I have some more ideas for this verse if you are interested.speaker-to-trolls wrote:Zor: It's Red Dwarf with mutant meat creatures, fantastic!
Zor
Moderators: Invictus, speaker-to-trolls
I have some more ideas for this verse if you are interested.speaker-to-trolls wrote:Zor: It's Red Dwarf with mutant meat creatures, fantastic!
I'm not really sure, but I'm sure it can be done at least with some wing thingies attached to your arms. You can make some attempts at flying even in full gravity, so with arm wing attachments it's sure to work.speaker-to-trolls wrote:Destructionator: Glad you like the idea. I've got another question about this whole setup; how effective would this 'swimming' in the air really be? Air doesn't seem thick enough to swim through. I also wonder what kind of flora and fauna one might introduce into a zero g environment like that.
Some of these things are too heinous to even comprehend. I shall now go on a shock site and cleanse my mindZor wrote:
*creating large amounts of artwork in cargo bay-5 out of scrap metal
*Creating over 250,000 Warhammer 40,000 miniatures and playing year long matches against a specialily programed computer.
*Comming up with names and personalities for every single one of said miniatures.
*Having landing drones build 1/1 scale recreations of historic landmarks on various moons while she collected deuterium and did overhauls.
*Capturing stray cats and selectively breeding them using a complicated series of test tracts for intelligence, dexterity, socialibility and bipedal locomotion
*Using clothing fabricators to make vast amounts of sock-puppets for the purpose of putting on sock-puppet theater productions of various peices of literature, including moby dick, the entire discworld series, Lord of the rings and so forth.
*Adapting Disney musicals to fit various historical time-periods and animating them (her personal favorite of these is the WWII soviet version of "I'll make a man out of you")
*Building numerous model sailing ships out of wood and bamboo and sailing them around the flooded decks.
"Lets get down to buisiness, to defeat the huns!"Heretic wrote:Some of these things are too heinous to even comprehend. I shall now go on a shock site and cleanse my mindZor wrote:
*creating large amounts of artwork in cargo bay-5 out of scrap metal
*Creating over 250,000 Warhammer 40,000 miniatures and playing year long matches against a specialily programed computer.
*Comming up with names and personalities for every single one of said miniatures.
*Having landing drones build 1/1 scale recreations of historic landmarks on various moons while she collected deuterium and did overhauls.
*Capturing stray cats and selectively breeding them using a complicated series of test tracts for intelligence, dexterity, socialibility and bipedal locomotion
*Using clothing fabricators to make vast amounts of sock-puppets for the purpose of putting on sock-puppet theater productions of various peices of literature, including moby dick, the entire discworld series, Lord of the rings and so forth.
*Adapting Disney musicals to fit various historical time-periods and animating them (her personal favorite of these is the WWII soviet version of "I'll make a man out of you")
*Building numerous model sailing ships out of wood and bamboo and sailing them around the flooded decks.
Now what I find a little interesting is I think this is taking place in, like, 2100. What intrigues me is when I cross-fertilize this with Accelerando-esque thinking about how radically things could change in a relatively small amount of time given the right premises, and the notion that the kind of theocratic dystopia presented in this novel could function as a sort of time capsule in such a changing world...The actual "story" beyond all this, is that America is about to commence a Reconquista of Europe, and the Caliphate knows it can't stop it.
So it decides to destroy the world with a viral plague! To do so, it recruits.......
CANADIANS!
...
They intend to perform their evil CANADIAN ritual of Science in a converted castle near the border of the Neutral land of Swiss People.
Yeah, probably.Invictus wrote:The one problem I see with this ending is wherever the undoubtedly not very technologically advanced Orion ship launched by the Caliphate would go, the transhuman Outsiders in their solid-state tin cans with faster antimatter/ion drives could follow.
I do agree. I can't imagine your Accelerando-esque transhuman society actually failing to notice their departure, but I suppose such a society would have more pressing priorities in dismantling the Solar System for computing mass or Dyson arrays. Once they get to the post-scarcity stage though, I'm sure someone with the time and energy to knock together a tincan with solar sails and a big laser array will follow. Makes for great sequel material.Somes J wrote:They might not bother though. A large human nation on Earth? Enough of a threat to be worth destroying. The world's most isolated self-sufficient town, which would require significant effort to reach? Maybe not worth it, at least for the moment.
I've kind of wanted to read it for a while but it sounds like it'd be so offensive I'm not sure I'd want to unless I could also spork it at the same time. Which I suppose I could do (I've done that for a couple of other books on SB.com), but from the summaries I've seen a lot of the issues I see with it are along the lines of THE HISTORICAL CALIPHATE DID NOT WORK THAT WAY and EVEN THE TALIBAN DID NOT WORK THAT WAY, so I think it might be something better left to somebody who's studied the historical Caliphate and Sharia law.Invictus wrote:I went and read through the Caliphate thing and there's so much wrong it isn't funny.
Nah, I meant the thread, not the book. I'm not going to go out of my way to hunt down right wing mil-sf novels, no matter how entertainingly awful the Internet makes them sound.Somes J wrote:I've kind of wanted to read it for a while but it sounds like it'd be so offensive I'm not sure I'd want to unless I could also spork it at the same time. Which I suppose I could do (I've done that for a couple of other books on SB.com), but from the summaries I've seen a lot of the issues I see with it are along the lines of THE HISTORICAL CALIPHATE DID NOT WORK THAT WAY and EVEN THE TALIBAN DID NOT WORK THAT WAY, so I think it might be something better left to somebody who's studied the historical Caliphate and Sharia law.
It's a well-established fact that vampires can't abide crosses. There seems to be some confusion, however, as to why this is so.
I should note here, before we go on, that I believe in vampire stories. I don't mean that I believe these stories are "literally" true -- they're not that kind of story. But I believe they are true stories -- stories by which we tell ourselves true things so that we do not forget them.
Vampire stories tell us, for example, that any of us can have great power if only we are willing to prey on others. Feed off the blood of others and great power will be yours. This is demonstrably true. It's how the pyramids were built. And Standard Oil.
The stories also tell us that there's a downside to this predatory choice. You become a creature of the night, unable to stand in the light of day.
And crosses will confound you.
Some mistakenly think that this is because the cross is a holy symbol, imbued with religious power. But this is wrong. The symbol, like the thing itself, is powerless. And that's the point. That is why vampires can't tolerate it.
Most vampires don't believe in the cross, but that hardly matters. It's the idea of the thing that gives them fits. The cross confronts vampires with their opposite -- with the rejection of power and its single-minded pursuit. It suggests that no one is to be treated as prey -- not even an enemy. The idea of the cross, in other words, suggests that vampires have it wrong, that they have it backwards, in fact, and that those others they regard as prey are actually, somehow, winning.
This notion is incomprehensible for vampires. The one thing they're certain of, the thing that drives them and tells them who they are and how the world works and that they've got it all figured out is that the key to immortality is in choosing to be the predator rather than the prey. The idea that this might be wrong is so befuddling, so contradictory to everything they have chosen to be that it forces them to recoil. They can't get past it.
It has become fashionable in modern vampire stories to portray these monsters as unaffected or somehow immune to the cross. Don't you believe it. This confusion arose due to the ridiculous, contradictorily cruciform objects being bandied about these days as "crosses." A filigreed gold or bejeweled cross refutes itself, denying its own representation of powerlessness. Likewise the oxymoronic martial crosses -- a problem since at least the time of Constantine -- that attempt to present themselves as sanctified symbols of power. Crosses like that aren't the least bit disturbing to a vampire -- they merely proclaim vampirism by other means. Vampires have been known, in fact, to have such crosses emblazoned on flags, or even to have tattoos of them etched into their undead flesh.
So the apparent immunity of modern vampires to such crosses isn't what it seems. Sacrificial powerlessness still confounds them, but that idea is no longer quite so effectively signified by this particular symbol. I've heard rumor of a vampire not so long ago being turned away by one of Margaret Bourke-White's photographs of Gandhi at his spinning wheel. Fortunately I have not had the occasion, personally, to attempt to repeat this experiment.
As for garlic, well, I'm not really sure what that is supposed to tell us, but I'm open to theories.
...
Yes. I was about to say this when I read this section.speaker-to-trolls wrote:And here's another thing, human beings have time and again shown a willingness to treat other human beings as commodities. You say 'insatiable unholy appetite for the blood of mankind?' I hear 'emerging market'.
Just whip up some kind of prejudice so that you don't have to think about the people you're selling as real people, and there you have it, it's just their place in the natural order of things to be vampire food, just as it is definitely not ours, we're totally different, etc.Destructionator wrote:And if the Vamps are honorable and honest about it, negotiation could surely get them into a decent place and be treated as an equal nation.
This is something that has always annoyed me a little about vampire fiction, it should be a lot more difficult to drain that much blood than it is often presented. Also, in a setting where vampires are an established political force all kinds of myths could be misinformation, either from their enemies or from the vampires themselves, they might quite like their enemies to believe they can turn into mists and control wild animals.Siege wrote:I wonder if in such a setting the "vampires kill you by DRAINING ALL YOUR BLOOD!" couldn't be stuff and nonsense made up by political opponents.
That depends on the vampire, he might well decide that mortals are so unreliable (you just finish a peace treaty and then, suddenly, just eighty years later, their entire government is dead and the new one wants to take your stuff again) that the only way to get some peace and quiet is to take over the world and put it under a vampire oligarchy.If he thinks long-term as you'd imagine an immortal to start doing eventually, then he might favour quiet and stability over the lust for conquest and other medieval unpleasantry that his mortal peers are after.
My thinking is that Barony Dracula's living standards would depend very much on the ratio of peasants to vampires. A high P:V ratio means that the vampires can take a little blood from a few peasants every month and there will be no ill effects, but a low P:V ratio means that they will have to take blood from a higher percentage of the workforce, which will affect the amount of work the peasants can do, which will affect the prosperity of Ze Barony as a whole, which could lead to more deaths among the peasantry and so on.Which could make Barony Dracula a better place to live in than the Duchy McVanquish next door.
Well, I suppose that works for medieval settings, but if vampires are really so set in their ways they can't cope with the idea of an entire nation changing its ways over a period of eighty years they're liable to be properly fucked once modernization kicks in. "What's this Internet silliness, haven't we just completed a perfectly proper telegraph network?!"speaker-to-trolls wrote:That depends on the vampire, he might well decide that mortals are so unreliable (you just finish a peace treaty and then, suddenly, just eighty years later, their entire government is dead and the new one wants to take your stuff again) that the only way to get some peace and quiet is to take over the world and put it under a vampire oligarchy.
That's a good point. The number of actual vampires needs to be low compared to the mortal populace to prevent overfeeding. But considering the creation of vampires apparently takes some doing this should not be too difficult to ensure. 'Course, too few vampires around and you risk creating a 'all eggs in one basket' situation where your cadre of trusted immortals are eternally at risk of a well-coordinated mortal uprising. This could actually be an interestind dynamic: too many vampires and you suck the mortals dry or they'll rise up in protest against your blood tax; too few, and the mortals might get it into their heads that they might just be able to stake you when you're not looking. In a way that's actually similar to how medieval kings can't create too many dukes and earls and knights, but they can't create too few of them either, because they need them to keep the peace in the far-off domains.My thinking is that Barony Dracula's living standards would depend very much on the ratio of peasants to vampires. A high P:V ratio means that the vampires can take a little blood from a few peasants every month and there will be no ill effects, but a low P:V ratio means that they will have to take blood from a higher percentage of the workforce, which will affect the amount of work the peasants can do, which will affect the prosperity of Ze Barony as a whole, which could lead to more deaths among the peasantry and so on.
Why not recruit loyal families, and reward decades of loyal donor service with a vampiric knighthood? You'd end up with a proven cadre of immortal knights who've shown their devotion to His Immortal Highness through decades of service and their families, now risen to a status I suppose you could compare to Roman patricians, would (A) look up in proudness to those exalted members of their family who've actually made the immortal Big Time and (B) would be loyal to the vampiric order because, hell, family ties plus the promise of immortality for dutiful service make for one pretty goddam motivator.This is why the vampires might want to import some more peasants from somewhere else. Ideally they would want to naturalise the new peasants so that they became good, productive, law abiding citizens of Ze Barony and not a potential fifth column, but if that isn't possible you could end up with an under-underclass of slaves who get worse treatment than peasants who have lived there a long time and have a better understanding of how things work
Yeah, that's pretty much the size of it. Since there aren't any examples of real immortals to draw from I can't really say how good they'd be with a changing world. For one thing this whole feudal blood tax thing only lasts as long as they have lots of peasants tied to their land.siege wrote:Well, I suppose that works for medieval settings, but if vampires are really so set in their ways they can't cope with the idea of an entire nation changing its ways over a period of eighty years they're liable to be properly fucked once modernization kicks in. "What's this Internet silliness, haven't we just completed a perfectly proper telegraph network?!"
Siege wrote: Why not recruit loyal families, and reward decades of loyal donor service with a vampiric knighthood? You'd end up with a proven cadre of immortal knights who've shown their devotion to His Immortal Highness through decades of service and their families, now risen to a status I suppose you could compare to Roman patricians, would (A) look up in proudness to those exalted members of their family who've actually made the immortal Big Time and (B) would be loyal to the vampiric order because, hell, family ties plus the promise of immortality for dutiful service make for one pretty goddam motivator.
That's something that anyone looking to create a vampire knight would have to consider, is it worth turning his family into vampires as well knowing that it might result in a troubling increase in overall vampire numbers? Moreover, will he be a problem if he isn't allowed to do so and will he resent his betters for letting his loved ones die?There's several interesting dynamics at work here: for one, a young knight recently turned immortal might strive desperately for permission to turn his beloved too before it's too late. Depending on how this eternal youth thing works he might not have that long before she fades away. The same thing is true for family members etc, driving the newly knighted to ever greater feats of heroics, using their newfound immortality with reckless abandon to save as many of their loved ones as they can from the ravages of time.
Definitely, the further in you got the more dangerous your opponents would be, since the older vampires would be those who were best at avoiding all the things which can be a danger even to them. I would expect that the oldest vampires would probably stay away from combat, since any kind of combat, over the years, is likely to thin out the numbers even of superhuman immortals, and let an older generation of vampire knights do most of their fighting. I'd fully expect them to be expert strategists, though, with hundreds of years of experience and study under their belts.Pierce deeper into the vampiric kingdom however and you'll meet progressively older earls and dukes, each controlling cadres of immortal knights with maybe decades or even centuries of combat under their belts. You'd have to bring enough cannon fodder to beat an elite army with lord knows how many years to hone its skills in war. And if this kingdom isn't internally stable these vampire princes might have years and years of trying to beat each other in progressively more Machiavellian games. They might be masters of war and politics. Hardly the sort of people you want to cross lightly.