"The Science of Discworld"

At first I thought it was going to be like the physics of Star Trek or how stuff works in the Predator universe but it turns out to be actual real physics with funny stuff added in. Terry Pratchett teamed up with a couple cosmologists and they wrote a three volume set about our world. Really good stuff

I turned a Doc Smith story in The Polar Treasure. It was a difficult read

Flack wrote: ↑Tue Oct 03, 2023 11:15 am That's not to say they can't succeed at anything (that's where "yes, but" comes in) but coming up with a character that can blast his way through every problem doesn't make for a good story.

He never read Spacehounds of IPC by E. E. "Doc" Smith. The protagonist can do everything, including advanced mathematics, spaceship piloting, and when stranded on a planet, starting from virgin wilderness and a damaged ship along with a lady friend, single-handedly creates a hydro generator for power, mines the iron ore and other elements to make steel, builds the spaceship replacement parts, flies it into space, travels to a comet, mines the comet for certain ores, brings it back to his smelter to turn it into that element...

Flack wrote: ↑Tue Oct 03, 2023 11:15 am but coming up with a character that can blast his way through every problem doesn't make for a good story.

Arnold Schwarzenegger has left the chat.

Because it made the protagonist too powerful. Even more so than in movies, protagonists in books have to have constant conflict. It's all that "no, but" and "yes, and" stuff. It's all about hitting your protagonist with conflict and challenges around every corner. That's not to say they can't succeed at anything (that's where "yes, but" comes in) but coming up with a character that can blast his way through every problem doesn't make for a good story.

Wait, why did the prof want the gun ditched?

When I was in my writing program I was working on a novel. It was a little out there. It was about this guy who was a gun for hire and basically he got killed and due to a glitch he got into heaven and ended up there with this magic rifle. This same glitch was letting demons and monsters into heaven and nobody in heaven had any weapons but this guy so he became really important. I had six or seven chapters done and my professor read it and said, "you gotta ditch the gun." I was like, the gun is the whole point! And yeah, the gun was gonna break toward the end and he was going to have to come up with a different solution, but she said no, the gun has to break in chapter two or three. It was the same problem you're talking about. My prof said a lot of novels started going that way after people who grew up on video games started writing books.

I started to read a lot of fiction where the protagonist is basically too perfect and invincible and it really put me off fiction for a while, choosing instead to read non-fiction at night. I need my FLAWS man, bro's gotta have himself some flaws.

Update: The guy is too stacked. He has no flaws and can out-think and out-fight anyone. It's like playing a video game on God mode. Too much Dues Ex Machina by the author. He solves the Saint's problems with one sentence or less and moves on like intelligent readers won't notice. Plus rhe guy gives away most of the money he steals and never never kilks anyone even in gunfights and stuff

The Saint novels by Leslie Charteris.
I bought a 5 pack of used paperbacks in a bookstore while I was in Canada. I had listened to all the radio shows starring Vincent Price and was keen to read straight from the source.
Well, The Saint, Simon Templar, is a cross between James Bond and The Avengers, the 1960s tv show, only set in the 1920s thru the Fifties.





007 much?

The radio show and the television show Americanized him of course, can't have Vincent Price do a Limey accent after all.
Amd they took away all his sidekicks.

When I was a kid one of my must-see television shows was The Six-Million Dollar Man. It was so cool to go into school the next day and hear the other kids talk about last night's show. I didn't talk much in those days but I listened really well. (These same kids all wanted to get jean jackets and write 'Lords' across the back. An idea stolen from the Lords of Flatbush, naturally.) I remember reading the before and after credits of $6M Man and seeing that the show was based on the book 'Cyborg' by somebody-somebody. I wanted to read that book and see if was as cool as the show. It turned into one of my (unknown) bucket list items. I looked up the word Cyborg in the Book of Knowledge encyclopedia set that we had and saw that it was derived from a Russian word. The dumb fourth grade me just assumed the author was a Russian and that it wouldn't be printed in English because of the Cold War and everything so I'd never get to read it. Oh well.

I forgot all about it for nearly fifty years. Then the Internet happened. I was browsing through my thousands of E-texts yesterday and just happened to stumble across that very book. The fourth grade me was very happy. It turns out to be a whole series of books, probably based on the wild popularity of the show at the time. I remember Walter Cronkite telling a news story about kids swallowing pennies in order to gain iron strength after watching the show and kids hurting themselves trying to lift heavy things.

They used to have $6MDM trading cards for ten cents a pack at the local store. I stole five or six packs of cards before my mom caught me and made me go into the store and give the grocer a dollar (of my money!) and apologize for stealing. They're probably worth a fortune now. I never had the Steve Austin action figure in the red jumpsuit, BUT the sitter I went to did. Or at least her son did, and I got to play with it while I was there. I took it home for the weekend one time and discovered that if I kicked our wooden storm door on the back porch just right it would make that di-di-di-di-di-di sound effect. Or a sound that was pretty close, to my fourth grade ears. Oh the bad guys we defeated that day! Oh the many Bigfoots we beat up!...Oh the storm door windows we broke! (after kicking the door one too many times.) I had to give the action figure back after that.
It was all my mom's fault, she never gave me any G.I. Joes or any other action figures. All I got were educational toys; they didn't take, obviously.

So I'm halfway through the first book (1972 by Martin Caidin) and discovering that Steve Austin was kind of a dick. Fourth grade me doesn't care! I'm reading the books! There's a lot of 1972 hard science that I have to skip over or go brain numb but it's worth it to complete a very small item of my unknown bucket list.


THE
BETTER STRONGER FASTER
AARDVARK

It's a rare treat to find that someone has written about your hometown. I found the following in a sci-fi book that I randomly started reading.

exerpt from

Conrad's Time Machine
by Leo A. Frankowski


Towards sunset, looking up old friends seemed like a good idea, and my bike made a
right turn into Rochester, a strange little town.
The locals claim that the engineer who laid out the street plan was drunk for eight
weeks before he drew the first line, but I knew better. It takes large groups of people
working earnestly together to do something that stupid.
The arithmetic average of the number of streets coming into an intersection is
probably somewhere around four, but the modal number is three, with the next most
likely number being five and after that seven. The whole town is like a quilt made by
crazy old ladies out of random polygons. There's even one frightening crossroads called
'Twelve Points." No shit.
Right downtown, doubtless by accident, there are these two streets that cross at
almost right angles, although one of them changes its name in the process. This oddity so
astounded the locals that they built this big office structure there and called it "The Four
Corners Building."




https://rochesterdowntown.com/neighborh ... r-corners/


https://rocwiki.org/Twelve_Corners

odyssia76 wrote: ↑Fri Apr 01, 2022 1:28 am

Ice Cream Jonsey wrote: ↑Wed Mar 30, 2022 7:11 pm Yeah, but none of those guys shamelessly ripped off their adoring fans for a cool half a mill.

I don't think that's true at all. Kickstarter projects fail all the time. Everyone knows the risks when they pledge. And there's no evidence he did anything wrong or profited in any way. He's got more than enough money without needing this penny-ante stuff. Having said that, he could be guilty of overconfidence and lack of business and game dev experience. My guess is that some of his rabid fans hyped him in the idea, made it seem fun, played down the risks, etc. And the game isn't necessarily 100% dead. He seems to have done what he could to make things right.

I mean, there is this.

DaveKap
about 3 years ago
Well I never got a refund so I guess Neal Stephenson is literally a scammer now? Weird a successful author would scam some random person out of 25 bucks.

So I guess he didn't do everything to make things right because this guy never got a refund. Right?

How do you figure that Clang is not 100% dead?

Ice Cream Jonsey wrote: ↑Wed Mar 30, 2022 7:11 pm Yeah, but none of those guys shamelessly ripped off their adoring fans for a cool half a mill.

I don't think that's true at all. Kickstarter projects fail all the time. Everyone knows the risks when they pledge. And there's no evidence he did anything wrong or profited in any way. He's got more than enough money without needing this penny-ante stuff. Having said that, he could be guilty of overconfidence and lack of business and game dev experience. My guess is that some of his rabid fans hyped him in the idea, made it seem fun, played down the risks, etc. And the game isn't necessarily 100% dead. He seems to have done what he could to make things right.

Ice Cream Jonsey wrote: ↑Wed Mar 30, 2022 7:11 pm Yeah, but none of those guys shamelessly ripped off their adoring fans for a cool half a mill.

I've seen some weird kickstarters, and this one is pretty weird. "What were they thinking" type of weird. Kinda like the power glove. But, when reading about it, apparently there were refunds? I mean, the dude apparently wrote some books that had a crapton of sales. Unless he spent all that on hookers and crack, he doesn't seem in need to rip people off.

Yeah, but none of those guys shamelessly ripped off their adoring fans for a cool half a mill.

Ooo! Mindstar Brigade with Greg Mandel

Thanks! I've been going through the works of Peter F. Hamilton, Alastair Reynolds and Stephen Baxter for a while now. The more the merrier.

RealNC wrote: ↑Wed Mar 30, 2022 10:17 am Never heard of them. I just browse goodreads.com and see what looks interesting when I'm looking for something new to read.

If you like hard science fiction, then they are must-read authors.

Neal Stephenson - Snow Crash, Diamond Age, Seveneves - all stunning classics. And the rest are awesome too.

Kim Stanley Robinson - Red Mars, Blue Mars, Green Mars, The MInistry For The Future

Jack Campbell Lost Fleet series (first book - Daunfless). Best hard-core militray/naval Sci fi.

You're welcome. I envy you for the amazing books you have yet to read.

You never heard of Snow Crash?