David > Recent Status Updates

Lol, buffing vs. resourcing.

C'mon li'l probe...

This is a cool alien mentation model: a distributed identity that attenuates with distance and eventually calves into a new iteration.

Heck yeah.

Proceeding along the lines of Asimiov's _The Gods Themselves_, here we have alternating chapters from human pov ("light") and alien ("dark"). And some third omniscient historian interludes telling us how life evolved on Shroud. The Shrouded (alien) is rather astute, and I would call bullshit, but for its fatal mistake. This is no Mary Sue alien! Good stuff, and believable.

Houston, we, uh, we are running out of main characters here....

"[T]here was a bit of a spark there. More enthusiasm than she usually let show. Devilment, basically. Devilment in an engineer is a terrible thing."

"Contrary to the old maxim, when you’re all in the same tin can with limited elbow room, in space everyone can hear you scream."

Definitely getting Alien Clay vibes: "We were going to spread ourselves across the near-side section of the galaxy like a rash."

I just can't anymore. Let's see if I can remember anything! Flashback! I remember something! Oh that's my name! I remember doing a science! Ugh. This writing is amateurish. I'll just catch the movie.

Ngl, the writing is grating.

Good heavens, this story is phenomenal. What a spectacular, bookend finish, and stinger.

Qntm must have had some math training. Pgs 265-7 are chock full of lingua mathematica, the language of my people, ending with this beautiful description of a graph and its dual, humanity and human connections: "occupying the same space as the first brilliant spiral is a second, its counterpart, a galaxy whose points are relationships between the points of the first: what each person means to each other person."

Mind. Blown.

Whoa, Chap III.5 "Wild Light" was awesome. Hix FTW. Nice save, man.

qntm: "U-3125 represents an omniversal-scale threat. It threatens alternate realizations of our cosmotype. It threatens microverses within our macroverse. It threatens universes that embed ours as fiction—"

Me: gulp!

Alas poor U-4987. We didn't really know ye. Because how could we?

So part III is a continuous arc about Adam Quinn so far, in contrast to the loosely connected chapters in the previous parts. And III.2 is basically Pluribus. Cool, cool.

Jeez, "Case Hate Red" was a downer. And we thought Quinn would be safe. But apparently his story continues immediately in the next chapter!

"And the memory of the operation dissipates, once again, like vapor." Well that's depressing. How do you combat an idea that makes you forget it? And thus ends part 2. Now for the giant final act.

Wtf is Quinn up to provoking U-3125?!

Gah, chap 2.2 "Where Have You Been All My Life" just destroyed me. Poor, poor Quinn. You are taking more of a beating than Collins did to Katniss, only you share in the agency.

And that last story ("Immemorial", Oli Morgan's tale) ends on such a gut punch. This one's been haunting me for a week.