New Testingstan

so there's some storm coming this way. conflicting reports on how bad it will be. but i'm trying to see if the crap in my new house can work if power lines go down

one worry is keeping my milk cold. some reports say we might get snow, some don't. if we get snow, no big deal. if not well we have a problem but i have some plans

now if it is cold, really no big deal, i can handle that. but i have this gas fireplace that is supposed to work w/o electrical power, so maybe i can make my house warm then charge admission to everyone who wants to come in to it!!!!!

i used it for a couple days in september to test it, but since i might actually want to use it, the fucking thing isn't working right now!


the fire turns on but is really short and really blue. it is supposed to be tall and yellow

my guess is it isn't getting enough air due to an obstruction in the roof vent. which i can't fix myself. ugh. and if it isn't that idk so i'll need to get a guy who knows anyway.

but blargh.

You could have it that there has been an ideological reaction from the survivors that their should be a universial government to prevent the tragedy from ever happening again but high technology is only found in islands of stability thus the WorldGov is highly decentralized with the powers that be in the various regions using association with the central authority as a source of legitimacy while having broad de facto authority. But the only in truth control a small area around still technologically advanced cities with those outside it in a state of anarchy (not necessarily chaos) or under the thumb of local strongmen that acknowledge no superiors.

Then we could have the initial establishment of the World Government as a totally peaceful and idealistic process but as the "low-hanging fruit" are exhausted they are turning to increasingly forceful means to expand the writ of the universal government and conflict brews with a hostile periphery.

So we have the irony of the Utopian response to a Utopian caused tragedy being initially promising but leading to fresh and exciting new violence.

Which, if we're cribbing history, isn't that far from the cycle of world war 1 and 2, how the responses to the first catastrophe created the next. And that it isn't that humanity never learns, its that humanity learns the wrong lesson because the world is complicated, possibly too complicated for even a good ideology to fix it.

Jung wrote:Keep in mind I'm talking about a situation a generation or so after the war, when there's been time for recovery and reconsolidation. I'm envisioning things being a lot more chaotic in the immediate aftermath.

So basically what happened after the fall of Rome but with more radiation and technology that may or may not be useless?

Oxymoron wrote:On The Beach (2000)


I remember it was very chilling, both times I saw it.

I recommend it.

You have execrably poor taste.

EDIT: No, I don't particularly care about what awards it got, or whether there were other sadists who enjoyed it.

evilsoup wrote:seriously though, I think a story about a hot nuclear war that ends on a happy note is probably missing the point
unless it was about some guys out in the middle of nowhere, then they could just about survive I guess (could even be a comedy )
but generally, the most optimistic thing would be 'facing death with dignity'.

Or we could, y'know, write a good story, where the protagonist accomplishes something more satisfying than "goes out with a whimper"

seriously fuck this... genre, whatever its called. tragedy? whatever. fuck it right in the ear.

Tell me about your relationship with your mother....

Ryan, your ability to remain so arrogantly confident that you hold all the answers no matter how many times you're shown otherwise is simultaneously adorable and frightening.

i normally don't make prescriptive comments about aesthetic taste but if you actually think stories need to have happy endings or else they're somehow worthy of contempt you're a fucking infant who doesn't deserve media

I just had an idea for a scifi short story.

A functioning "what if" machine. But and point of timeline divergence must be fifty years in the past, and it can't tell you any more than up to thirty or so years afterwards. So as a result, you couldn't say "What if I played [lotto numbers] next week."

adr wrote:BTW i hate how statist propaganda has had so much success in equating anarchy as chaos

It's easy, because it is chaos.

Infinity Biscuit wrote:Ryan, your ability to remain so arrogantly confident that you hold all the answers no matter how many times you're shown otherwise is simultaneously adorable and frightening.

I'll be right eventually.

Nietzslime wrote:i normally don't make prescriptive comments about aesthetic taste but if you actually think stories need to have happy endings or else they're somehow worthy of contempt you're a fucking infant who doesn't deserve media

Let me see how monosyllabic I can make this: I don't care to see yet more dumb shit on TV.

"What if EVERYBODY DIED LOL" is not an interesting line of question. It's boring. It's expected. Realistic, if you prefer.

Gands wrote:I just had an idea for a scifi short story.

A functioning "what if" machine. But and point of timeline divergence must be fifty years in the past, and it can't tell you any more than up to thirty or so years afterwards. So as a result, you couldn't say "What if I played [lotto numbers] next week."

More like this.

So, Ryan, I want you to go and do me a favour. I want you to do one of the following;

1. Attempt to see Hamlet as is performed on the stage.
2. Failing that, attempt to get hold of a DVD of Hamlet and watch it. There is a very good adaptation directed by and starring Kenneth Branagh.
3. And failing even that, simply get hold of the play and read it.

And then try and tell me seriously that the genre of tragedy is 'dumb shit on TV'.

Well, tbh, it seemed pretty awful when I read it in high school, but that may have just been the presentation.

Romeo and Juliet was also pretty meh, but with less implied incestuous sexual assault AFAIK, so there's that.

That one interpretation of it with Leonardo Di Caprio was pretty unintentionally hilarious though. That was dumb shit, but at least it was funny dumb shit.

EDIT: That is to say, I'll re-read Hamlet.

If your judgement of Shakespeare is based on what you read at school, you're doing it wrong. Or, more accurately, it was almost invariably being taught wrong because schools really just don't know how to teach Shakespeare to teenagers.

On a subject that's not post apocalyptic...

What seems obvious to me is that most of those who complain about bullying online actually don't object to the concept of bullying, but more to the fact that they are the targets. I feel like there's a potentially very interesting research opportunity in TEO on the subject of cyberbullying/internet social dynamics. The age and (except for certain posters) permanency might present an interesting data set if someone had the stomach to wade through it

There's an entire library's worth of research opportunities on TEO, really. Not all of them in the field of sociology.

Abnormal psychology certainly comes to mind...

I mean, not even looking at it strictly negatively; the sheer size of TEO as an online community means that it's produced quite a lot to look at. Hell, from the perspective of someone who's studied literature, the entire User Fiction subforum represents a fairly interesting-if-bleak area to look at in the area of fandom community influence upon how fiction is perceived and written.

The bleakness, naturally, coming from the fact that with maybe a handful of exceptions... most of it is really bad.

Hamlet on stage is amazing, Ryan, you should definitely see it. If you live near a major city you should be able to find someone playing it.

Hamlet, the War of the Roses plays, and Macbeth are some of the best theater I've ever seen.

Sandman wrote:I mean, not even looking at it strictly negatively; the sheer size of TEO as an online community means that it's produced quite a lot to look at. Hell, from the perspective of someone who's studied literature, the entire User Fiction subforum represents a fairly interesting-if-bleak area to look at in the area of fandom community influence upon how fiction is perceived and written.

If you've actually studied literature, I salute you for having the fortitude to wade through user fiction.

no, don't you see sandman and questor

hamlet, anna karenina, citizen kane, oedipus rex, the grapes of wrath, king lear, moby dick, vertigo, the illiad, frankenstein, paradise lost, wuthering heights, and basically most of the body of work that defines western culture is just dumb shit

the entire world is wrong and ryanthunder is right

Questor wrote:

Sandman wrote:I mean, not even looking at it strictly negatively; the sheer size of TEO as an online community means that it's produced quite a lot to look at. Hell, from the perspective of someone who's studied literature, the entire User Fiction subforum represents a fairly interesting-if-bleak area to look at in the area of fandom community influence upon how fiction is perceived and written.

If you've actually studied literature, I salute you for having the fortitude to wade through user fiction.

That's where the bleakness comes into it. Even by the standards of most internet fiction, TEO has some stuff that is genuinely bad, and not just a little low-in-quality, but remarkably bad.

Stuff like Conquest and The Salvation War are almost legendarily horrible.

Still, the inverse of Sturgeon's Law probably applies, and for every ten iterations of SMARMAGEDDON!!!!11!!!!1!?!£!?$!^$&$ you likely have something for which the act of reading isn't entirely like suffering toothache in prose form.

Questor wrote:Hamlet on stage is amazing, Ryan, you should definitely see it. If you live near a major city you should be able to find someone playing it.

Hamlet, the War of the Roses plays, and Macbeth are some of the best theater I've ever seen.

Richard III.

It's my favourite of Shakespeare's plays, and it's amazing when performed right.

What do you think of Julius Ceasar? I'm always disappointed in the theater. It's never able to live up to my imagination.

I always find Richard III's turn towards the end to be a bit unbelievable. Then again, when I saw it I disliked the performance so maybe I should give it another go.

The best Shakespeare I ever saw was Macbeth. It's a hard play to stage effectively, but when done right it's so bloody and gothic and weird that it's close to perfect.

RyanThunder wrote:It's easy, because it is chaos.

No it isn't.