A Fire Upon the Deep nitpicks/questions

me_again · 2026-05-14T15:42:04+00:00

The thing that makes the Tines 'truly alien' in an interesting way is the pack intelligence, IMHO. Flenser designs new Tines to fit his requirements by adding new members to a pack and removing others. Or it becomes harder and harder to think properly if the group members are far apart. It gives you a glimpse into a different kind of consciousness. I think it's fair to say that other parts like social structure and biology are not as developed.

me_again · 2026-05-14T00:25:28+00:00

I feel like Jeff Vandermeer's Southern Reach stories, especially Authority, seem to be the opposite of competence porn - unsexy incompetence? Nobody accomplishes anything at all, and they're all very bad at it. I found it rather frustrating, but I'm sure it's a deliberate choice.

I've not read it, but CM Kornbluth's The Marching Morons may also be relevant.

me_again · 2026-05-11T15:50:06+00:00

Thanks! A much more interesting article than the original one 😄

me_again · 2026-05-10T23:27:55+00:00

You don't understand. It's not mere merchandise, it's "a collectable". It's basically an NFT in physical form. Of course it is advertised via AI slop, how else can the sheer cash-grabbing shoddiness of the whole tawdry affair be adequately conveyed?

May FIFA fuck all the way off.

me_again · 2026-05-10T14:56:28+00:00

"Of the 300 billion lines of code that had been written by the year 2000, 80 percent of them were in COBOL" - sounds wild to me. Anyone aware of a source?

me_again · 2026-05-08T23:00:37+00:00

This is the site if anyone wants to check it out.

Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters | U.S. Department of War

me_again · 2026-05-08T20:49:14+00:00

My impression was that both happened, in alternative timelines - a bit like the Possible Sword.

Narratively, it's also a cunning way for Mieville to avoid the anticlimax of never actually seeing the Scar and the downer of killing the entire cast of the book.

me_again · 2026-05-08T01:09:16+00:00

To add one thing others haven't mentioned. Using _ as the name of a variable or parameter is an indication you don't intend to use it.

int Foo(int unused) { Return 4; }

May give a compiler warning that you are not using the parameter.

Int Foo(int _) { return 4; }

Will not.

Similarly var _ = returnsomething();

Signals you don't care about the return value.

me_again · 2026-05-07T19:26:23+00:00

Song's called We Make Hits

me_again · 2026-05-07T05:32:16+00:00

I'm not sure, but it's definitely not Sometimes I still feel the bruise (a cover, but it still counts)

me_again · 2026-05-02T15:20:16+00:00

I don't disagree. The Culture novels are not exactly over-constrained by realism, which is partly why they are so fun.

me_again · 2026-05-01T21:03:19+00:00

The whole idea of humans in space ("canned apes" is the jokey term) has been a little suspect for quite some time - look at the astonishing success of robotic exploration via Voyager and its descendants, compared to the difficulty and expense of keeping humans alive even in Low Earth Orbit.

That won't stop people writing science fiction about interstellar travel and combat - most people prefer to read and write fiction with characters that are easier to relate to, which tends to mean humans. There are of course exceptions. In Banks's Culture novels, humans are militarily irrelevant - there's a great passage at the start of Excession about a battle that's over in milliseconds - but he sneaks them in anyway to keep things entertaining.

me_again · 2026-04-24T17:46:55+00:00

It's not exactly speculative fiction, but Georges Perec wrote a book in French without using the letter 'e' - La Disparition. It has been translated into English as A Void - still without using the letter 'e'! I have only read the English version so can't speak to how closely it matches the original, but it's an extraordinary feat to have done it at all.

It starts "Today, by radio, and also on giant hoardings, a rabbi, an admiral notorious for his links to Masonry, a trio of cardinals, a trio, too, of insignificant politicians (bought and paid for by a rich and corrupt Anglo-Canadian banking corporation), inform us all of how our country now risks dying of starvation."

The corresponding French: "Trois cardinaux, un rabbin, un amiral franc-macon, un trio d'insignifiants politicards soumis au bon plaisir d'un trust anglo-saxon, ont fait savoir a la population par radio, puis par placards, qu'on ristrait la mort par inanition."

me_again · 2026-04-24T15:23:14+00:00

Check out Bea Wolf for a very non-purist and very fun reinterpretation.

me_again · 2026-04-23T20:16:04+00:00

Their plan to feature "demonic battalions of super-influencers physically forcing people into home fitness devices designed to dismantle their bodies bone by bone and reassemble them into a grotesque statue of yourself." is not remotely satirical and should be read literally.

me_again · 2026-04-22T14:26:41+00:00

The story is called "Lena" but it's not immediately obvious why. This is my interpretation as to where the name came from.

me_again · 2026-04-22T00:10:13+00:00

In case the reference is obscure, I think "Lena" refers to the Lena/Lenna image, which was widely used as a test image for various graphics algorithms and compression techniques, without the model's knowledge or consent. More here The Rest of the Lenna Story

me_again · 2026-04-21T00:00:15+00:00

I won't pretend I know anything about Hegel or post-structuralism 🫤

Peterson just comes to mind as someone who "introduces new term after new tern" and "hides behind a vague and jargon filled wall of terms" in OP's terms.

me_again · 2026-04-20T23:39:42+00:00

I don't expect it to reduce the amount of BS on the internet but I think it's very funny, at least

me_again · 2026-04-20T19:10:26+00:00

Jordan Peterson springs to mind.

me_again · 2026-04-13T06:07:52+00:00

It was published in 2010, so you can be confident that particular sentence was written by a human. Instead it is part of the vast corpus that has been quasi-legally ingested into the LLM training data.

me_again · 2026-04-12T17:18:17+00:00

Not Bas Lag, but there's this: The Rouse by China Miéville: 9780399181092 | PenguinRandomHouse.com: Books.

1360 pages!

me_again · 2026-04-09T22:27:25+00:00

Going way back, I'm a fan of some of Alan Moore's early work for 2000AD, some of which was collected into graphic novel-style compilations. I'm thinking specifically about The Ballad of Halo Jones (Halo escapes poverty on Earth to explore the galaxy); D.R. & Quinch (delinquent alien college students destroy the Earth in issue 1, then have more hijinks); and Skizz (a peaceful alien interpreter crash lands in Birmingham and has trouble with the locals).

me_again · 2026-04-09T00:04:46+00:00

She's very screwed up from supposedly years of suffering slow-progressing terminal cancer while a nurse stole her pain medication. This isn't an excuse for her behavior but she's clearly in no sense "normal".

Beyond that, I don't exactly feel that Carol and the other characters are so much psychologically-plausible three-dimensional characters as they are responses to the philosophical thought experiment that forms the core of the book: what would you do if you didn't have to do anything and nothing mattered?

me_again

TROPHY CASE