cks you designed to be ~exotic~ or whatever, and those rabid jerks at Disney can only grit their teeth now!
Sufficiently Advanced status update, and a small heads up · 8:11pm Oct 5th, 2014
I've just spent most of this Sunday hammering my head against the five-meter granite wall that is my writer's block on chapter four.
I am happy to report that I've managed to push it from about 1.7 K, to 5 K, and the biggest problem that kept me from writing the rest is now solved.
And all without any sidef- bodityonhgdnhodirutnodigmnflh.
Bad joke aside, chapter four is nowhere near ready yet, but I'd thought you guys might want to hear where my day went, given the circumstances.
Oh, and a few thoughts occurred to me, that might be rather unpopular.
Three big, scary, scary, scary words: Deliberate Values Dissonance
I'm not going to spoil it in a blog post about what, but I'll give this hint. Some ethical quandaries we're still wrestling with? Even if some people and cultures disagree, but by the year 2310 we really should have come to a conclusion on a social/legal level if nothing else.
I genuinely think it will make SA a stronger and more interesting sci-fi story in the long run, but short-term? I frankly expect quite the fire-storm in the comments.
Just a fair warning so those that think they might be effected can brace themselves.
Hey, at least you haven't forgotten SA and you're working on it
, As for the Ethics whatnot
You DO realize this is humanity we're talking about. There are and will ALWAYS be those POS even if they don't realize what they are or do but don't care or (and this one's worse) TRY to be (for whatever reason
)
2509375
It's going to sound SO silly when I reveal why things stalled for so long, but I just couldn't move past that one roadblock, since it will effect so much else down the line.
Still, glad to hear the story isn't forgotten, just because it has slept for far too long!
Well, yeah, but I still think a small heads-up to the older readers is just fair, given that it's stuff that wasn't planned from the beginning, and as such might feel a bit from nowhere.
Morals are always a mess. I have no objection to changing morals, so long as they are set, at least loosely, and as such can be known, and can be as consistent as any morality system. That is, not exceptionally.
*affected.
I'm very curious to see what you mean now. I can't wait till it comes out.
I am actually fascinated by foreign morals, Even though I would be breaking them no matter what.
They often give you a glimpse into the author's mind, and make the story feel fuller. Continue on.
As if the whole concept of clinical immortality through total body replacement, and the way that technology has rendered gender and even apparent species almost moot isn't a giant values dissonance?
Or are you talking about deliberately rewriting someone's memories and personality without their explicit and previously given consent? Haven't seen that yet but it's implied with the mass cybernetic conversions and copies of personalities.
The whole story has been one disturbing look into a future where technology has made one's own self so malleable that death is moot when one can simply rearrange oneself mentally and physically on a whim, thus allowing for the entire destruction of a previous personality and body without even the step of ceasing their life functions first. The soul survives, but a soul is like liquid, shaped and altered by the container it's in; what trauma then happens with such a drastic reformat?
How big a values dissonance can you even add at this point?
Unless you're talking about something that is basically child molestation/sexual abuse, in which case, yes, I'd be rather pissed and drop the story like a burning hammer.
2510281
Are you saying you don't adhere to posthumanist values?
Mein Komerade... You are on thin ice.
Hmm. Nope. I'm dense.
2510482
I am what I am. The wheel of time yet turns, rolling on its inexorable path towards the uncharted future. A Brave New World awaits, but none know the shape of it, not until it is too late. But it is a wheel for a reason: what once was, shall be again. Humanist and Post-humanist philosophers dream of a world in which the mind is limitless. Those of us who have studied the past weep at the terror this will bring.
On a lighter note: Swedish Meatballs.
2510281
Oh GOD, NO!
fc04.deviantart.net/fs71/f/2012/346/7/a/all_aboard_the_nope_train_by_odscene-d5nu2je.jpg
I'm NOT, I repeat NOT, doing that thrice damned 'android prostitute that looks like a kid' cliche! Not only is it squicky as hell, but it has been done, and —pardon the horrible pun, milked too death and back even on a philosipical level.
And I don't do freaking foal-con.
'Congratulations,' I guess. Not often I get blind-sided by somebody being pessimistic about something.
I'll say this though, the above? A lot closer to some of the stuff I've realized should be possilby, and thus need to explore with this setting.
No damn foal-con, though, I can promise you that even now.
2510849
Thank God some folk have brains.
And yes, I'm pessimistic. I've been using the Web since it got popular back in 1996; I've seen shit that would make foal-con look tame. Just covering my bases.
Also prepping the napalm.
I figured, as that's certainly a possibility I find disturbing. There's a particular story here on this site that I shall not name, but is very popular despite the fact that the author has Celestia and Luna basically doing ad hoc mind erasures and memory alterations without consent or warning, all ostensibly for the good of the characters they effect, but when you start throwing around "the greater good" as a reason, I start thinking of how that was the reasoning behind the concentration camps of World War II. Of course, said author is a psychology student of some stripe (amateur or university, I have no idea) and thus that story has many piles of utter horseshit (no pun intended) pretending to be some kind of "healthier" outlook.
Anyway, once you start getting into this territory, it's real easy to cross the moral event horizon, so be careful, man. And I hope you don't make any of the interesting protagonists into real s**tbags. Mistakes and flaws are one thing, but if someone's rewriting their offspring/clones/replicants/whateverthefuckthecopiesarecalled willy-nilly, then that's some squicky stuff right there.
Anyway, look forward to reading it to see what happens.
2510901
Know what you mean. The web is a place of wonders and horror.
Now, I don't actually mind losing a reader or two by sticking to my guns on depicting a taboo from an alternative perspective if I think it makes the story better... but foal-con?
I didn't buy the argument 'it isn't real children' when I heard it for cub-porn when I stumbled across that crap, and I'm most certainly not doing it with foal-con and the same stupid argument a decade later.
And not only is foal.con icky in the extreme 99.9999999% of the time, but the mine of concepts to be explored therein is so stripped, even the timber struts have been stolen by now.
Oh God, it's probably going to seem positively tame after this discussion, but the big thing I was worried about?
Being able to change your orientation having become a semi-commonplace procedure with most of the controversy behind it. Kinda like a sex-change today.
Don't get me wrong, I still expect some resistance and muttering, but nowhere that bad anymore.
(Not to mention far darker things being possible with the same type of tech, of course, but I think that will only be hinted or discussed in the story proper. Not shown outright.)
2510932
Sure, why not. It's a crazy cyberpunk future after all.
It's a time to make hecatomb with this modern holy cow.
From glancing through your conversations with my predecessors in the comments, I can see that anything I'd be remotely bothered by is not going to be the big thing the deliberate values dissonance revolves around.
All I can really add to what the others have said is: go for it, and don't be afraid of what the response might be, since there will always be those who complain for complaining's sake and they're going to whine no matter what you do.
Fantastic to see the story still lives, and I shall patiently await the next chapter's arrival.
2510932
Read the spoiler, and the thing is, you kinda already went there. ;p Aren't like half of the cyber-pony people originally male? And then you introduce the ease of which some of them can change bodies and it's already implied that capability is there. And when a capability is present you bet your ass humans will abuse the smeg out of it.
Anyway, yeah, glad to see not as bad as I feared. Will be interesting to see.