User talk:Robotech Master/More Foxed

Hey, great story! I stayed up way too late last night reading it. I really am addicted to this setting.

Anyway, I wasn't really looking for typos as I read it, but I did notice a few:

• I had wondered whether it was really fair to let the RIDEs play, but it turned out that without reliable net access they were limited to what they had in their own internal databased, which for trivia weren’t necessarily any better than the good ol’ Mark 1 brain.

• from floral-print tourist rags to qubitite riches to freezing to death rags to hiding out in a guarded docking slip in a badlands town riches.

• I watched with some interest as the stewards and stewardesses secured Gordon in her seat.

--Antimatter (talk) 19:22, 10 October 2012 (UTC)

Hey, thanks. I'll fix those. (Well, the first and third anyway. I'm not sure why you think "riches" is a typo there. The sentence structure being "from X rags to Y riches to A rags to B riches", whereupon X, Y, A, and B are descriptions of events…) —Robotech Master (talk) 22:20, 10 October 2012 (UTC)

Ah, sorry. I read that sentence a few times and it just didn't click. I kept thinking it should end after "badlands town," and that you must have accidentally put riches in there an extra time. Now that you explain it it makes sense, though :-) --Antimatter (talk) 06:23, 11 October 2012 (UTC)

2ND COMMENT

A really great addition to the Freerider Universe. I look forward to the new stories.

Mason (talk) 17:03, 13 October 2012 (UTC)

In Which I Read

This running commentary stuff is addicting, I tell you.

Oh hey, trains! There are so many rail corridors in Greater Vancouver (both active and defunct) that I kind of automatically insert them into any fictional cityscape, so it took several reads for me to figure out what was bugging me here: I think this is the first (and possibly only) time railways have been mentioned in any FreeRIDErs story. Rail corridors shape urban development even decades after the rails themselves are torn up, so this is excellent fodder for worldbuilding/cityscape design (or at least speculation thereupon). Rufia's run-down apartment block must be on the border of an industrial area, one supported by an extensive network of sidings and rail-spurs connected to a main line. But where does the main line go? Are there rail links to other polities? What about passenger service or light-rail trams? So many delicious questions!

No matter how many times I read this story, I can never resist saying "suture self" aloud. The pun is just too delicious.

Hmm. Dayla's skin patterns actively glow? I wonder if she and Donna have gone through the same thing as Myla and Sophie.

Ouch. A circular reference paradox is not the way you should open a conversation, Dana! He does let go of his preconceptions admirably quickly, though. On another note, this conversation brings up the fourth (or fifth, depending on how you count it) piece of out-and-out Handwavium in the FreeRIDErs setting: FTL travel and communications. Hardlight is obviously some application of relativistic and/or quantum-mechanical weirdness, and it isn't really necessary to understand how cavorite or qubitite work in order to make use of them. Is FTL enabled by a similar Magical Mystery Mineral, or is it 100% Human Ingenuity like Hardlight seems to be?

"'Y' in 'Brubeck'". That's a hell of a thing. And Wikipedia is a hell of a time sink: I just spent two hours or more on various articles on mineralogy and geometry, originally because I was curious if there were earthly minerals with tetrahedral crystals. (There are, but not many.) In any case, that thing (and any other reasonably large "Brubeck Y") breaks my brain. It'd be a mineralogical miracle no matter where it was found, a single crystal that size. (And to have that kind of unified feature, the structure almost has to be a single crystal.)

":...make sure ye use protection!:" Ah, Fiona, never change. And merely referring to profanity instead of actually using it ("My response was largely unprintable.") is almost always at least as effective and much funnier.

Hah! Dana's on the ball, he is! The "fuse to reset" thing is possibly the single most contrived thing in this story. It's very forgivable, though, and easily handwaved: the RIDEs simply wanted to gauge the humans' truthfulness and level of commitment to rescuing the guides, and made up a reasonably plausible story.

"And then he ate me." Oh god. This entire sequence. My sides, they hurt. It's perfect.

Jamie's soliloquy-thing about gender and curiosity is absolutely spot-on. I know I've had (proper sleeping) dreams in which I was female (and/or nonhuman, actually). I've also introduced myself to my elder sister's friends as her sister on a number of occasions. (Of course, that my sister is a drag king and gets called "Ed" more often than "Amy" doesn't help matters.) And I somehow can't imagine myself freaking out over being female if I somehow changed overnight (freaking out about the mechanism or about identification concerns (school records, bank accounts) are entirely separate issues, and I daresay I'd freak out more about those practical concerns than most would freak out over suddenly being the wrong sex).

Bartertown, Mos Eisley, Tombstone; I'm surprised Science-Related Memetic Disorder isn't a major concern on Zharus. Or maybe it is, only nobody has written the stories?

Whoops! In Yvonne's first conversation with Tom and Larry, you've got a point-of-view glitch: "Yeah, that's where we're at," Yvonne said. Everything else in that section is in proper first-person Yvonnevision.

Near the end of Charlene's first Casino chapter: We settled into the charge cradle and started taking on power. It felt good to power up... Is it just that charging while fused has never come up before, or does Charlene have an unusually intimate sense of Fiona's systems?

Retaking the Annabelle Lee: well that was stupid, securing the GUI but leaving a logged-in terminal accessible. On an unrelated note, the utility of a game as training is directly proportional to its realism. In a world with immersive VR, time in the right kind of game would be the next best thing to real combat experience, even above real-world military training. (Of course, it still wouldn't help with everything else military training teaches you, but...)

"She grinned at me in that old insufferable way of his." I don't know if this was deliberate or an accident you left in because it's perfect. Either way, it's brilliant.

I feel like there's some kind of reference in the white rabbit being named Jefferson, but I can't for the life of me figure out what it is.

No further comments until the Epilogue, and even if you miss the section heading, Rufia is the only possible narrator here. I'm terrible at accents, so I haven't assigned one in my head to Rufia. Her word choices ("And I'm like, really? And they're like, really.") make me think "California surfer dude" (I originally wrote "valley girl", but that's just too horrific), or possibly "stoner", but I can't even imagine her sounding like that. In my head, Rufia sounds British Columbian: she hikes the West Coast Trail, kayaks from Vancouver Island to Haida Gwaii, and so on.

"It's good to have an awesome partner, and it's great to be home." And that's the perfect ending. Great work.

--Proginoskes (talk) 14:25, 15 April 2013 (UTC)