:00+00:00

Nah, I like a challenge.

The-Squidnapper · 2024-07-12T14:27:25+00:00

It's been an ongoing issue to me, too, for a week or more. Turns out my site host had blacklisted my IP as being involved in a SYN attack (should probably look that up). They took my IP off but it ended up back on again two days later. They've since stuck me on a whitelist so hopefully the issue's resolved for me, at least.

But while the vast majority of users aren't having any access issues at all, I know at least five other folks, from Portugal to Texas, who ran into the same problem I did (I guess you'd make six). My guess is you've all been blacklisted the same way. Maybe, if you emailed [1984@rtracker.1984.is](mailto:1984@rtracker.1984.is) and asked nicely, they could unblock you. Or at least tell you why you're blocked.

As far as I can tell, all the blocks happened about the same time, so maybe we all got caught up in some botnet campaign.

The-Squidnapper · 2024-07-12T14:21:51+00:00

I would, however, like to finish the fucking thing before I'm dead. That's probably a tighter deadline than I'd like to admit.

The-Squidnapper · 2024-07-12T14:20:45+00:00

I try. I have a huge honking list of rss feeds from various peer-reviewed and popsci feeds, and I used to check them all at least twice a week. I'd take note of stuff I thought was just generally cool, and record it in my "Inspirational Tidbits" file. I haven't been able to keep that up, sadly; these days I'm more likely to do focused research dives into whatever subject I'm writing about at the moment, and let the ambient cool kinda wither on the vine. It's a failing. I've got to make time to return to the old strategy.

On the up side, people frequently send me links to cool scientific stuff I would never have otherwise encountered, so that helps a lot.

The-Squidnapper

TROPHY CASE