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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   2440 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for October 6, 2023

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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It's a nice sensation to notice yourself growing as an author.

I started my novel almost 7 months back, on a whim really, and picked it up recently after a few months of hiatus. I can already tell, looking at the older chapters before I edit them, that I'm better these days at plotting, pacing, all that good technical stuff. Better at introducing new characters and fleshing them out, noticing unfired Chekov's guns (that I didn't want to leave as a mantelpiece), and just a more competent writer overall.

I suppose around 200k words has to count for something, that's an effortpost and a half even by Motte standards haha.

Maybe I'm improving faster than LLMs can catch up, for now, GPT-4 certainly can't beat me, but I await eagerly for Gemini and co to reveal themselves. I still strongly suspect it won't be able to match up, but as always, the lines between competent amateur work and something publishable blur under a rain of compute.

I intend to make a Patreon soon, when I finally conclude an exceedingly long arc set in and around Mars, there's already a guy who slid into my DMs ages back who asked me, while on hiatus, whether or not money would motivate me further. I'm pleased to state that when I got back to him again, he was both happy to find that the work was continuing apace, and was willing to contribute enough for me to get off my arse and do the KYC needed, which I will get around to eventually.

Eyeballs are great, but money, ah, is there stronger evidence that people enjoy your work? I'm certainly not quitting my day job, that would be a very poor decision, but as always, anyone who subsidizes my biryani and previously undirected worldbuilding on the shitter is dear to my heart.

What’s your story about?

Ex Nihilo, Nihil Supernum

Dr. Adat Sen has been having a bad week.

You think you have it good, after the sudden appearance of superpowers into the world revolutionizes everything. Especially when your wife is a one in a billion teleporter, it's a cushy gig right until the draft notice arrives and she's forced into a war of apocalyptic proportions under alien suns.

The same star system where, every day, hundreds of trillions of dollars and the lives of millions of normal humans and metahumans alike are destroyed in a meat grinder, barely managing to hold the line against the K3 civilization that a superpowered research experiment accidentally brought to our doorstep.

Let's not forget that his promised pay raise didn't come through, or that someone's out for him to the extent of trying to trying to fry his brain with a Basilisk hack. Who would have thought that being a a cyborg psychiatrist for the UN could be this stressful?

Then there's the matter of publish or perish, handling nasty cognitohazards on a daily basis, convincing suicidally depressed superhumans not to take everyone else with them, all while living under the shadow of the hostile advanced aliens building a Nicoll-Dyson laser in the solar system next door. Oh, and the one Superhuman AGI that humanity produced might be out to get them.

Welcome to the world of ENNS, where superheroes have actual jobs and don't run around in costumes fighting muggers, humanity faces existential threats around every corner, and Adat has the bad luck of finding himself fighting threats way above his pay grade.

It's a hard scifi novel (superpowers exempted) that takes place 20 years in the future, about 15 years from an abortive singularity where humanity noticed one of their AI ascending to ~godhood and decided the optimal course of action was to drop a 50 megaton nuclear warhead on San Francisco.

Then superpowers start showing up in a small yet seemingly random segment of the population, and while things look better for a few years, an attempt to use their abilities to create a wormhole in Alpha Centauri ends up bringing some very advanced hostile aliens to our doorstep. The protagonist is a psychiatrist working for the UN, with a stint in the US Army before the old US dissolved with California and Texas seceding (well, if your own nation drops a whole bunch of nukes on you..). Then things only get crazier.

I wrote precisely the kind of novel I want to read, for what that's worth. Can't let GPT-5 do all the work, especially given it doesn't exist.

Before I read the blurb, and even a few sentences into the blurb, I would have given low odds that it would make me want to read it*, but I was wrong. And now I'm going to try reading it.

*I'm less enthusiastic about web fiction than most of you all, especially web fiction with superheroes.

You've fallen prey to my (financially dubious) plan to write something incredibly niche and specific, but highly appealing to whoever it appeals to haha.

Let me know what you think, I quite rightly believe there's nothing quite like it!

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