It has a downside, tbf. Angie is quick to own her mistakes, but this can come off a bit… calculated?
If you’re upset with me and my apology is quick and kinda mathematical, like I’m solving for X as the apology, that might not feel genuine to you.
She may not necessarily be the kind of person to gush an apology, but she will absolutely own her mistakes because she doesn’t regard mistakes as personal/moral failings - merely perfectly human data input errors to be corrected. (3/3)
She runs it through a kind of metaphorical internal spreadsheet so she can locate the data input that created the error. Errors happen and a good, pragmatic accountant doesn't let that ruffle her feathers. (2/3)
Focusing on Angie, the modern accountant living in the Enclosure among paleo-people: She meticulously catalogues the nature of the mistake. (1/3)
#AwesomeCharacters
Powerful on its own. That singular status is its core problem. If it fails completely, the whole of the story comes to an end, but creating a redundancy to take over for it means aggressively disabusing at least one person that they have any agency concerning their fate.
#AntagonistApril
Placing Rowling among the rest who are pictured would be laughable if it weren't so bloody crass.
The narrative will orbit around the first of the Neanderthals to be fully upgraded to Builder status, the woman named Tourr’di. When she comes “on-line”, she subordinates the Steward and takes the H. heidlbergensis gestalt as her personal set of remote avatars. (4/4)
But their success is only partial. They function as a gestalt mind and aid the Steward in keeping planet-side systems running. But they aren’t enough, and the Steward continues to degrade. (3/4)
The attempt with Neanderthals and Denisovans is ongoing and central to the narrative. The prior attempt with Homo sapiens ended dramatically and tragically. The only remotely successful attempt has been with a small group of Homo heidelbergensis that live in permanent stasis. (2/4)
#AntagonistApril 18: I don’t know if they count as henchmen, but… The Steward has been trying to upgrade hominins in order to create new Builders that have access to systems out of its reach in order to save the whole of the project. (1/4)
Behold all that transpires and know that the veil will never be thinner. You will never get a better look at the fact that the law is just a pricing schedule and attorneys and magistrates are just highly specialized accountants.
If you can afford it, you can do it.
Thank you, Existence, for not saddling me with a peanut allergy.
Thai cuisine is WAY too good. 😳😊
#Thai #Food
David Gerrold out here breathing a sigh of relief that his "War Against the Chtorr" novels - on hiatus since Book 4 published in 1993 - will soon be overshadowed.
In short: Narrative intrusion that overrides the structural constraints and logic of the narrative form in order to satisfy fan-service like wildly exhaustive clothing descriptions in high fantasy.
POV and descriptions out of sync. Looking at you, Arya Stark. I'm told from your first POV that you hate the “pretty princess” life your sister Sansa loves, but then, in every one of your chapters, you describe other people’s clothing just like everyone else does. I thought you hated all this???
Unreasonable reasonable descriptions.
Does the POV character have access to the room being described? - Yes!
Does it make a lick of sense for the POV character to give a "laser scan" description of a room they've been in a bazillion times as though it were the very first time? - No!
That.
It has been a weekend of catching up on movies. Anyone else ever go through periods where new media is just unapproachable, and then the floodgates open with no explanation?
Given how ludicrously everything is accelerating, I'm of the opinion now that there are videos of Trump in The Files that are most accurately viewed with 3D glasses. 😒
The main antagonist, the Steward, is an A.I. that runs the show, but it's dying and forced to watch the failure of the grand project it's still trying to save. That feels like a prison to me, and while finding narrative compassion for Hurásu's racism is a chore, the Steward does get my pity. (3/3)
If you ask Hurásu the Scythian, he would say he is imprisoned by monsters that only pretend to be men. He would say this world is a prison where adaimag must not only suffer the presence of tukhé and maosa, but worse - their dominance. But Hurásu is only the initial, blunt antagonist. (2/3)
Not in the literal sense, no. The Enclosure does not possess such intricate sociological artifacts like prisons. The population density is far too low for that kind of thing to arise. But prison can be metaphorical, no? It can exist without walls. (1/3)
#AntagonistApril
A screen-cap of a virtual dating app where you design the boyfriend of your dreams, but all the example images look exactly like the attributes Clavicular thinks will get him girls... but don't.
Why do digital boyfriends all look like they were designed by Clavicular? For whom exactly are these AI BFs designed and BY whom??? 😅
A threads post from edeunda.benson stating: You can be civil and kind to fascists without supporting them.
The words of a monster signalling to her fellow monsters that the disguises aren't working anymore and it has become unsafe to be a monster among humans.
Character template sheets. Part of me sorta sees the point, but another part of me is like, "If you knew a person who was THIS unshakably predictable in real life, you'd be looking for the exit, and with a quickness."
No, but… do they ever? Really? I do have a character who is not an antagonist but was forced to face violent antagonism in the past in the only way violent antagonism understands. He does often worry that the man circumstance forced him to be might have been an evil man.
#AntagonistApril
Evil? No. The initial antagonist is, if anything, sadly predictable. His grievance is petty, his anger overblown, his entitlement unwarranted. The main antagonist is, in the end, just trying to keep the experiment running. The ensemble are children of a lesser god.
#AntagonistApril
“Alive, alive, and this one here is NOT in your possession! And to think, all that coin jingling in your pocket. Tsk, tsk. Your Queen will be well pleased… not.” 😅
The ensemble includes Nikho, a name that is known to everyone. He was a maosa general during the conflict. Adaimag call him "the shadow's shadow". For those who hold Hurásu's sentiments, there is no greater prize than Nikho. (3/3)
He has contact with an insular group of adaimag (Homo sapiens) that have lived in self-imposed isolation after an era of conflict in the deep past. They would rather there be no maosa or tukhé folk, and certainly no mixed folk. Hurásu agrees with them. (2/3)
To avenge his bruised honor. His wife left him, and for him what is worse is that she left him for a maosa man, a Denisovan. They moved east to a maosa community and Hurásu crosses paths with the our ensemble just after being rejected yet again. But that part is incidental… (1/3)
#AntagonistApril