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[robkelk]

A thread devoted to talking about telling the story, instead of to telling the story.

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Deconstructions can be time-consuming to write. I just spent a half-hour researching the real-world answer to a question I had about a story element that's so inconsequential that it'll probably go unnoticed by the readers... unless, of course, we got it wrong.

The answer, by the way, is "Yes".

(Okay, okay... "Yes, five hours of "BD Pure Audio" lossless-format 7.1 channel audio will fit on a single Blu-ray audio disc or a single 50 GB SSD, so we can do a studio-quality master of the entire concert." At this point, I'm not going to say which concert, because there are at least three points in the devfiles where we might want to do this.)

[Bob Schroeck]

Oh, that Nao! Such a busy little bee! And she's not the only one. <grin>

[robkelk]

Hey, she's discovered something that she's good at. Of course she's going to embrace it.

[Labster]

I've noticed this effect.  At one point I noticed that two Wikipedia pages had differing opinions about whether a particular war had major impacts or was insignificant in the the history of Venezia, and both had sources.  Of course, I have no way of knowing which interpretation was correct, so I just kind of left it there.  You know, as research for our terraformed!Mars!gondoliers, from a manga that seems barely aware of real world history.

I also have another Meta comment: my phone's screen broke to the extent that I can't unlock the thing, and honestly, it's been really good for my writing and mental health?  I've read 6 books in the past week, compared to that many for the past year.  And then I came across this thing on Reddit, a snippet of a 2016 book talking about how J.K. Rowling eschews social media and as a result gets more work done.  It's in /r/agedlikemilk, because starting around 2017, she got really into Twitter, and from there seems to have been radicalized by the anti-trans movement.  Maybe the internet is bad for us, says a guy who makes websites?  Her writing seems to have decreased since then, both in quantity and quality.  (Personally, I feel like Jo has some nice logical points, which unfortunately don't actually apply in the particular illogical world in which we all live.  Basically like how I think the laws of Robotics are a great idea to protect humanity, but Ukraine also needs autonomous killing drones because of Russian signal jamming.)  In any case, when we're using Harry Potter stuff in the setting, remember that this is set before before Jo jumped off the turnip truck.

[robkelk]

The fire vs. ice battle you've all been waiting for: Yang Xiao Long versus Sailor Mercury!

What? "Our summer story-posting break starts today?"

Sorry, folks; you're going to have to keep waiting, for at least a month.

[robkelk]

I've started work on a story to being another of the Witches 5 into Refuge. This won't be like the story that introduced Mimete (the revising of which put me in the mood to do this story). As to which of the Witches it is, anyone who's familiar with the manga continuity will realize how this extended theme remix applies to her.

[robkelk]

The things that one looks up in order to determine whether something can and cannot be done in a story...

Perplexity's reply to my question "Is there any place inside the International Space Station big enough for the TARDIS to materialize inside?":

There is no single room in the real International Space Station that could comfortably fit the TARDIS as it appears on Doctor Who, but some areas are just about large enough in principle for a phone-box‑sized object to “materialize” if you allow a bit of sci‑fi hand‑waving.

ISS interior size

NASA lists the station’s total pressurized volume at about 1,005 cubic meters, with roughly 388 cubic meters of that counted as habitable living and working space spread across multiple modules rather than one big hall. Individual modules are typically only a few meters across inside, laid out like long narrow tubes packed with racks, equipment, and cables.

Biggest open areas

Public descriptions compare the interior more to a five‑bedroom house broken into corridors and rooms than to a warehouse, with no empty chamber remotely approaching the size of a football field; that field‑sized comparison applies to the overall station footprint, not to any internal room. Even the larger laboratory modules and connecting nodes only offer short stretches where an object the footprint of a police box could sit without immediately colliding with walls, racks, or handrails.

Fitting a TARDIS‑sized box

A classic 1960s British police box is roughly 1–1.3 meters on a side and about 2.5 meters tall, so in pure geometric terms there is enough volume inside several ISS modules to fit one. The practical problem is clutter and clearances: the station’s interior is densely packed, with only narrow “tunnels” free for astronauts to float through, so there is no canonically documented spot that is both tall and wide enough to drop in a TARDIS without moving lots of equipment. In a fictional crossover, the most plausible locations would be a relatively open section of a laboratory module or a node where multiple modules join, treating the TARDIS as having extremely precise materialization to avoid hitting anything.

Of course, there's no room for handwaving in a deconstruction, so for our purposes the answer is "no".

Which is the answer I was hoping for, actually. Bob should know why.

[Bob Schroeck]

I should?

Oh! Oh, right! Is that in response to the sentence I ... didn't yet add to the wiki copy of that story. Let me fix that.

[robkelk]

Yes, it is. We can chat about it this evening.