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Okay, I'm really getting close to re-posting M1 and M2, I really mean it this time, and after that I'll throw out M3 and M4. M5 and M6 may be a while, y'know?
Anyway, I decided I'd re-read the whole series to make sure I didn't go off the tracks on M5, and I just noticed that I mis-spelled the name of Sam's home town the first time he mentions it. Seven paragraphs in. It's spelled right the next two times, in the following paragraph. Fine. 'grep -rn Atalla *' only found one other place, in the most-recently completed chapter of M5, so that's it. It's Attalla everywhere else, like it's spostabe.
Still... Me going over this stuff a million times to make sure it's perfect. A half-dozen proofreaders. Twenty thousand downloads. And no one noticed that I mis-spelled a city's name. We're all blind.
Shaddoth's 'Axeman' story is about the whole world waking up one morning to find portals scattered around the planet. Those portals allow some people to enter them and battle assorted monsters for fun and profit. The protagonist is a database programmer geek, so naturally one of the things he does is create a website to collect everything that we've learned about the portals and make it public for everyone's benefit.
The website, 'www.PortalControl.com', becomes one of the major side-stories. It has info on all the portals, things you can do in there, all the monsters, loot you can find, items you can buy from the System Store, forums for the people who enter the portals to discuss things, and so on.
Anyone here in _our_ world who writes a story in that universe has to keep track of everything that his character would know from that website. Unfortunately, that website doesn't exist in our world. It could. I just checked, GoDaddy is squatting on the domain. They will sell it to me for a cool $3500, or rent it to me for only $170/month. Then hosting, programming costs, etc, etc, etc. Uh, how much does SOL pay me for these stories again? Right. I do this because I enjoy it, and it doesn't cost me much on a retired old man's income.
Ideally, we'd get Shaddoth to turn over all his notes, but he's not answering the phone these days. So, each writer dabbling in this universe has to come up with their own version of what 'everyone knows' about it. I've previously posted a 'Writer's Guide to the Axeman Universe' here, and I've got a couple other untidy piles of notes here and there.
Where should I put them, so that the other writers can use them? Not here. This is a story site. I've talked to the proprietor and he doesn't want the site cluttered up with lists of spells, lists of System Store prices, etc. I guess I can email what I've got to writers who give me an email address.
This writer just doesn't want feedback. He has email disabled, he has story comments turned off, there's just no gentle way to contact him. He has a nice story going on, well-written and well-proofed/edited. However, he's writing about subjects that he knows nothing about, and sometimes he misses things that are obvious to those who are familiar with those subjects.
The usual example is flying. If you aren't a pilot, don't write about in-flight emergencies and how they are handled. You can't possibly get it right, and anyone who IS a pilot will very strongly lower their opinion of your work. If you have to have that for drama, re-write it as a passenger who lives through it. No one expects a passenger to understand what the pilots had to do. I have an ASEL Private License, and I have helped a couple of writers on things I know about. Not multi, not rotary, not seaplane. I would not attempt to write a story about what a Citation pilot has to do when an engine fails on takeoff. My knowledge about that is limited to "Get the damn thing down on the ground as fast as possible, fuck everything else. The plane is toast. Just try to save the people." And I may have that wrong. Maybe they can take off with one engine.
Anyway, apparently, EDP is unfamiliar with the concept of 'diesel engines'. Diesel engines operate on the principal (Edit: That should be 'principle', of course -ZM) that gasses heat up as they are compressed. If you compress a flammable mixture (maybe an atomized fuel mixed with air), eventually it will reach a temperature where the mixture explodes all on its own. No need for a spark plug, or any sort of electrical system to generate the pulse that makes the spark. No need for ANY kind of electrical system.
Small diesel engines that run small devices are very common among people who work in unimproved regions. Chainsaws, pumps, generators. I have a diesel-driven dewatering pump in my garage as we speak, along with a couple much larger diesel engines. It's small enough that it can be started with a pull-cord, just like most small engines. Nothing electrical anywhere on it. And completely impervious to EMP attacks. Small diesels are very reliable, as long as you feed them good clean fuel. They are a little heavier than the gas version, but 'reliable' trumps 'light' every time. And any member of a forestry service or a SEAL team would be very familiar with them.
Did you know that you can get diesel-powered vehicles, too? They couldn't use a modern one with computer-controlled fuel injection, but they've been at this long enough to have come up with an older vehicle with no electrical system. There are multiple ways to get them started. If nothing else, find one with a manual transmission, remove the electrical system, park it on a hill, and roll-start it.
The inability to use electrical devices should not stop people of this caliber for longer than a day. Unless the author wants it to.
-ZM
Word Hunter just posed a question about AI writing. Omachuck immediately chimed in with a view that I can completely support. I think that we need to think a little about tasks, skills, and tools.
I'm trying to get a flat area to drain a little better, and I've recently dug a trench from the middle of it to a nearby creek. Well, I didn't actually touch any of the dirt myself except by accident. I used some tools. A backhoe, to dig the trench. A front-end loader, to move all that dirt out of the way. A shovel, to clean up some of the mess.
Those guys at the factory who ran the stamping press to create my shovel's blade, ran the lathe to produce the wooden handle, and drilled a hole and put a rivet in to mate the blade and handle into one piece: How much credit do I owe them for digging that trench? I mean, it was the shovel that moved all that dirt, not me!
I believe that they deserve the credit -along with the businessman who created their factory- for creating the tools I used. I gave them all the credit they deserve when I went to a store and bought that shovel. After I bought that shovel, it's mine, and I get all the credit for any tasks accomplished by my shovel under my direction. And, yeah, with my sweat.
I have not willingly used any AIs yet. Unwillingly, yeah, it's getting harder and harder to avoid them. Some of them are pretty helpful. Alabama Power's phone system is pretty well written and it knows when to go get help. Some AIs, I believe, are only there to keep you from getting any help until you give up and go away. Frontier Fiber's phone system is willing to keep me on the phone for half an hour or more, going back to the beginning of its script every time it can't figure out what to do, before it finally gives up and tells me to call another number. Hello? Computer program? Answering the phone? And it can't forward a call to a number it knows inside the company it's supposedly working for? That's GREAT customer service!
In this case, I use a lot of tools to write. I paid for the computer and peripherals. How much do I owe Dell for helping me write my last best-seller? I paid for some of the software, while other software I got for free from the internet, downloaded where the authors had posted it for free use. Should I add all those software tools to the list of acknowledgements at the end? I'd like to thank Jim, Sally, and Toad for proofreading, as well as my word processor, my spell checker, and Google.com for all their help. I'm not thanking my grammar-checker, though. That piece of shit is worthless.
Where's the dividing line? There's a guy here who is posting something like eight different versions of the same story: A young man with super powers (genetic, magic, alien gift, he's tried them all) grows up and deals with life, girls, crooks, the government. I honestly believe that he's trying out several different writing AIs to see which ones get the best reviews here. Nothing he's posted is actually HIS writing, except maybe the 'seed' he feeds into the AIs. I figure that within a couple of years he'll be posting stories that are good enough to enjoy reading. By then, though, we'll all have marked his account "don't show me any more of this crap" so he'll have to get a new pen-name. I really, really hope that the webmaster here lets us know that "Bob? Yeah, that's the same account as Joe from last year. It's just a new pen-name." I wonder. If he'd put all that effort into, you know, WRITING, wouldn't he be a decent writer by then? This way, he'll never learn to write. All he's learning is how to run an AI.
Okay, I need to get back out and do something useful instead of sitting here in the AC.
(* "Tools and Their Uses" was the title of a module I went through -and, much later, taught- in my early USN training. How to recognize different types of tools, how to tell which of several similar tools might be best for my current task, etc. One topic was judgement: How to decide when the right thing to do was to go get the correct tool, and when to go ahead and mis-use the tools that were immediately available. Yes, I can do it right. If I have the right tools, the right parts, and the right tech manuals. I can ALSO do it _wrong_, when we don't have the right tools, parts, or manuals, but we're getting shot at and the Captain really, really wants the ship to start moving again.)
-ZM
So, I'd had these stories I'd written a while back, set in Shaddoth's 'Axeman' universe. I had three complete and a fourth one, well, maybe about half-done but I wasn't really working on them anymore. Jason 2, another Mike & Shirley story, the second half of "The First Command", I've got a lot of unfinished work.
But, the site administrator here got tired of my whining and created an "Axeman" universe for stories that other writers had come up with. Oh. Well, crap. I should post mine!
Now, the first three were DONE, but they weren't PROOFREAD. I hadn't been able to talk anyone into doing that kind of work. For free. So, I put the first one up. I got a lot of feedback. It doesn't look anywhere near as polished as the rest of my stories. Well, yeah, all of my old proofreaders are retired. Where'm I gonna get a new set?
Turns out, I can ask all those poor innocent readers who emailed me saying I mis-spelled supercalifragelisticexpialidocious. Ya know, you caught THIS, and I'm about to publish M2. You wanna see if you can find any mistakes in it?
Even though I didn't ask most of them until Saturday afternoon and I was planning on posting Chapter 1 at 8 Monday morning, I got answers back from four different 'volunteers' in time to fold all their corrections into the posted version. If M2 looks a little more polished than M1 did, well, it's their fault. I'll list all the proofreaders who helped at the end of the story, but the first four names are already set.
Oh, yeah. Chapter one of "Missile 2" is up.
-ZM
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