Technical difficulties have occurred and may recur. Tiny elves are working to restore regular service as soon as possible. The blog post won’t appear until next week. You know how those tiny elves can be.
Technical difficulties have occurred and may recur. Tiny elves are working to restore regular service as soon as possible. The blog post won’t appear until next week. You know how those tiny elves can be.
Hey, I got in and could read this. Especially since the tiny elves didn’t do their magic in a tiny font! 🙂
A suggestion, thrown out here for what it may be worth: Have an open thread every so often for people to engage in therapeutic whining, ask sundry questions, make bad puns, and possibly do dancing rodents (“conga-rats”)
@Deep Lurker – That’s a great idea. We could do it here, if it won’t interfere with the elves.
I’ll start: I, er, /*shuffles feet*/ have a story in the current issue of Analog.
Congratulations!!!!
Oh, congratulations! That’s great.
LizV, that’s wonderful news! Congrats! Will you tell us the title of the story?
Thanks, all! The story is “Dix Dayton, Jet Jockey”.
I’m trying to hatch another “small, domestic” science fiction plot. What I’ve got is a glass that dropped and shattered on a kitchen floor. Most of it gets swept up right away, but a few fragments are still there, hidden in various nooks and corners. The story-problem is about getting those last few glass shards and knowing when they’re gotten. In a higher-tech, alien planet setting.
I’m trying to work out possible science-fictional cleaning appliances. So far I’ve got a ‘tractor cleaner’ that uses small-scale tractor beams instead of vacuum. (Old-style vacuum cleaners still exist in a few specialized niches, but are mostly obsolete.) And the ancient “broom” technology is still in use, but with one or two high-tech wrinkles.
But even if I’m doing better than my usual, here, I’ve still got [whine]Plot is Hard[/whine].
[whine]Plot is Hard[/whine].
I am *so* there with you.
Lessee:
Self-contained miniature whirlwinds that swoop up all debris and whisk it away to
the Land of Oza suitable disposal area. (Probably more of a fantasy device than SF.)Nanobots that convert all small debris to flooring material, thus using routine dirt to counteract routine wear on the floor.
Some kind of rogue device that originally was supposed to clean, but now makes art out of whatever it finds. It melts down the glass shards and turns them into a beautiful, if tiny, vase or glass filigree sculpture.
Highly-advanced household computer that takes the weight, original position of the glass pre-drop, etc., then calculates the breakage pattern and trajectory of each individual shard. And then sends out some other device (glorified SF roomba) to gather them up. (I’m hearing a Heinlein-esque Gay Deceiver sort of voice in my head, but YMMV.)
Hmm, alien planet. Is there anything there that eats glass? (Or uses it in its nests, or whatever.) And that could then cause further complications once it’s gotten into the house?
Okay, I’m now getting a wildly-overcomplicated idea about some tiny alien creatures that collect the remaining glass shards and use them as knives, thus proving that they are tool-using and therefore sentient. This is probably not what you were hoping for. 😉
Tool using ants and other insects exist, so not “therefore sentient.”
Riffing off that: Bioengineered alien ant-analogs designed for janitorial work; normally for commercial use only, but the protagonist is ultimately able to borrow some.
But what I think I’m going to go with is “specialized/commercial-use tractor cleaner that can be set to find and draw in debris of a given density.” Which pushes the problem to “how does the protagonist manage to borrow the gizmo?” (Which applies to any gizmo that I ultimately end up using.)
Or maybe the final issue will be “one shard of glass turns out to be particularly Stuck, and requires a special improvised hold-tongue-in-the-right-position use of the gizmo to work free and collect.”
As the entire world is having technical difficulties and I’m stuck at home I just went back through all the Enchanted Forest Chronicles. Haven’t read them since middle school (15 years or so). And while everything is going crazy it was such a nice world to dive back into. A joy as always.
Since this is the current open thread, the story I mentioned a little while back is posted, if anyone here is still interested:
https://kevinwadejohnson.blogspot.com/2020/04/the-lost-heir-of-generica.html