Quote:From where I sit, it looked like you were so eager to find things about my story to blast that you had to invent some. That's not good "pre-reading", or at all helpful. It is something that raises the blood pressure...
Rob: First, with respect to "criticizing characters before they appear", and "why did you say it if you knew how I would respond" and so forth, the point is to make sure that problems don't happen. Pointing them out before they happen is a cleaner way to do that than allowing people to make them first and then requiring fixes.
Quote:I suspect that this point is one where we're just not going to be able to reach agreement. You like the slapstick-style comedy - that's wonderful. But it isn't the be-all and end-all of the setting, and it wasn't the be-all and end-all of the setting even before I started writing in it. (If I recall correctly, most of what Feinan and Valles have written is lacking in broad humour.)
Second, yes, subtlety can be funny - but handwavium is not subtle, or at least is not *only* subtle. Again, going with the idea of "my quirks are subtle quirks, and my flaws are subtle flaws" is a dodge on the "my life is made bizarre" aspect.
This particular shared world is big enough for all sorts of stories, some of which aren't funny at all. (For example, the "probe becomes a weapon" short-short.) This didn't seem to be a problem before I started writing...
Quote:Did you bother to read my second vignette before you wrote this?
If you want to do the subtle funny, *great*. Roll with it. Include some sort of unsubtle funny in there too, though - or if not funny, at least unsubtle.
Quote:People have been giving things new names all over this shared setting. Why pick on me?
Fourth, the thought tht Kaboomite was wavetech - Well, you gave it a new name.
Quote:Okay, that's another thing to remember for the re-write.
Moreover, it looked like your characters all assumed that this would be so - so it wasn't just a particularly thin raiderhull.
Quote:My writing style is more like Heinlien than Niven - if it doesn't need to be explained to further the story, I don't bother explaining it. I assume my audience is intelligent enough to fill in the gaps...
This is only *broadly* correct - a nuke will stil ruin just about anyone's day, for example, but I personally figured that if you were firing little baby nukes out of your gun, you'ld have said so.
Quote:Way, way back in the thread - in the third post on page one, in fact - M Fnord (who came up with this sandbox that the rest of us are playing in) said that this might be a roleplaying game. The possibility that point-balancing might be necessary has been here literally since Day One.
Fifth, the nearsightedness bit was because the way you'd written them up looked like you were point-balancing them somehow.
Quote:On this one, guilty as charged. Blame it on the practical engineer part of me, that doesn't see the point in using wavetech when perfectly good hardtech already exists. (Speaking of which, this article has a good "executive overview" of the current state-of-the-art of robotics. Dr. Ishiguro's "Geminoid H1-1" plus Dr. Nishiwaki's "H7" appear to be pretty close to what I've been using as a hardtech baseline for the AIs, although I'll need to see a copy of the H7 paper to be sure.) I'll have to explicitly mention the gravtech is wavetech... Do you have any suggestions as to what other wavetech Noah might use, while remaining much the same character?
You've just made a Fen who happens to not use handwavium all that much, and that doesn't really fit all that well.
(Come to think of it, Noah might be an example of the "fendane", which Bob and M Fnord came up with over in the Glossary thread... or he might not. Re-write's on hold for a few hours while I ponder this...)
-Rob Kelk
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Rob Kelk
"Governments have no right to question the loyalty of those who oppose
them. Adversaries remain citizens of the same state, common subjects of
the same sovereign, servants of the same law."
- Michael Ignatieff, addressing Stanford University in 2012