Johannes Punkt’s Flaskpost

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Category: Parallel to Writing

4/Mar/2013

I Solve Your Fictional Problems with FTL-Drives

The post on Time Travel was a success! On account of how everybody loves technobabble, I will strive to make solving your fictional problems a regular occurence. Today’s letter comes from one @_TK_O (Ms. Osborne), who writes

Dear Mr Punkt,

My starship is not peppy enough, and I’m struggling to get it to go faster than light. However, all the fancy spaceships my friends own seem to be able to manage it! Tell me, how can I win the next big drag race in the Alpha Quadrant?

Sincerely,

Ms. Osborne, T. Read the rest of this entry »

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25/Feb/2013

More on Conlanging

The language of the Cekno has evolved! (See /2012/12/14/thoughts-on-conlanging/ for context.)

With the help of @kerastion (Rob Mitchelmore), @drakekin, and @eleniturner (Lily Newman), the language is going places and it is exciting.

Prototype of what the language would look like, by @drakekin. Isn’t it pretty?

It still is not anything you can communicate with, but it has ideas! There is a Glossary of Definitions you can check out: /glossary/idiosyncratic-glossary/. You can also check out drakekin’s work at his ministry-of-plenty.co.uk/, or his version of the glossary (with glyphs!) here: …pages/a-cekno-dictionary.html.

Some cool words from it are the word for light or photons, which I aim to make as diverse and difficult as the Greek λόγος (logos), or the Latin re. One can dream, right? Also the word for waiting, without knowing something is going to happen. It is almost always a retroactive verb, for saying things like ‘I waited for the reaper to come (having never heard of the reaper before he came)’ where the bracketed part is only implied. Can be used in present-tense if one is very careful.

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11/Feb/2013

I Solve Your Fictional Problems about Time Travel

Fictional people often come to me with their Problems. They are very distressed until I calmly technobabble at them until it all seems to make sense. So, I thought I should offer my services to the public. Are you a fictional person? Do you have a problem? Email me at johannes.punkt at gmail dot com and pose your problem and I will try to explain it away.

Now, without further ado, today’s problem is about time travel. The question was illustrated in the form of a picture of a DeLorean several thousand miles into space, with Earth in the background, and a pithy explanation that the Earth moves in space.

Q: How come time machines also seem to be space machines and always know exactly where to go???

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21/Jan/2013

Plots You Can Have #5, Ambiguous Monsters Edition

[Content Warning: suicide, human sacrifice]

Previous part here: /2012/10/31/for-the-undecided-plots-you-can-have-nanowrimo-edition/

First part here: /2012/08/20/a-few-plots-you-can-have/

~

The Dalmour Parasite

a parasite that only infects suicidal people and turns them into psychopaths to make their lives better

Neil Ruthsmoke is a man who makes his friends suicidal. He cannot help it; it is not to do with his personality per se, it is just that his particular body odour trips bad wires in people’s brains; he is a freak of nature undiscovered by science. He is also quite depressed on account of this. Story is about how his psychologist both tracks the spread of the parasite and how it starts to take over hir. There is research into Ruthsmoke’s life, and the point where his friends stopped killing themselves and started becoming sociopaths is found. Good scenes might include: when the psychologist puts forth the idea that maybe, possibly, it’s all Ruthsmoke’s fault; when a friend breaks the pattern by topping hirself; when the psychologist realizes ze has probably been infected hirself.

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14/Dec/2012

Thoughts on Conlanging

So, I wrote this story a long while ago: /vignettes/the-anywhere-machine-appendix-i-futureful-skyful/

If I were to construct a language, I would try to construct the living sun’s language and I would try to write the poem that I alluded to.

The Cekno had a language that grew from hir necessity to organise hir own thoughts, to cope with the dread that every aware enough being feels. As such it is not a good language for communicating with other entities, but good at writing poetry and arguments in. The writing would be constructed in circles, with characters (that could correlate to sounds if one wanted to speak it aloud) being the highs and lows in the wave that the circle is made of. Presumably, to write it, it would be easier to draw it as a line and then draw it once more as a circle. Eventually, people who learn the language would try to read squiggly lines and circles and it will be amazing.

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31/Oct/2012

For the Undecided: Plots You Can Have, NaNoWriMo Edition

Don’t know what to write for Nano? Are you a planner caught by November with your breeches down? FEAR NOT. I am here to offer some last-minute, utterly stupid excellent ideas for you. You are free to use them however you like. I will be basing the things on quotes from various things.

~

Sufficiently advanced organized crime is indistinguishable from government. Okay, this quote is from me, I admit it. Imagine a novel which is about a mafia in some mediterranean country, and how the mafia family – as it grows larger and more influential – takes up more and more of the responsibilities of government, eventually even holding press conferences and being worried about public opinion. It would be a slow shift, and the main plot would be about, well, making money and smuggling.

~

A religion that doesn’t change is just as dead as a river that doesn’t move. Quoth Buddha or someone like that. This story would be about two elderly clerics tasked with modernizing their fringe religion, whose memberships have dwindled over the last centuries. Funny scenes include the time when their entire server gets hacked and their website made to display a rival religion’s stuff instead. The thing devolves into a battle between these two rival religions.

~

СЧАСТЬЕ ДЛЯ ВСЕХ, ДАРОМ, И ПУСТЬ НИКТО НЕ УЙДЕТ ОБИЖЕННЫЙ! (The end of Roadside Picnic, by the Strugatskies. In Russian here for reasons of ambiguity, spoiler-prevention, and also my pretentiousness.) What would happen if, right now, the world became a utopia? The utopia is not static, but say there is a superposition of an ultra-advanced society on top of ours. Follow small groups of protagonists as they pursue intellectual goals, try to uncover what the heck just happened, and go a bit nuts from conspiracy theorizing about it.

~

The fork was never found. From the Wikipedia article on Tarrare. You could write a fictionalized version of the life events of Tarrare or Charles Domery, who were men who could not stop eating. That Wikipedia article is one of the best wiki articles I’ve ever read, and a fictionalized version could be amazing. Suggested ideas: write it from the viewpoints of three or four different people interacting with him: the surgeon, the military interrogator, etc. It will be awesome. Do it.

~

If anyone decides to write these plots I would love to read them.

Cheers.

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23/Sep/2012

List of Rules [Notes on TIME TRAVEL SEX CLUB]

https://zombiesintelligently.com/vignettes/time-travel-sex-club/

  • RULE 1a DO NOT GO HOME WITH ANYONE RULE 1b DO NOT TALK ABOUT TIME TRAVEL SEX CLUB RULE 1c DO NOT MENTION SPECIFIC DATES/EVENTS RULE 1d DO NOT ALTER HISTORY.
  • RULE 2 NO NAMES.
  • RULE 3 WHEN YOU FEEL THE BUZZ DROP YOUR TIME IS UP; LEAVE. you cannot stay in an unchronized zone forever. there is still a pseudo-time moving forward but independent of the time in the synchronized world, and as reality is made by consensus time-and-place needs to keep all chronoception outside of its zone.
  • RULE 4a WE ARE FOREVER RULE 4b ANY RUMOURS OF US GOING OUT OF BUSINESS ARE STRICTLY FABRICATIONS RULE 4c KEEP FINDING US. Read the rest of this entry »
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18/Sep/2012

Avoiding Translationese (English from Swedish)

Below is a paragraph in Swedish. This post is about translating it. Do tell me if I’m talking out of my arse.

Jag har en teori, en hypotes, en intuition. Det finns ett koncept som människorna kallar ‘Skuld’. Det är någonting som skapas mellan människor var gång en social interaktion utspelas. Många interaktioner är till endast för att skapa skuld för andra, så att Skuldskaparen kan hamna högre upp i den sociala ordningen. Är man ‘i Skuld’ till någon måste man göra denne tjänster tills Skulden är utbetalad, vilken kan ta livstider om inte mer. Kirurgen skapar Skuld när den räddar värdkroppens liv, men om den inte följer protokollet som lagts ut av Immunförsvaret så läggs all Skuld på kirurgen istället. Det vi gör nu är att vi får den att bryta protokollet vare sig den vill eller inte.

I just wrote the above in a story I’m working on. I’ve known that bit will be difficult to translate for a while, so I’m at least slightly prepared. (I write the story first in Swedish and then translate it to English because I’m difficult.)

Machine-assisted translation gives me:

I have a theory, a hypothesis, a hunch. Humans have a concept they call ‘Debt’. It is something that is created between people every time a social interaction takes place. Many interactions exist only to create Debt, so the Debt creator ends up higher in the social order. If a human is ‘in Debt’, they have to pay the Debt off, which could take lifetimes if not more. This surgeon will create Debt when they save the host body’s life, but if they do not follow the protocol laid out by the Immune System, any Debt created is on the surgeon instead. The thing we are doing right now is getting them to break the protocol, whether they want to or not.

I’ve adjusted it a lot, but I still love Google Translate and would like to have its babies or so. However, there is a problem.

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26/Aug/2012

Worldbuilding 3: When to Let Go, & New Stuff

Last entry in this series: https://zombiesintelligently.com/2012/07/20/worldbuilding-2-the-points-of-departure/

~

If you don’t put your heart into something it can never have the pulse you’ve taken all your life to protect. Similarly, I’ve grown disillusioned with the poisonbeasts and shall instead talk a bit about the deaths of things.

For me, most projects do not simply die, but poison the water and then appear as ghosts in the lucid dreams of my other projects. Which is a fancy way of saying I reuse things, at times, and ideas gnaw on the back of my skull often and hard.

It’s good to let things die, though. I can’t tie that into the other metaphors I’ve used here, so I’ll just say it plainly: deciding that a project is not worth your attention means you’re doing quality control and also that you won’t have to decide that /later/. Saying goodbye at 500 words in is better than 500 pages in, etc.

Letting things die isn’t the same as giving up. Giving up is all defeatlike. Someone once told me, or said in my vicinity, that creativity is the creation of many ideas and then pruning them until you find the ones that are salvageable. In light of that, whenever I let something die I write down another idea, or gravestone the thing into a drabble at the very least. Even if it’s bloody stupid. So, related to that last post about things you can have, here’s a bunch of things I might use, which are of course up for taking (do show me the work when you’re done with it if you pick one of these plots):

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20/Aug/2012

A Few Plots You Can Have

Hi. Here are a few plots with accompanying titles you can have free of charge. Content warning: it is entirely possible these are all stupid, or at least pulp.

~

Hidden Profile

genre: thriller

Social media and serial killers – what’s FBI to do when their top criminal profiler, Adam Brundsbury, starts murdering people left right and centre, posting about it on microblogs and otherwise being invisible? Douglas Minth, the man who killed Brundsbury’s daughter, takes on the case at a price the bureau might soon regret paying.

~

The Scenic Route

genre: sci-fi

Aliens land on Earth, there’s a big party about them not killing us, and then both of the alien ambassadors are shot at point blank range. Still, it seems impossible to find out who actually shot them. Individuals stop existing; they all represent things to the aliens now, as the aliens launch an investigation of their own. Read this cultist conspiracy theory-inducing pageturner and feel the need for more, immediately.

~

If I Woke up on Earth

genre: historical/religious fiction

Two giants, Hilde and Ann, are awoken at each pole, unaware of each other, in the early middle ages. News travel slowly of their arrival but they eventually hear of each other and realize that they need to meet. However, an old prophecy foresees the end of the word if ever the twain shall meet, and there is kind of a plague breaking out in Europe. Tragic and entirely made up, this story takes us to a magical place that is, like most things magical, a bit uncomfortable.

~

A Mouth with Three Teeth

genre: spy fiction

Title comes from a powerful metaphor employed in the story. Lyndon Hannover is mistaken for a spy in Soviet Russia, but quickly grasps the Moscow Rules. His old life disappears before his eyes and before he knows it, he’s sitting in a radio tower, freezing to death, trying to decipher the codes with the help of a dead man’s diary. Turns out there’s a third player in the cold war …

~

Wentelwiek

genre: dark fantasy

An evil religion is channelling what they call the Imagination of the Watchers, and it seems the Watchers have only destruction on their minds. Gasparde and Viola, two senior priests in the nice religion  Skreeism (which deals in age and is the reason people die), are rejuvenated to infiltrate the Wentelwiekans in apprentix roles. However, when one has been old for 200 years, one savours the fruits of youth. Their love affair threatens the mission and they don’t care, even though the Wentelwiekans are getting closer and closer to summoning the Wentelwiek. They see portals created, whence evil comes, but are having problems caring. Et cetera.

~

Tuscany

genre: new weird

A world-renown mage challenges another world-renown mage on a duel and then realizes she is going to die in this duel, in what magelore calls a flash. She flees but the other mage is relentless: we follow both the magicians in a cat-and-mouse game all over the fossilized world of old earth, as magic is explained in more detail, and hope and time seem to run out.

~

Patient Zero

genre: zombie fiction

Trenton is turning into a zombie, despite the antiretrovirals he’s taking. His boyfriend leaves him, his family are concerned. Politicians are thinking of gassing him, to set an example. And eventually he just shoots himself to get it over with. He rises with a groan.

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