The PPC Posting Board - Latest posts

Hello and welcome to the Board! Here, have some chocolate, and enjoy your stay!

Nice variety of fandoms, and it's nice to see another Hamilton fan on the Board!

Actually, I was thinking of just getting Discord on my laptop. There is a warning about "this kind of file damaging my computer", should I just go ahead and do it anyway?

We're both newbies then! Nice to meet you. :3

Isn't it possible that this is an unfortunate byproduct of being born when you were? I'm not saying there was never any tonal shift in science fiction en masse - there definitely has been over the course of 60-70 years - and I can kind of understand what you mean when you say you're wishing for things more in the tone of the older shows.

That said, I think that your view on older science fiction may be a little skewed. ^^; You weren't alive when the original Star Trek started airing I don't think, and you were probably a young kid when Voyager started airing. You weren't as old as you are now, with your social and political knowledge, when they were airing, and in the case of things like the original Star Trek, the height of the Cold War was something firmly in the past for you. The allegories aren't nearly as relevant to you, and because of that don't feel nearly as on-the-nose, as the shows making them now because you are conscious of the world around you and current events in a real sense that you weren't when you were younger. I guess the prevalence of mainstream media increasing people's awareness to the degree it does now is also a factor in that; I don't remember it being that way when I was a kid.

One more thing is that you have to remember that you're seeing a lot of these bad shows because you're around when they're first getting started or are currently airing. A lot of the really bad scifi shows, and I think even a lot of the mediocre ones, in original Star Trek era, and the ones from when you were a young kid, didn't last and aren't talked about now because they weren't preserved as well and simply don't have the staying power of Star Trek. I mean, as a person who reads and watches a lot of anime and manga, the same thing happens in those communities with a lot of people who idealize older anime because it was "better" back then, but they have 20, 30 years of hindsight and people living through all the bad and mediocre ones to fall back on to tell them what the real gems are. I think it's the same with any sort of media, really. Lord of the Rings wasn't the only high fantasy book written before 1955 but it's certainly the one everyone remembers, as a literature example! ^^

A Blink of the Screen, his short fiction collection, includes quite a bit of good SF. I'm quite a big fan of "#ifdef DEBUG 'world/enough' + 'time'" because of course I am, but other standouts include "Hollywood Chickens," "FTB," "Kindly Breathe in Short, Thick Pants," and of course the fantastic "Once and Future".

ED: That one especially Pratchett character you were thinking of was Lobsang, wasn't it?

I feel like leaving the PPC for a some time now. I am starting to feel a bit angry with myself and the community. It was fun being with everyone, especially when I had the opportunity to spork that Warframe/Neptunia/Persona fic in the Discord server. Hopefully, I won’t be gone for too long.

~SomeRandomPersonAccount Going on a spiritual journey.

~SomeRandomPersonAccount Still can’t find recently released books that piques his interest.

Yeah, Andy Weir and Cory Doctorow both contributed to Press Start to Play. See previous comment for my review, obviously. :)

Now that you've brought up the Long Earth books, I get to indulge in some Pratchett Sr. fanning. As Thoth said, the series is co-written by Pratchett and Baxter, and it's obvious much of the world-building was Pratchett. It has his signature all over it - plus, y'know, the original short version appears in one of his short story collections. That's a hint. ^_^ But I got the impression that the actual writing was mostly Baxter. There's one character who screams Pratchett at me, but overall it felt like Pterry had an idea that he really wanted to see written, but either didn't feel he could write serious scifi, or knew he was out of time to do it.

Which, for me personally, is a real shame, because I've never really liked Stephen Baxter's writing. I've taken a run at it several times: I've read various Xeelee works, the Time Odyssey trilogy with Arthur C. Clarke - another 'let's get this done before I go' - the Long Earth series, the Northland trilogy, at least one of the Manifold books... um... okay, this list is getting unwieldy. Looking at his bibliography, I've actually read some or all of most of his series - but there's very few that I've re-read once they were complete. (This includes the Long Earth, sadly.)

I just keep bouncing off the general... not even grimness, the griminess of his writing. I think he's aiming at realism, but it comes across as a combination of 'by golly, there was a lot of biological nastiness going on' and a deep pessimism about humans as a species.

Which is a real shame, because I adore his worldbuilding. The Northland trilogy, which starts from an AU Stone Age, is a fantastic alternate history - in which every single character seems to be barely suppressing the urge to shag and then stab someone. It's just... grimy.

(Also, I was bitterly disappointed at what the last book of Time's Tapestry did to the coolest lines of the previous books. The feathered serpent, plague-hardened/Flies over Ocean Sea/Flies east... But this goes back a good bit longer than that.)

But I've always had a penchant for the lighter side of fiction. If you love intricate and grounded worldbuilding, and like or don't mind unsympathetic and kind of messy humans, I can highly recommend... probably everything Stephen Baxter ever wrote.

Meanwhile, I would unreservedly recommend everything Terry Pratchett wrote. If you want scifi, there's Strata and The Dark Side of the Sun from his older works, and Nation on the edge of the genre from near the end.

hS

Check out You: A Novel, by Austin Grossman. It's about a guy trying to track down a glitch after being hired by a video game company. It's a bit weird and floaty and probably not as clever as it thinks it is, but I remember enjoying it. It's certainly a better tribute to gaming than anything that hack Cline put out: Grossman was a real writer and game designer at (among others) the legendary Looking Glass Studios and puts that experience to work in writing the book.

He's also, by curious coincidence, the brother of Lev Grossman, who wrote the Magicians trilogy. I don't think that he got this book published through nepotism, though, because before this book he wrote Soon I Will Be Invincible, which is extremely well-reviewed.

Take this brass lamp of +2 Protection Against Grues.

I have read PotO, but never saw the musical. Nesh is the big PotO fan around here.

...I really should see the musical at some point. It's constantly running at heavy discount on Broadway so tickets are cheap. But the book was... solid. Very much of its day.

Dunno what else to say really. I don't have experience in most of your fandoms. :-/

I'd like to see any evidence that CZM has noticed that flooding the board with similar threads rather than consolidating is considered poor form.

Okay, let me see. I read a lot of sci-fi. And not all of it is ancient.

-First off, Andy Weir's The Martian. Everyone knows this book is great. And it is. What you may not be aware of is the philosophical short story he wrote before The Martian, The Egg, which is also excellent. Weir does have his weaknesses (his next book was pretty universally panned for a lot of reasons), but these really do show him at his best (which is to say, approximately 40 million times more deserving of your attention than Ernest Cline -- no, bad Thoth, stay positive). The other thing that he's known for is "and Bob was there too" which is pretty funny in my opinion, but not sci-fi.

-In slightly less known territory, Cory Doctorow. I read a significant percentage of his novel in elementary and middle school (without paying a cent -- thank you Cory!). Most of his older books are still free downloads, for the cash-strapped. If you like rebellions, activism, tech geekery, anti-DRM protest, and other such nonsense, you'd probably enjoy him. His YA novels (Pirate Cinema and Little Brother) are great fun if sometimes a bit dark, and books like Down and Out In the Magic Kingdom, Eastern Standard Tribe, and the like are great and occasionally quite surreal. I really need to his collaboration with Charles Stross

-And speaking of Charles Stross, I'm willing to recommend even works of his I haven't read on confidence. The Laundry Files is rock-solid pulp horror sci-fi that borrows from Lovecraft, cold-war thrillers, James Bond, Modesty Blaise, internet folklore, real-world folklore and conspiracy theories, office bureaucracy, institutional computing and science, and all kinds of other resources. It can be blackly comedic at one turn and utterly chilling the next. It's just really good. And there's nothing else like it. ...Except maybe Delta Green. And from what I've heard, Accelerando, Rule 34, and the rest of his books are just as good.

-Speaking of good, Terry Pratchett wrote Sci-fi. Man, I need to finish the Long Earth books. But even the first one was excellent. Cowritten with Stephen Baxter, it's got traces of Pratchett's sense of humor but still more of his empathy and his distinctly warped mind--his ability to look at a world different from our own and not just take real-world parallels for granted. His worlds are full of things that on the face of it seem insane, but as soon as you think about them, they make perfect sense and of course things developed that way. How could they not? That's the hallmark of excellent world building.

-I just read Planetes, and that's also quite good. Near-future, set in space, chronicling the adventures of a ship tasked with clearing space junk out of orbit. It's... flawed (I've heard the anime might be better), but it's still Makoto Yukimura, and his care and attention to detail and latent talents for storytelling shine through even the roughest patches. Even at its lowest point, Planetes has absolutely beautiful moments that I can't imagine any other mangaka writing the same way. It's beautiful and thoughtful and so very human.

-I'm bending all the rules but what the heck, Planetes is well over a decade old so I might as well bring up Cowboy Bebop. I know, at over 20 it's not quite modern anymore but it's just... so... so good. If you haven't seen it, you should. Go ahead, treat yourself. Run, don't walk, grab a copy of the dub, and prepare to sit down for a lot of hours because I don't binge shows ever but I pretty much binged this. It's that good.

-While you're at it, Firefly is good. Obviously.

-I should stop going back or pretty soon I'll be recommending Snow Crash (go read Snow Crash, it's excellent), so let me talk about a book I've basically never seen anyone talk about that I read years ago. How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe, by Charles Yu, is a truly surreal novel about a time machine mechanic looking for his father... sort of. If you appreciate comprehensible, clear narratives, this may not be your book. But it definitely has a distinct charm to it.

So, how did that go? (Um, spoilers in the subject line...!) My goal was to see if the PPC could collaboratively create a coherent mission through AI dungeon, and we managed... one of those.

The mission is certainly coherent. It glitches at times, but with only minimal editing it would be 100% cohesive. The plot is weird, but not too weird for the PPC.

But the collaborative side... other than me, a total of five Boarders took part in the thread, and of those five, SMF and 4Moons posted entirely random lines, while NeoSkater's only line used was directly suggested by me. Even while SRPA and doc were contributing, I wound up writing 2-3 prompts for each of theirs.

And that's all mostly my fault. I should have made the compiled story available right from the start, so people could jump in without having to read the whole thread. I should have made it clearer at the beginning that the goal was to see how the AI could be wacky and random while we tried to be sensible at it. I should probably have put in a 'no more than 2 prompts in a row' rule; we ended up with 2 people making huge blocks of contributions, which is great for the story, but not great for getting people involved in the thread. Really, I needed to be clearer about what I was hoping to do right at the start. And I should have held back on my own 'pushing the story' prompts in favour of letting other people speak.

But setting all that aside... I can't help but feel disappointed at how flat this all fell. I guess a lot of it comes down to the fact that there was no way for anyone to contribute except as the next person to prompt, which means if I haven't posted, there's nothing at all to do. Like I said to 4Moons, it would probably be a lot better suited to the Discord, where you could get instant responses. Maybe you can all have some fun with it over there.

Here's the complete story, which I will put up on my website at some point.

hS

This should be the correct link--I'm guessing Markdown formatting ate the one SRPA posted, judging by the italics. Hopefully it won't touch this one; if it does (honestly, I'm kind of curious), I'll edit it into hyperlinked text, which should be fine. (ETA: Yup, that's exactly what happened. Hyperlinked text it is. The formatting guide will show you how, under 'links'.)

Welcome! We share a handful of fandoms (at second glance, it looks like that covers almost everything you've listed by name, wow), but I'm going to go Hamilton! because it's been on my mind a bit lately. Re: Elisabeth, I haven't seen it, but I know a tiny bit about it because of (a currently mostly inactive Boarder named) Lily Winterwood.

At any rate: have the (hopefully working) link and a bar of Swiss Bleepolate! Hope you have a good time here.

~Z

Mmm, I smell interesting stuff...

Oh, and, that link doesn't work?

Pretty much everyone just uses GMA for obvious reasons to refer to me. I hope you continue to enjoy our brand of weirdness!

Welcome! Have a plate of fresh SPaGhetti!

Aaaand you’re another musical fan!! I love Hamilton so much, and Les Mis! Don’t suppose you’ve heard of one called Waitress before?

Yes, this is going to be very interesting.

Oof, never expected to get so may replies.^_^ Thanks, guys!

Welcome to the PPC! We're glad to have you join us.

For your newbie gift, have a lucky sixpence!

I have some... opinions about Ernest Kline, but if he only wrote the introduction, I can deal with that. And this is a pretty interesting premise for an anthology.

I shall put it on the TBR list. :)

Having been published almost 70 years ago, and all.

Have a purple object that’s impossible in all but the weirdest branches of maths and may or may not have the power to summon demons.

It has a lot of fire, and I mean a lot of fire. It also takes place in the late 2010s apparently, because the seashells remind me of AirPods.

~SomeRandomPersonAccount Recommending books because they have fire, and question marks