Random Questions Thread

Thing is, Возделывание is exclusively associated with agriculture and Воздельник sounds rather awkward and inappropriate (it rhymes with Бездельник (Bezdel'nik) - a slacker). Why not use the appropriate loanword - Культивация (Kul'tivatsiya)? The person doing that would be Культиватор (Kultivator).

edited 7th Mar '18 9:05:04 PM by Millership

@Millership: ...If it rhymes with "slacker," then I'm totally using it. That is exactly how the "man on the street" feels about these foreign scientists, professionals and metahumans.

@Adannor and Millership: Thanks!

If you're going to use it, it should be noted that nouns derived from "Возделывание" properly would be "Возделыватель" (Vozdelyvatel', the one who cultivates) or "Возделываемый" (Vozdelyvayemyy, the one who is being cultivated). "Воздельник" is broken Russian, but it could be used as a slang term to emphasize (and mock) that those professionals are foreigners and do not speak the language fluently.

Also note that those words are in masculine form, and while in Russian the occupations default to masculine (with few exceptions) even when talking about a group of people, when talking about individual female specialists, you should use the words "Возделывательница", "Возделываемая" and "Воздельница" (Vozdelyvatel'nitsa, Vozdelyvayemaya and Vozdel'nitsa, respectively).

edited 8th Mar '18 3:15:30 AM by Millership

Thanks again! Highly useful.

Hi everyone, my writing question is fairly general, but it's something I've been thinking about a lot lately. I recently came across this article on digital storytelling, which gives a rundown of different tools you can use to do it. The article is kind of geared toward marketing, which isn't so much my thing, but I got to thinking that it would be really cool to write a creative story with one of those tools. Here's the link to the article, if anyone's interested:

https://www.1and1.co.uk/digitalguide/online-marketing/online-sales/storytelling-tools-at-a-glance/

I guess my question is twofold: Have any of you used digital storytelling creatively before? And if so, which tool(s) did you use?

Thanks in advance!

On making a footnotes section at the end of a book, what to do if you only had one footnote and you want to point out where in the book to find it?

How badly do you think things would have to go for a country like China or North Korea would consider asking for foreign help?

In this particular (fictional) scenario a small crystal has been stolen and brought to China. This crystal absorbs industrial pollution and replicates itself. In the country it was stolen from, that’s not a problem, they know how to stop it replicating and clear it up. But that information was not stolen along with the crystal. Fast forward two months, the crystal mass is now visible by satellite and is growing at an alarming rate, threatening Chinese industrial interests and lives. Efforts to remove the crystal have either failed and/or made things significantly worse. Other countries know there is a problem in China but only the country of the crystals origins know how to deal with it.

edited 16th Mar '18 10:46:34 AM by MCE

China did request UN help in the aftermath of the 2008 Sichuan earthquake. Considering the outside expertise needed in this situation, I think they'd do the same.

I'm sorry, but any ideas of motifs that could be linked to a "misery build character" plot?

Since that's something Calvin's Dad would say when he took Calvin on camping trips in the comic Calvin and Hobbes, I imagine a rain soaked campground in the deep woods.

Consider the following scenario: A Mad Scientist creates a horde of hivemind-linked soulless transhuman clones with a variety of superpowers (most notably physical assimilation of other organisms, Biomanipulation, Shapeshifting, and cell division-like Self-Duplication) to serve as an army for actualizing his Evil Plan, only for them to break out of their creator's control because it turns out that, being trillions-strong aggregations of cells that include well-developed central nervous systems, each clone had gradually developed a collective form of human-level consciousness and intelligence, a la Mass Effect's geth. The clones, unfettered by any human moral and ethical values, run entirely on the basic instincts still ingrained into their cells... and since their transhuman enhancement leave them with no need for food, sleep or any such physiological wants, the only instinct left for them to follow is the urge to breed — and, by proxy, indulge in carnal sensuality. And they feel that humankind in its current state is really pitiful, so they resolve to fix that by assimilating the entire species into their collective via infecting and ultimately "overwriting" each and every single one of them with their mutated cells. The concept of rape is completely incomprehensible to them even when it's thoroughly explained, as is the fact that their method of assimilation essentially results in Death of Personality for the victims (and thus is tantamount to murder); similarly, they see no point at all in "spiritual" matters such as religion or philosophy. The closest they can get to a concept of "good" and "evil" entirely revolves around whether or not a being has total freedom to indulge in their carnal desires, from both external and internal constraints, and that as long as everyone feels good, there's nothing "bad" or "evil" about it at all; saying "No" is simply the fault of those silly, unnecessarily self-imposed inhibitions that serve no purpose but to deprive the "victim" of pleasure, and thus "rape" is perfectly OK if it's to liberate a person from such shackles. One of the few things they would agree upon with regular humans, however, is that Cold-Blooded Torture (i.e. deliberately causing pain to others for the hell of it) is bad... unless the torturee is Too Kinky to Torture, then it's A-OK.

Does these clones' mentality qualify for Blue-and-Orange Morality?

edited 22nd Mar '18 5:34:23 AM by MarqFJA

I can't say for certain, but yeah, that sounds like a pretty good candidate for it to me. They just straight-up have different priorities than humans and have based their good and evil around those.

For my own question: one of my characters nearly died of an illness in his early teens that left him with the ability to hear ghosts. What kind of illness could I use? Like I said, the character was in his early teens at the time and has already been established as not having a strong immune system, but this also takes place in the US in the late '90s, so a lot of the more stereotypical ones are pretty unlikely.

Pneumonia was my first idea, but I'd love to get some other ideas.

OK, so in the event that a normal human objects to the clones' moral system and/or their way of "preaching" it to humanity as well as method of "recruitment" on account that the clones don't really give any second thought to the fact that such actions are deemed "evil" by prevalent human norms, and part of the clones' response to that is that "good" and "evil" are entirely subjective labels so it would be nonsensical for the clones to base their approach towards converting humankind on whether or not their methodology would be considered "evil" in the eyes of humankind, does that make them an example of Above Good and Evil?

RE your idea: I'd suggest any disease that could plausibly affect the brain in some way, though not-necessarily permanently. FWIW, I've come across examples in fiction where a character gains the ability to perceive the supernatural (or a specific subset thereof) through head trauma (which is implied to have changed something in their brains that "turned on" their supernatural-sense) rather than a disease.

edited 25th Mar '18 4:21:51 PM by MarqFJA

I don't think so. I think that trope is more about characters who recognize that good and evil as the rest of the characters/the audience understand it exist, but feel that their actions are more important than that for some reason.

RE: My question. I don't even know that it would have to affect the brain, though. The implicit explanation for his ability is just that since he was so close to the realms of the dead himself, he was left with the ability to perceive them on some level. I was more just curious as to what kind of thing would he be likely to have, something strong enough to basically kill a 12 or 13-year-old kid who, while not blessed with a strong immune system, isn't impaired to the level of, say, an AIDS patient or a transplant recipient. Particularly since this is a more-or-less modern setting with parents who likely would have made sure he got all his vaccines, was fed properly, etc

Tuberculosis mostly affects those with weakened immune systems, kids are especially vulnerable to it. Some forms of meningitis can be quite dangerous and even lethal in that age (bonus points for affecting the brain membranes). Same can be said about hepatitis. Those three illnesses come to mind first when thinking about dangerous infections.

I just have to know; just how much of this type of story is lawsuit and scandal-worthy similar of ‘A Wrinkle in Time” and the stories written by J.K. Rowling, J.R.R. Tolkien and Rick Riordan?

A race of shadowy animal creatures that have been imprisoned within magical structures are collaborating with villainous creatures on the outside in an attempt to release themselves from their prisons and to try to conquer the world with a method that they attempted to use in ancient times

If this is similar to the work of an author that I haven’t mentioned, please do let me know

How can I make use of a character that can phase through objects and can manipulate sound?

Well, the most obvious answer is as a spy and/or thief. No vault would be safe from them, nobody would ever hear them coming.

edited 6th Apr '18 8:42:23 PM by Fighteer

In the same line of thought as , an assassin would be terribly effective with that powerset. For something a bit less obvious, you could also use this character as the ultimate engineer, who can repair, understand or sabotage almost all systems without having to open them.

edited 9th Apr '18 4:46:35 AM by C105

Well, repairing without opening really depends on how phasing works - for starters, the insides of closed-up things will be in total darkness.

Say you have a character who is Japanese, raised in Japan, but has an American stepfather from whom she learned fluent English from her early childhood. Would she realistically speak English with a Japanese accent or an American one?

Depends on how often she actually got to speak English in later years.

From personal experience, my mother tongue is Kazakh, I went to Kazakh school and speak Kazakh fluently, but from my university years onward I was living mostly in Russian-speaking environment. And with comparatively little chance to exercise my mother tongue, I've picked up slight Russian accent as a result. I'm pushing thirty now. Make of that what you will.

edited 11th Apr '18 5:39:28 AM by Millership

So, I need some help with a specific plot event I'm thinking of - say you have a male character with a female love interest. That love interest - who is an established character - is killed while the male character is in another location, and he only finds out about it some time later. And a long time later (by which I mean many years), her death turns out to be plot-relevant. What would be the ideal way to handle this without falling into the negative, Unfortunate Implication-laden pitfalls of the Stuffed into the Fridge trope?

Hmm, you can try the fact that she dies while managing to do something important, vital enough to give the hero the clue on how to save the day or something like that.

I don't really think you have to worry too much- despite some people who will cry fridging every time a female character dies, the actual trope only really applies when a female character (usually one who didn't have much if any agency in the first place) is killed off only or mostly to provide angst for a male character. If your character is developed as her own character beforehand and her death serves some plot or narrative function beyond "make her boyfriend sad", it's not really an issue from that perspective.

(Edited cause I misread the thread title and thought this was writer's block daily. removed the general writing chatter)

edited 14th Apr '18 3:37:03 PM by Ashfire