fpez

[fpez]

I read them but I don't remember. Hope this helps.

I was reading Cenotaph but I got bored at the Leviathan arc. Do the sequel fics ever reveal what happened to Emma and Sophia?

I didn't read them so I couldn't tell you (I also have very little memory of the first). Anyone else know?

[fpez]

Writers who use em dashes, have AIs that use em dashes. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KUXb7do9C-w

Yeah, I use em dashes, but consider: I have millions of words of material online, so who do you think the AI learned it from?

[fpez]

Everybody wants to be a cat

[fpez]

Can you believe I used to prefer smugbug to wolfspider. Youthful ignorance. That smugbug is more popular in general speaks to a conspiracy against butch women in popular culture. Wolfspider is a blessing to this blighted fandom. Butch woman makes Taylor whimper in like the first chapter they see each other, and then they have a dog-based enemies to lovers arc. I mean come on.

[fpez]

When this happens to me I often wonder if I only like the one song due to the context it was introduced to me in, and if I wouldn't have liked it if I wasn't associating it at some level with a show, event, or a nostalgic memory where I first heard it.

Absolutely gutting to listen to a banger of a song, go track down the band, and find out that it's their only good song across three albums.

[fpez]

This needle bridge (Esplanade Riel Bridge, in Winnipeg).

It's a building in the middle of a river accessed via a walking path that gets howling -40 or below windchill, and there's zero wind cover. A few restaurants tried it and never lasted long. They tried having a mini bus shuttle people from a nearby parking lot for a while. I think it's now a bio lab -- coolness upgrade! I wonder how often the locals are mostly opposed to the Big Dumb Thing. This one was lambasted as being super expensive and showy in a city that's not doing great financially. Infamous $1m toilet.

I love when a city has a Big Dumb Thing in it.

The quintessential Big Dumb Thing is the St. Louis Arch, which was built to commemorate westward expansion and is almost exclusively there for tourists, but also gives an otherwise kind of mid city a little bit of identity. I have to imagine that as soon as it was built, people started talking about it, which is one of the things I like. When practical considerations dominate how cities are built, it's great to have someone's creative vision writ large on the horizon, even if it's not the most beautiful thing ever constructed.

To qualify as a Big Dumb Thing, the structure in question needs to have no practical purpose for being built how it was, or at least minimal purpose. Most of its shape should be aesthetic, though as buildings involve engineering, I'm willing to give a lot of leeway. Most often, they'll be towers, because those stick out, and you get more bang for your buck with a tower.

Not all landmarks are Big Dumb Things. There are plenty of bridges and buildings that are pretty but functional, and the functionality comes first, because they were built with that function in mind. So the Golden Gate Bridge? Not, in my parlance, a Big Dumb Thing, even if it's nice to go up and look at, and dominates the popular understanding of San Francisco's identity.

But San Francisco also has Coit Tower, which was built because someone wanted it to exist and had the money to make that happen. This very much gets at the heart of why most Big Dumb Things are built, and if not for the Golden Gate Bridge, I think it would have found a more prominent place in the city's cultural identity.

I would like to hear about your local Big Dumb Thing. Something that someone built mostly because they thought that it would be cool to have around, either built by a benefactor or commissioned or just a building made into art. Might be a monument, might be a tower, might be a building, it just needs to be Big and also Dumb (affectionate).

And also include a picture, if you can.

[fpez]

wolfspider kiss but Taylor's a degenerate speedrunner and already prepping for Valefor

lisa felt the need to request no tongue bc her shard told her exactly what taylor did to that poor girl

[fpez]

I like this coolest version of tattletale. grue: You can't just put on a pair of sunglasses and call that a mask. tattle: Watch me, bitch. bitch: I'm watchin'

is she a girlboss or is she suicidal?

[fpez]

Every time I think about finishing my wormfic I remember I'd be updating it on spacebattles so what's the point really

Why are you here instead of writing

[fpez]

If you targeted a primarily programmer audience, then explaining it in programmer terms seems pretty straightforward. You'd visualize it as an array of deterministic simulations all advancing one step at a time, where the simulation at index N is also on step N, and each update they are all advanced one step and a new simulation with the default state is added to the front. You only have one simulation at any step N at a time. All simulations that reach step N are identical at that step (because they're deterministic), except if they have interacted with the time travel mechanism where an actor/objects can be moved from one simulation into another one. At least to me, thinking of it this way makes it easy to visualize one person starting a time travel sequence causing a cascade, and how cascades can be broken up by other time travel events. Also easy to see that if you have even just a few time travelers who can travel multiple times, you can quickly end up with a huge number of diverging simulations.

There's a beautiful model of time travel called hypertime, which so far as I know was invented by qntm. You can read about it here.

The general idea is that there's an infinite stack of universes, possibly with a "prime" universe, each temporally offset from each other by some small amount (or just being continuous). You can imagine all of time on a chart where a properly sloped diagonal defines a specific time (e.g. January 1st, 2001), every horizontal line defines a single universe from its past to present, and every vertical line defines multiple universes that are "initially" arranged so that they're equivalent to "down" being backward in time and "up" being forward in time.

My plan was to write a fanfic of the NBC show Timeless using this model, rather than the one they use in the show. I see now that this was hugely more ambitious than Timeless ever deserved.

The big thing that keeps drawing me to this idea like a moth to flame is that there are cool things you can do with it. Here's one of them: a person goes to what they think of as "back in time", which is actually "down" on the time sheet, and ends up in a past that's different from the one they remember. How cool is that??

You intend to go to the past to see what's on Nixon's missing 18 minutes, and instead find yourself in a universe where the Nazis won WWII. And if you're operating under the assumption your time machine works like the one in Back to the Future, you're suddenly extremely confused. So you go back in time again, heading to just before the outbreak of WWII, and ... it's completely normal, with no sign that anyone has been monkeying around.

This is my white whale of a scene: the revelation that it all actually does make sense, the unfolding implications, the machinations of all the major time traveling factions and their goals.

I'm not actually sure that such a scene can be written in such a way that the majority of the audience would get it. Hypertime is hellish. Diagrams would help, but I'm not sure how much, especially because one of the things that (this subset of) hypertime assumes is some level of determinism and the inability to talk about "when" things happen except using reference frames.

As an added bonus, hypertime makes it possible to have diverse scenarios such that you can be wrong about how time travel works multiple times. You start out thinking that it's a stable time loop, you eventually see that contradicted and realize that it must be branching timelines, you see that contradicted and decide that it's ripple effect, and you see that contradicted and end up realizing that you're in this stupidly complicated hypertime setup. It has the potential to be the most complicated time travel story of all time. It has the potential to have the greatest number of explanations of time travel in a story, many of them incorrect.

I am at the point where I have an almost intuitive understanding of hypertime, but it took me drawing a lot of diagrams to get there, and I'm not sure I possess the writerly ability to explain it properly, especially if there are misdirects built into it.

A man can dream though.