The Return of Testing Chat Thread

[Oxymoron]

http://whatever.scalzi.com/2012/10/25/a ... liticians/

Jesus. I know it's satire but...wow.

Wow indeed.

I had some kind of stomach pain at one point while reading that...

[Aaron]

Yeah, it was gut wrenching.

I thought I "got" rape but there's shit in there I never considered. Mostly because I live in a country where woman aren't being used as pawns in an election between two pieces of human garbage.

[The Spartan]

That wasn't something I should have read this early on a Saturday; angries up the blood.

[Oxymoron]

Also help explain why it's so widely used as a weapon in time of war...

[Darksi4190]

So it turns out when I installed norton on my laptop I used up the last of my "licensed installs," and I can't activate it on my new computer. Gonna call up customer support on monday and see if I can get them to re-set it. I paid for the goddamn product, I paid for the subscription too. Not letting me install it is fucking bullshit.

[Oxymoron]

Welcome to the wonderful world of licensed softwares. Here's you're customary "FUCK YOURSELF" card. Cactii are on the room on your left and and high-pressure sanders on the room on your right. We are sadly out of lubricant, so you will have to do without.


Enjoy your stay.

[Oxymoron]

Also, because people are going to ask the question anyway :

Are you aware of the existence of "Microsoft Security Essential" ? It's free, and unless you go on really shady sites, or click every pop-up you see, it should give you the same amount of protection Norton does, while taking less resources to execute.

[evilsoup]

fuck Norton forever
part of me wants to say 'fuck antivirus', but I guess some people like going to shady sites & letting them execute code & download pirated films, so to some extent you might need it

[Darksi4190]

I use bittorrent to catch TV eps that I miss, so I do need AV protection.

Also the porn. It's what the internet's for after all.

[evilsoup]

thief

[Zod]

Norton is a bloated piece of shit.

In other news the Amazing Spiderman wasn't too bad for a reboot if you ignore the cringe-inducing first thirty minutes.

[evilsoup]

cringe-inducing in a good way?

[Zod]

The whole uncomfortably awkward teenage social interaction bits. Also they used actual web shooters instead of the organic bullshit from the earlier trilogy, which was nice.

[Losonti Tokash]

lol this guy with a whole bunch of super powers from a spider is fine but him shooting webs is immersion breaking, glad they went with a teenager inventing something stronger than any material ever built

[timmy]

Super powers, Los

Super brain powers

And like Anthony J. Stark, he jealously guards his tech lest it be perverted for injustice or worse, profit.

[Jung]

I gave in to temptation in the "future equipment of WWIII" thread:

-------

This is a good opportunity to talk about something I think is a serious poision on nerd attempts at fiction.

An excessive focus on minutia. Lists. Timelines. Data. Tangentially relavent, floating, disembodied facts. A sort of mission creep of background material, where it moves from a purely instrumental thing that informs the story and prevents immersion-breaking moments to taking on a life of its own, diverting the would-be writer into hamster-wheel spinning busywork and leading to Weberesque prose where tangentially relevant minutia is awkwardly shoehorned in because the writer is under the tragic misapprehension that if it never sees the light of day something of value will be lost.

I have suffered from this problem myself. Perhaps I jump to conclusions in thinking the OP may be a fellow sufferer, but he/she's got the visible symptoms. This is exactly the kind of mindset that leads to thinking that getting a detailed floating disembodied list of military equipment right is a high priority in writing a story about WWIII.

Look, this list largely represents something you don't really need to know to write a good war story. What you need is to know enough about the experience of being a soldier in wartime to maintain immersion. The go-to place for this isn't lists of military equipment, which doesn't tell you much about the experience anyway. The obvious go-to place that springs to my mind is real soldiers' personal accounts, e.g. of the Iraq War, or WWII. You don't need to know the weight and horsepower of your tank, you need to be able to describe what it's like to operate one well enough not to break suspension of disbelief. If you want the most relevant feedback, don't present a giant list of equipment, write a battle scene and then ask what people think of that.

You can probably get away with not knowing very much about the tech at all, if you break with the technothriller paradigm of writing, which I think probably has more popularity than it deserves in sci fi amateur writer circles. To me the interesting thing about imagining WWIII isn't the tank battles, it's the fallout, figurative and literal. Unless the enemy is really evil or the propaganda is really effective it seems to me it's likely to be the sociological experience of WWI cubed; there's probably going to be a huge sense of disillusionment and disgust at the culture, politics, and institutions that created the conditions where burning the world in nuclear fire looked like a sane idea to somebody with the power to order it done. A story about, say, a soldier returning home from a bloody and futile war to a homeland of irradiated ruins seems more interesting to me than some technothriller about WWII-esque clashes of American and Chinese armies or whatever.

[Bakustra]

NO CROSSPOSTING YOU GOD DAMN BASTARD- yeah, that is a good point. One of the few things I disliked about Howard Mittelmark's How Not To Write A Novel was that it semi-endorsed this in its section on sci-fi when it mocked cribbing your sci-fi setting from history- I can understand the point about being uncreative, but at the same time, the primary literary power of speculative fiction lies in its inherent ability to selectively distort reality to make a point, which this seems to disfavor. But then again, they are writing entirely about how to (not) write genre fiction, so perhaps doing that classifies as literary fiction.

[Oxymoron]

NO CROSSPOSTING YOU GOD DAMN BASTARD-

That's an interesting point to make. And yeah, the idea of setting a story in the endpoint/aftermath of a WWII where nuclear exchanges took place, told from the point of view of soldiers trying to get back home is a really interesting one I think.

...

... And now I'm thinking of a post-apocalyptic version of the Odyssey...

[Jung]

NO CROSSPOSTING YOU GOD DAMN BASTARD

Sorry, I had figured that was aimed at "goddamn [insert SDN poster here]!" crossposting rather than just generally anything posted to SDN. I'll be more circumspect in the future.

[evilsoup]

don't sweat it, that was a good post

[Bakustra]

NO CROSSPOSTING YOU GOD DAMN BASTARD

Sorry, I had figured that was aimed at "goddamn [insert SDN poster here]!" crossposting rather than just generally anything posted to SDN. I'll be more circumspect in the future.

Nah, it's a joke. You're fine and makin' quality postage.

[evilsoup]

... And now I'm thinking of a post-apocalyptic version of the Odyssey...

the guy would be seeing the devastation around him, somewhere overseas, and hoping that when he reaches home it'll be relatively unscathed
bits of the story would have to focus on his family back home, struggling to survive, and possibly beginning to succumb to radiation poisoning
I'm not sure whether it should end with him reuniting, or if he should get there to find them dead

the episodic nature of the odyssey would suit this story perfectly, yes, he'd meet up with a bunch of people doing there own thing & trying to survive.

[artemas]

all the while wondering if his fantastical experiences are the result of delirium, radiation poisoning or just the face of the terrible new world he finds himself in

[Oxymoron]

Don't sweat it, Jung. My reaction was aimed toward Quacky, 'cause I've been bitching alot about crossposting these last few weeks and assumed the comment was aimed at me.



Anyway, good idea 'Soup.

I'd say, have them be reunited, only for it to be as brief as the time it will take for them to finally succumb to radiation poisoning.

Have the final scene, where they are finally reunited, take place in a giant refugee camp, filled to the brim with misery.



Makes it really bittersweet. Like "Life is Beautiful" bittersweet.Because even if they (the wife, the kid(s) and the soldier) are dying and surrounded by what must feel like the antechamber to Hell, they are finally together after all the suffering they endured ; and the soldier, during his travels, found communities he has HOPE in, to recover, to rebuild :

You know how in the Odyssey Ulysse's last "test" is when he is lost, without any memory on an island where he is welcomed and taken care off, and he must find the will to get back on his quest ? Make the parallel here.

[evilsoup]

his being a soldier would be played upon too, beyond the odyssey parallels and the excuse to have him in another country: the breakdown of the military structure would be an important part of the first section, and the fact that he's in the military would cause some of the locals to hate him (until he got some different clothes of course, then they'd hate him for being foreign).

Maybe he'd keep the uniform in his backpack, planning to put it on when he reaches home? And at some point he has to destroy the uniform, to light a fire or something, disillusionment with society etc etc

Former military guys who stuck together would become nihilistic bandits and so on, they could be a threat to the hero (maybe he helps out some guys defending themselves? That might be a bit too hollywood action hero though)

Another thing which could play into this would be The War of the Worlds, in that he could be accompanied on his journey by various different people, whose goals temporarily overlap with his