Random Questions Thread

If you get a different group of people approaching a problem...well, how many times do you expect the answer to be "nah they're gonna do things the same way"? They'll have different techniques, different senses of how urgently it needs to be confronted, different definitions of what constitutes an ideal success.

Unless they're under an extreme micromanager who mandates what's done, when, and how, there will probably be significant divergence.

It all depends on whether one changed outcome of a particular station of the canon will have a snowball effect that radically changes the outcome of one or more other stations "downway", IMO. Because most characters are capable of thinking for themselves and may very well react to differences in circumstances in appropiately different ways from those they did w.r.t. canon circumstances.

I am actually now kind of confused on exactly what the Stations of the Canon are. (is it bad if it has the same general over-arching plot but modified for the characters? Or is it when the plot goes to the exact same places with characters who have no reason to do so?) If in story 1, we're investigating 2 murders and 5 kidnappings, is it bad if you take the characters from story 2 and have them also investigate 2 murders and 5 kidnappings in the crossover?

edited 30th Jul '15 3:12:19 PM by mercuriesandrandomness

Like I said, it depends on the significance of the long-term after-effects of a divergence at an earlier point. Would the way these new characters handle on of the earlier cases lead to one of the later cases never happening at all? If so, that's probably considered good, provided that you actually do attract the reader's attention to that fact in an appropiate way, even if it's actually subtly done and so only an attentive reader will notice.

BTW, as The Stations of the Canon is defined "a fanfic revisits a series of iconic canon events," it seems to me that it's not inherently bad or good, it's just that Sturgeon's Law afflicts the concept roughly as hard as it does almost everything else.

Okay, I see. I just once wrote a really bad fanfic series that was really heavy on that trope, and noticed that most of my stuff when writing crossovers tend to be really heavy on said canon-stations. Also, for the thing I'm currently writing, the most common opinion seems to be that it's really boring from the people I sent the whole plot summary to. (Which is 2 people, so I don't know if that's anywhere near reliable.)

Not really reliable IMO. Sometimes the whole point of a story is to see how the new characters affect the plot by passing through each Station of the Canon in order. This, of course, would hinge on picking the appropiate characters, e.g. that they're neither so "overpowered" nor so "underpowered" that the original plot diverges so drastically in one way or the other that several Stations are bypassed altogether.

edited 30th Jul '15 7:36:53 PM by MarqFJA

How would a chimeric hybrid of the mythical kraken and the Biblical leviathan probably look like? I'm not entirely convinced of Kraken and Leviathan's Pirates Of The Caribbean entry's claim that the kraken from said work is truly a combination of both in design.

edited 2nd Aug '15 1:13:34 PM by MarqFJA

Isnt Leviathan a serpent? And the Kraken has tentacles? So a tentacled sea-serpent?

A Kraken with serpents instead of tentacles and maybe a giant snake head?

No, the Biblical leviathan (if we ignore Word of Dante) is apparently a four-legged scaly amphibious creature, theorized by naturalists to be a mythologization of the Nile corcodile (except that crocodiles can't breathe fire). The serpent thing was probably conflation with other mythical sea monsters.

Wouldn't that just turn it into a hydra?

edited 3rd Aug '15 7:51:07 AM by MarqFJA

A legless hydra with a snake head instead of a body.

An alternative is a Tarrasque with visible vectors.

edited 3rd Aug '15 9:19:51 AM by Pz_VI

The Biblical leviathan is largely undescribed, but might be more whale-like.

I'm working on a conlang. In addition to the comparative (bigger) and superlative (biggest) degrees of comparison, it also has distinct constructions for two more comparisons in the opposite direction: for instance, less big and least big. These are not equivalent to "smaller" and "smallest", though; they indicate that something is still big, but less so than the compared object(s).

I currently call these comparisons the anti-comparative and anti-superlative, respectively, but I think they should have more official-sounding names. I'm thinking of calling them the derogative and sublative, but are there any other terms that could be better?

Diminutive and underlative, maybe?

Underlative just sounds odd, and the term "diminutive" is already being used in intensifiers as a contrast to the augmentative. Say, the diminutive of big would translate to "kind of big" or "not really big".

Can you use the English equivalent of how you want to use those structures? I am having difficulty figuring out how the "anti-comparative" would work, because comparative always makes a comparison between two things, even if only implicitly.

As I said in my first post, the anti-comparative for "big" would be "less big", but it is distinct from "smaller". Say, "The Colosseum is less big than the Great Pyramid." Implicit in the sentence is the addition of, "...but it's still big."

Sublative sounds good. It relates to the superlative pretty obviously and its only meaning in English seems to be for some Finnish-Ugric verb case we don't care for.

For the other I'm tempted to recommend slapping a prefix like quasi-, semi-, sub- or under- on the front of comparative. I think that would maintain the sense that these things are comparable, but A just isn't as much as B. (As opposed to un-, dys- or mal-).

edited 3rd Aug '15 3:44:06 PM by Luthen

There is a thread specifically for conlang development.

RE Leviathan: Actually, no, it does get described in detail, though it still leaves quite a few unanswered questions.

Where is it?

Well, I found three in World Building but they're all fairly old.

• Show Off Your Conlangs! - 31 posts, last updated 6th Aug 2014
• Conlang Development - 47 posts, last updated 3rd Sep 2014
• Creating a Constructed Language - 4 posts, 8th April 2015

I can never remember our local rules on thread-necromancy though...

edited 4th Aug '15 10:57:28 PM by Luthen

Reductive. Why didn't I think of that before? I'll call it the reductive. Or maybe subtractive. One of those two.

edited 4th Aug '15 11:35:14 PM by TeraChimera

From Job 41:1–34, emphasis mine.

So yeah, multiple limbs, an outer coat of fur/hair, bodily structure resembles animals that can be ridden upon, a maw full of teeth, a back (and perhaps a whole body) covered by armored plates/scales, actual nostrils and eyes, breathing fire (or doing something that resembles such), a distinct neck and chest, undersides that are apparently spiky or something similar... Yeah, doesn't sound anything like a known aquatic animal to me, let alone a fish.

I didn't want to put this question in the Relationship Critique Thread since it's more of a cultural/general question than a detailed thing about a specific relationship.

So in Moonflowers, I've got a REALLY downplayed, stable, "normal" relationship that got together recently, but I'm also planning for them to have slightly drunk sex while they're staying overnight in a hotel after a concert. I was checking the dates between when the relationship started versus the current date of the concert, and it was a day over two weeks between those points.

I'm probably overthinking this too much (I have a plot full of Xanatos Gambits to deal with, so my "KEEP SHIT STRAIGHT" mode is probably spilling over into tiny things), but does it seem too soon? They've been friends a couple months beforehand, so it's not like they're literally having sex after two weeks. Although since it's set in western Ireland and I try to keep things Like Reality, Unless Noted, any specific Irish views on non-married sex would be a good pointer. (Also, any stereotypes to avoid would also be cool.)

The guy is noted to be a genuine Nice Guy and a moderate but not exceptionally devout Catholic, so unless there's something I don't know as an American who never went to Ireland, I'm pretty sure they should be cool.

edited 5th Aug '15 5:40:48 PM by Sharysa

My gut tells me that getting drunk in Ireland is very commonplace, so things like that happening is fairly possible. It's a Catholic country I believe, but I think there's no real flack unless they get caught or the guy is against it, which you said he wouldn't.

People have sex the night they meet, so I wouldn't worry about it, especially since they've known each other for quite a bit beforehand.

(I'm assuming they both get drunk so there's no glaring consent issues, js)