Subject: New DoSAT story plug
Author:
Posted on: 2019-10-28 03:50:48 UTC
Pager Duty (alternate Google doc), in which Tomash gets paged at an early hour.
Reviews and even just an "I liked it" are very welcome.
This story is an improved version of an old prompt response, except now it's expanded on and more canon.
This is set in 2017, and the spoilers for the story.
Weird fun, but fun all the same.
But...
... but the Ghost in the Machine and Holo-Acacia are (were?) both living on the network at the time of the crash. They're confirmed 'alive' a year or so later (during Talk Like 15 Pirates), but I can't imagine this was easy on them. Of course, versions of the Ghost have lived through multiple network crashes and wipes before, but I don't think this one has... I think I'll file that under Points To Ponder.
hS
eeeee hS liked my story eeeeee!
I, uh, completely forgot about people living on-network. So, potential solutions:
Folks like Holo-Acacia probably have their long-term memory on a disk somewhere, and those were untouched. So, worst case, they've forgotten the pile of infovore-related panic and possible a few minutes previous to that, and thus woke up afterwards going "Wha' happened?"
Chase scene? Chase scene! Especially the sort where the monster is behind most of the doors you open and you're desperately trying to get away from the thing. The background is inevitably somehow Yakety Sax [microsecond remix].
A miracle occurs, and everyone safely made it to the lab before getting munched on.
Massive piles of handwave, up to and including "it was all just a dream"
Oh my, tech stuff. I don't understand the specifics of the computer language of course, but I think you at least laid it out clearly enough that I still understood what the computers were "saying" as the shut-down rolled out. Being time-stamped also gives a direct sense of the relative timing of the story, and how quickly the failures started to eat through the network. I also appreciate all the details you put into the physical composition of the machines, since the only part of computers I understand well is the outside part. It's interesting to think of all the different parts that would need to be linked together to make a system like the one in Headquarters function. I especially enjoyed the detail of a Somebody Else's Problem field blocking World One from noticing all the data being consumed by New Caledonia, a detail I had never thought about before. Oh, and the wiki, of course! I love that their wiki is a paper book, unlike ours!
You did a great job of making DoSAT (and HQ in general, really) feel heavily staffed, with the variety of reactions shown by the techs and agents in response to the outage. Once I finally get caught up on my spin-off better, I'll definitely have my agents participate.
—doctorlit, presented with electronic thoughts
And you're right about all the parts that need to be tossed together to make HQ have something vaguely resembling a functioning computer network, especially since the only way to get enough stuff without massively breaking cover is to cobble things from all over the multiverse together. DoSAT is managing to hold the critical bits together reasonably well, but things would be in a much better state if people stopped coming about broken CADs every five seconds and taking up everyone's valuable time. That is to say, the department is as staffed as it needs to be to make everyone else's spinoffs funny.
It's also nice to hear that I did a good job with various details, including the physical layout of the computers and the SEP field bit.
I'm not sure how you got the impression the wiki is on paper though? There was a machine in the lab Technician!me had to connect up to to get to the thing.
Okay, yeah, I'm not sure how I got that reading either, other than, you know. Being me and having books on the brain. Woops!
Since I'm replying anyway, I forgot to ask about a possible error: After the line, "As the water started boiling, the situation quietly got worse" you have one of those [630599 messages elided] messages, but this is the only one of them that omits the word "similar." Wasn't sure if there's a computery reason for that message being different or not . . .
Also also, I don't seem to get email alerts for replies, even though I check the little box above the "body" area. How I fix?
—doctorlit is being dumb
Some of the jokes were funny, I guess. They really were clever though. Too bad I only know Java - otherwise I would have enjoyed it better.
((If you feel damned by faint praise, don't; I've been having a really hard time maintaining sustained attention lately, so reading has lost almost all of its pleasure. I haven't finished a book in weeks. So my reaction probably reflects more negatively on me and my lifestyle choices than it does on your writing.))
I imagine I’d have enjoyed it even more if I knew one lick about coding, because I’m sure you snuck some extra jokes in there.
Loved Besh and Nala’s cameos at the end, too.
Now that I think about it, I'm not sure how many computing-specific jokes I put in there, but I do know I was careful about making the details plausibly PPC-like (or at least, what I imagine PPC stuff to be like)
I read this last night, sort of without meaning to. I clicked just to see if I could jog my memory about what the incident was, and ended up sticking around for the whole story. {= D
I remember laughing out loud and stopping to read a couple passages out to Phobos, but sadly cannot remember what they were. I'll come back and edit that information in if I get a chance. Overall, though, very fun. I do love the computational potatoes.
~Neshomeh
I'm glad I did a good job of making this funny even for less-technical folks.
(and yes, the potatoes can be blamed for any internet issues your agents experience)
I liked the early draft, and I like this expanded version even more.
But there may be some evil autocorrect going on:
Tomash shared at the screen in confusion. And Tomash shared at the state of the room and then looked over at the panel. In both cases, you meant "stared", right?
He aimed the CAD at the plothore intersecting the cables, and pushed the button. This appears to be a "plothole".
She then messaged the fellow who'd run to the data2 switch to let vem know it was safe to pull it. This may be correct, supposing that "vem" is a non-gender-specific pronoun I’m not aware of, but I thought I’ll better mention it anyway.
Overall, though the department maintained a typical level of swearing, coffee-drinking, and excited "I figured it out" noises. This doesn’t look grammatically right, like a part of the sentence is missing, though you may just need to either drop the "though" or insert another comma after "though".
HG
It's good to hear that the expanded version added something to the original story.
Thanks for the SPaG notes (I'm glad I didn't have as many of those typos as last time :) ). I've gone and fixed the issues (ve/vem was used intentionally).
Man, I missed a hecka lot.
I have to admit one of the lines near the ending made me laugh:
"After the incident with the tape recorder and the dry ice, DIA sent a Sith Lady to keep order, and a Jedi to keep an eye on the Sith."
Maybe that's just because for a lot of my previous time in the PPC, one of the Boarders I was closest to was Rilwen Shadowflame, whose Agents were almost entirely from Star Wars, and I got pretty familiar with the issues between Jedi and Sith. XD