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Journeyman


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Nov
19th
2015

Grey Hat Commentary: Interlude #3 · 11:50pm Nov 19th, 2015

This entry contains spoilers for Gray Hat. Be warned...

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<-- Previous Chapter Commentary *-* Next Chapter Commentary -->

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I’m not quite satisfied with this chapter, although it’s still in pretty good shape.

All of the other interludes so far have thus had a very special idea in mind. The first was to get people used to the format, talk about Twilight, and give a little background on the people in the chatroom. The second was all about providing a little background surrounding AJ’s and Fluttershy’s trip to Magnasanti. Until that time, they thought it was nothing but a job, but according to the nerds in the chat, something different may be going on behind the scenes.

Ozymandias: I think they landed in the OCO private landing bay. South of the Bay Area. Sector 7.

Captain Chaos: That’s isolated...

ZomZom: Odd. I expected them to be in a little more public area. Magnasanti officials and corps would want to show them off a little.

LaLiLuLeLo: You bet your ass they would. This... something smells wrong with this. I’d expect this treatment towards any civilian, pony or otherwise, but these are national heroes. Why shove them into a place to grow plants and shit?

Captain Chaos: I will pull a few strings and make a few calls. See if I can shoot a few bullets and see who runs and who stops to watch. There might be something to these two coming here. At the very least I can trace the paper trail and see who authorized this co-op in the first place. I think this is just nothing, but I want to be certain.

But this one? Not so much. The first two were built from the ground up but this one was a little different. While it is true I came into it with the explicit purpose of talking about Dratali, it’s the other fragments that I’m not satisfied with. The stolen blueprints, Johnny26’s odd behavior, hinting at each character’s roles and jobs in the real world, and of course the conversation no one sees. What made this one different is that all those other ideas came before the main point of this chapter: discussing the Pledge. I had written, or at least outlined, all of them before I had started work on this chapter. I’m a little bothered because it doesn’t flow quite as nicely as I want it to. Still, it works.

I wanted this story to from the very beginning to stay as far away from Into the Black as I could. I wanted it to stand on its own feet and only reference other stories when needed and necessary, like a big one that’s coming in the future. I’m perfectly fine with that, and that’s what I wanted to do. I don’t know about all of you, but I’d much rather not read another story or crossover that relies much too heavily on its own source material, or supplementary material. There is nothing more frustrating than reading a story than references and names being brought up and having no real context for why they should. Well, there are a lot of things more frustrating, but you get the idea. I gave shirotora a fair amount of guff about that when I ran through and edited his chapters. As much as I wanted to stay away from it, I had a bit of an internal struggle in my head. I could probably get away with not talking about the Dratali at all. But... I was kind of struggling whether should I or not. One of the problems I have as a writer is that just because I can, that doesn’t mean I should. A lot of things didn’t go through the “Shut Up” filter in my head when making At the End, and that filter is still trying to build up its muscle mass after about two decades of atrophy. I didn’t want to bite off more than I could chew, but at the same time I needed to talk about things that needed to be talked about. The Dratali were the impetus for so much, so it stands to reason that there would be talk about them. That was the point of the chat room in the first place, wasn’t it? To talk about current events? Yes, it was. But I had trouble separating this little detail: does it need to be talked about because it is important to the story, or because a character wants to talk about it? There’s a slight semantic difference. People would be glad to talk about whatever the hell they want in this world of mine. That didn’t mean that every little thing needed to be in the story, because I had to think about what would be digestible for readers. The part of me arguing for won out, and thus the subject of the pledge took place after all.

I just noticed that the letters on the left control key are almost completely gone. How long have I had this keyboard? Nothing else is faded. Huh. Sorry, got distracted.

The important part of any balanced argument is dissenting opinion. One thing I had wanted in right off the bat was someone as the Vocal Minority. A little background for you. The invading Dratali were defeated and now there are those pledging themselves to repent for their own sins, or those committed by friends/family/you get the idea. This is a good thing. At the same time, no it’s not because for the longest time they were a bunch of assholes. A lot of the people in the chat are cool and level-headed most of the time. There was the rather perverse dick joke Synergy made in the last interlude, but as a whole these are people you can count on. I stepped in to ensure everyone had a reasonable argument. The trope came in with ZomZom being much more vocal about his views. That’s what I wanted. Different people have different reactions. No one in the chatroom has a perfect solution, or unbiased viewpoints. Synergy’s apathy leaks through. As does ZomZom’s anger, LaLiLuLeLo’s analysis, Blackjack’s cavalier attitude, and King Kludge flexing his moderator chops.

That’s something I rarely see in fanfictions nowadays. When a difficult topic or decision comes to the table, there’s always a correct answer. No one balances how much suckage is weighed with the benefits of a particular proposal. The invading army is coming. How do you stop it? Well, you draft villagers to the cause and tell them if they don’t the enemy will put their heads on pikes. That’s an obvious one. Who wouldn’t pick that choice? Well, you have to contend with dissenting opinions on the war, allocating resources for new recruits, training, what if they don’t want to be uprooted from their home and family, perhaps your empire is in the wrong and deserves to be conquered, etc. There is no right answer a lot of the time. Sometimes the goal isn’t to make things good, but just less bad.

I did notice a strange coincidence after I had written most of this commentary. I brought in Blackjack in the second Interlude and BJ comes up again in this one. It’s shown a couple times that she (as the others imply Blackjack is female) is very knowledgeable about private security in terms of the logistics, staff, and corporate actions side of things. I just realized, I know another security-centralized individual who goes by the name Blackjack. Just like Sophia, this one happens to be a strange twist of fate that wormed its way into being. True, I’ve read Fallout: Equestria, but I haven’t read Project Horizons, despite being somewhat familiar with the character. Consider this an unintentional Easter Egg.

Wait, half of the W key is gone too.

Johnny26’s stuff wasn’t plotted out entirely, but I had a general idea. I had notes about the speech to text part for a while, along with a note about what would happen if such a thing was used to beatbox (I think about these things sometimes. Don’t rightly know why.) I also wanted someone with a less “clean” name. Everything was complete, clean, and concise so far. Everyone’s username was a recognizable noun. That almost never happens as the logarithmic curve for new users forces people to get more creative with their names. I needed a guy or girl with a name with special characters or numbers in the username. I just kinda ran with those ideas and that’s how Johnny came to be. I will admit I did get the idea for this somewhere however:

Blackjack: You sound like your testicles dropped and wedged themselves deep in the planet’s crust.

Johnny26: Sorry. I’m a prepubescent but my voice keeps confusing people into believing I’m a thirty year old black man.

The problem is I can’t rightly remember where. I believe it was one of Seananner’s videos and the memory of that guy’s lines stuck with me. Now I can’t find it.

The other piece I had mostly written was the argument about the Smartlink circuit. This was something I had pulled from Shadowrun with the express reason of making the entire thing defective. It’s an awesome idea in theory, but I questioned the mechanics of it and implemented that in the chat. Originally Synergy was to have sent the blueprints to VolTecha, but a miscommunication on my end with another user prevented that from occurring. I had compiled a list of everyone’s specialty before I even started the fic, so I moved it to the next one in the line: Sid the Kid. Surprised? Yes, Sid was your standard forum leech in the second interlude, but as Captain Chaos said: he doesn’t tolerate people not pulling their own weight. It’s my litle bit of the Proteus Effect again. Yes, Sid’s actually pretty smart, but this is something you have to remember when dealing with 100% dialog: it lies to you. Meaning, you don’t get the full understanding of a person’s intent and reasoning if you take them at their word alone. Just taking someone’s word alone is a terribly bad idea, as it’s subject to Poe’s Law and all its variants; you need to see them in person to better understand if they are truthful or not, unless you can trust them implicitly. All of this because of a scene inspired by Doctor Insano. We’re getting all kinds of deep in human psychology shit.

Now...

There is one more piece that you’ve probably come to read about. If you don’t know what it is already, I’m seriously wondering why you are here. Perhaps you didn’t find it. It could happen; I did take steps to hide it. If you’re the puzzle-hunting type, you’re going to hate that I’m about to tell you this and you didn’t find it on your own. Then again, maybe you’re the type of lad to say “Screw the rules.” and ignore the spoilers banner up top. If you didn’t find the secret, there be spoilers ahead.

There is a conversation going on in the chatroom that’s hidden from those actually in the chat. These two characters, @°õN)0ÿÿl¯ÿ¯ÿ and `¯ÿø+))0w (and no neither of those are a typo), are having a particularly menacing conversation about events occurring and yet to be. If you’re wondering why those names look so odd, that’s because you see garbage like that because of something in computer programming called memory allocation, or memory management. When making new variables to put crap into them in languages like C++, such as names or numbers, they are assigned a chunk of memory. Problem is that chunk of memory is complete and utter garbage until you do something with it, unless your particular language assigns it a default like spaces or zeroes. The subtext going on here for the computer-inclined is that these two are breaking the rules and getting around Captain Chaos. The chat is trying to retrieve a username that doesn’t exist and is displaying garbage string text instead.

And because I didn’t want to code up some BS in java or C, I just grabbed the first two strings I saw online. TV and movies may make hacking look like awesome shit, but you know what it’s like in real life? Waiting. You’re either sitting there for hours at a time coding/debugging, or you’re waiting for your program to do it’s job. Even hacking into different sites tend to use brute force tools and you’re supposed to warm up some hot pockets while they run.

Man, I just pulled this tangent straight out of my ass. Actually, all of the WASD keys are fading a little. W the most, though.

I had hinted since the very first interlude that many secrets would be revealed in the chatroom before the actual story finds them (because they are actually looking for them). In the previous Interlude commentary I talked about no one, at the time, finding the secret I had hinted. I have confirmed that two people have found the secret now, or something I describe as the “lock” but not the key. There’s at least two rats in the chatroom. Let’s call these two “Only” and “Yellow”, the rough approximation of what those garbage names look like. Yellow’s been getting information from Only. And there’s also the little bit Yellow deduced that he/she is just the middleman and there’s someone pulling Only’s strings.

So who are these two unknowns? They left the chat before Captain Chaos could sniff them out, but there’s always next time.

There’s still the missing key, which I’ve told no one, even shirotora, how to find. With this, the two who found the lock may be able to open up all the little secrets from within. That’s not to say their conversation didn’t have a few nuggets of information. Only believes Twilight is coming to Magnasanti in the future. There’s also this monikered individual who puts a distinct sense of fear and dread into Yellow, “He Who Walks Through Walls”. The machinations of this Only and the hacker’s supposed handler rely on ignoring this man, and helping Twilight. So what could possibly be so terrifying about this man? What could Twilight possibly be doing in Magasanti?

Tune in next time. The mystery is only now starting to unfold.

Report Journeyman · 474 views · Story: Grey Hat · #Commentary #Grey Hat #Chat room
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