kythyria

kythyria

  • Commented on Who Owns SF?
    One of us has missed the other's point, somewhere along the line. People tend to miss that genres aren't exactly mutually exclusive. They just tend to get treated that way for ease of figuring out where to shelve things. The...
  • Commented on Who Owns SF?
    I'd say it's always been merged in a sense; that science fiction is a subset of fantasy. This is based on characteristics of the genres, not on what people assert about them, of course. All the things that fantasy involves,...
  • Commented on Who Owns SF?
    For a concrete example, see My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic. Only four characters have any orientation in evidence: Rarity, Spike , Cadence, and Shining Armour. Almost everyone else, no hint is given. I'd argue that in such a case,...
  • Commented on Who Owns SF?
    I don't know if it applies here, but it's very easy to imagine a story in which the orientation of any of the characters is not, in fact, determinable with any reliability. This probably won't stop such stories being labelled...
  • Commented on Gods and genre
    "Hey, we want to add a strong female character to our lineup, but we think so little of her we can't be bothered to, like, actually create a new female character, so we'll just change a male one." What...
  • Commented on Gods and genre
    @93:On top of that, I'd say hardness is a continuum. On the one end you have things that run on Rule Of Cool/Funny/Symbolism/Artyness, on the other, well, at the limit I think it stops being SF altogether—make the tolkienesque fantasy...
  • Commented on Gods and genre
    People like me would have skewed the stats. I just used to skip over the tedious stuff about sex, relationships, angst etc Amen to that. It's not SF per se, but my only criticism of Clarke's Glide Path is the...
  • Commented on The Snowden leaks; a meta-narrative
    Not quite. It's possible to write an interpreter that never needs to write to instruction memory (or executable pages on a von neumann machine), but they're slower than ones that can generate machine code. A bigger issue is that if...
  • Commented on The Snowden leaks; a meta-narrative
    That is, I hope nobody writes delibrately self-modifying code anywhere. In times of the 8-bit machines of 35 years ago, yes, it was sometimes necessary, but not today. (Please correct me if I'm wrong and it has some real world...
  • Commented on Implications
    Ice walls and dragons have the advantage of a sense of wonder having greater tensile strength than a sense of realism. At least when keeping one's disbelief off the floor. And I suppose if you put the black plants under...
  • Commented on I'm back
    We'll end up with an arms race between the people writing lie detector apps and the people using them to train their lying. Joy. Possibly there'll be a third group in the arms race: People writing apps to catalogue people...
  • Commented on Implications
    [...] it's a lot harder to sell a story about amphibious dragons who garden swamps, attempt to tame or domesticate everything they come across, think humans make great pets, and help their tame humans survive in what would otherwise be...
  • Commented on Implications
    Temeraire is an example of tropes being tools, I think, the trope in this case being consistent worldbuilding. It still works, because the rest of the writing is good, and because of the basic coolness of the concept; if you...
  • Commented on What's The Future For Virtual Reality Movies?
    Lacking a Rift myself, I can but speculate on what would be workable. That said, I imagine that the first “Cinema in the round”, so to speak, would be machinima distributed in the form of game mods or map packs....
  • Commented on Commercial announcement
    That is the most supervillainous logo I've seen in a while. I a) kind of want that patch, and b) wonder how the hell that made it past whatever committee picks mission patches....
  • Commented on PSA: Why there won't be a third book in the Halting State trilogy
    Is this plausible? 32 bits gives us 4 billion currency units, which is 16 million USD in circulation. Linden Labs receives, from one class of income source, about 64 million USD each year. Normally when Second Life needs unique identifiers...
  • Commented on Things that keep me awake at night #1: The end of telephony
    I can see whitelisting remaining a popular technique, though. Google Talk (which despite the name is an XMPP service; go figure) silently drops at least inter-domain messages from people not in your contacts list. The idea seems to be that...
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