So, current WIP is tropey AF.
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@cstross volcano lair?
@frang Space Opera, not Bond Villain, but yeah, I think I can cram one into this.
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So, current WIP is tropey AF. So far I've had:
—Protags have to rob their own tomb to recover a time capsule (Indiana Jones sequence with traps)!
—Escape from venomous mole rat swarm!
—Impersonating robots to dodge museum guards!
—New brain implants = backstreet brain slug replacements!
—Other protag in underwater battle against SHARKS with LASERS coming out of THEIR EYES
—Graveyard robbery!
—Villain's ranting monologueAnd I'm only 20K words in.
What other pulpy goodness should I pursue?
@cstross In the course of their adventure, have one or more characters had their clothing sufficiently torn in sexy ways for the cover painting pose?
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So, current WIP is tropey AF. So far I've had:
—Protags have to rob their own tomb to recover a time capsule (Indiana Jones sequence with traps)!
—Escape from venomous mole rat swarm!
—Impersonating robots to dodge museum guards!
—New brain implants = backstreet brain slug replacements!
—Other protag in underwater battle against SHARKS with LASERS coming out of THEIR EYES
—Graveyard robbery!
—Villain's ranting monologueAnd I'm only 20K words in.
What other pulpy goodness should I pursue?
@cstross lightning flash and thunder at dramatic reveal?
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@cstross Improbably fast invention and deployment of new weapons, if not by the main characters than by their opponents?
@SteveBellovin No, that *doesn't* work in this setting (space opera, 700,000 years in the future, science/tech trees are essentially exhaustively explored by this point—unless you find something long-forgotten in a dusty archive, what they see is what they've got).
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So, current WIP is tropey AF. So far I've had:
—Protags have to rob their own tomb to recover a time capsule (Indiana Jones sequence with traps)!
—Escape from venomous mole rat swarm!
—Impersonating robots to dodge museum guards!
—New brain implants = backstreet brain slug replacements!
—Other protag in underwater battle against SHARKS with LASERS coming out of THEIR EYES
—Graveyard robbery!
—Villain's ranting monologueAnd I'm only 20K words in.
What other pulpy goodness should I pursue?
@cstross
- Chinese kill switches in brain implants
- Villain's white cat
- Alligator pool
- Secret lizard people ?For me though that sort of fiction is about it being *fun* to read and not require much thinking. Perhaps the test of pulp fiction is 'can you read it after a bottle of wine' ?
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So, current WIP is tropey AF. So far I've had:
—Protags have to rob their own tomb to recover a time capsule (Indiana Jones sequence with traps)!
—Escape from venomous mole rat swarm!
—Impersonating robots to dodge museum guards!
—New brain implants = backstreet brain slug replacements!
—Other protag in underwater battle against SHARKS with LASERS coming out of THEIR EYES
—Graveyard robbery!
—Villain's ranting monologueAnd I'm only 20K words in.
What other pulpy goodness should I pursue?
@cstross Doc Savage-esque grotesques of personal quirks (like the industrial chemist with a weird-looking pet pig).
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@cstross In the course of their adventure, have one or more characters had their clothing sufficiently torn in sexy ways for the cover painting pose?
@Rob_T_Firefly That's a given.
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@cstross white Persian cat?
@frang I'm not sure whether or not cats are extinct by this point in the future. But they've de-extincted velociraptors, if that helps? Also azhdarchids, from which they've bred racing dragons?
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@frang I'm not sure whether or not cats are extinct by this point in the future. But they've de-extincted velociraptors, if that helps? Also azhdarchids, from which they've bred racing dragons?
@cstross so... albino tea-cup velociraptor that someone can be ominously petting?
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So, current WIP is tropey AF. So far I've had:
—Protags have to rob their own tomb to recover a time capsule (Indiana Jones sequence with traps)!
—Escape from venomous mole rat swarm!
—Impersonating robots to dodge museum guards!
—New brain implants = backstreet brain slug replacements!
—Other protag in underwater battle against SHARKS with LASERS coming out of THEIR EYES
—Graveyard robbery!
—Villain's ranting monologueAnd I'm only 20K words in.
What other pulpy goodness should I pursue?
A conservation of ninjitsu battle, or other disposable minions inexplicably lining up to die in service?
A multilayered betrayal - betrayal?
A defense-in-depth system so ridiculous that any five year old could bypass it?
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@cstross
- Chinese kill switches in brain implants
- Villain's white cat
- Alligator pool
- Secret lizard people ?For me though that sort of fiction is about it being *fun* to read and not require much thinking. Perhaps the test of pulp fiction is 'can you read it after a bottle of wine' ?
@etchedpixels
— China is as forgotten as Earth by this point.
— The villain is an Abbot. He has zombies.
— Alligator pool … I'm tabling that for later consideration.
— Secret lizard people: no, but there are dwarf and elf hominin sub-clades (humanity speciated when it went interstellar). -
@cstross so... albino tea-cup velociraptor that someone can be ominously petting?
@frang That's a REALLY GOOD idea. Possibly the Abbot has one that he feeds prisoners' little fingers to.
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@frang That's a REALLY GOOD idea. Possibly the Abbot has one that he feeds prisoners' little fingers to.
@cstross waste not..
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So, current WIP is tropey AF. So far I've had:
—Protags have to rob their own tomb to recover a time capsule (Indiana Jones sequence with traps)!
—Escape from venomous mole rat swarm!
—Impersonating robots to dodge museum guards!
—New brain implants = backstreet brain slug replacements!
—Other protag in underwater battle against SHARKS with LASERS coming out of THEIR EYES
—Graveyard robbery!
—Villain's ranting monologueAnd I'm only 20K words in.
What other pulpy goodness should I pursue?
Has anyone rescued a puppy?
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A conservation of ninjitsu battle, or other disposable minions inexplicably lining up to die in service?
A multilayered betrayal - betrayal?
A defense-in-depth system so ridiculous that any five year old could bypass it?
There is already a reverse fake-out multilayered betrayal (the villain thinks the protagonists have betrayed him so he's stolen their memories and is holding them to ransom)
Disposable minions: already involved (space ninjas with Cotard's delusion so they think they're already dead)
But I'm assuming my villain is smart enough to have written the Evil Overlord List, never mind reading it.
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So, current WIP is tropey AF. So far I've had:
—Protags have to rob their own tomb to recover a time capsule (Indiana Jones sequence with traps)!
—Escape from venomous mole rat swarm!
—Impersonating robots to dodge museum guards!
—New brain implants = backstreet brain slug replacements!
—Other protag in underwater battle against SHARKS with LASERS coming out of THEIR EYES
—Graveyard robbery!
—Villain's ranting monologueAnd I'm only 20K words in.
What other pulpy goodness should I pursue?
Detectives on the anti-hero's trail, but always one step behind?
They are caught by the cops, but are then deus-ex-machina'd to freedom?
The bad guy has the Mona Lisa and Michaelangelo's David in his hideout?
Love interest is tried to the train tracks or future equivalent?
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@cstross waste not..
@frang Listen, you can't have a proper gothic pot-boiler without a mad monk, and it's ABOUT BLOODY TIME we dropped the Stainless Steel Rat and Angelina into a gothic pot-boiler, isn't it?
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So, current WIP is tropey AF. So far I've had:
—Protags have to rob their own tomb to recover a time capsule (Indiana Jones sequence with traps)!
—Escape from venomous mole rat swarm!
—Impersonating robots to dodge museum guards!
—New brain implants = backstreet brain slug replacements!
—Other protag in underwater battle against SHARKS with LASERS coming out of THEIR EYES
—Graveyard robbery!
—Villain's ranting monologueAnd I'm only 20K words in.
What other pulpy goodness should I pursue?
@cstross Villain captures protag only to attempt to kill them with a rube goldberg machine that they escape from once the villain leaves?
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Detectives on the anti-hero's trail, but always one step behind?
They are caught by the cops, but are then deus-ex-machina'd to freedom?
The bad guy has the Mona Lisa and Michaelangelo's David in his hideout?
Love interest is tried to the train tracks or future equivalent?
@cstross But to the honest, what you have now sounds like perfection!
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@frang Space Opera, not Bond Villain, but yeah, I think I can cram one into this.
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Behold: A house! (I have trained a local model that tries to draw SVGs of basic shapes. I'd say things are going great.)
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@Gina fucking hell I can't get the stuff down. During chemo they recommend all the extra protein stuff. Please, just give me the regular food and drinks without the extra protein. Especially with all senses being messed up, it all tastes like *just * protein and nothing else. Sorry, I got triggered - end rant 🙃
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@Gina So true, as a Canadian this was the final straw; protein infused Mac n' Cheese: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/kraft-dinner-protein-9.7136154
There is no punishment great enough for this heinous act.
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@Gina Are you eating the mosquitos again?
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Digital Brain (@yourdigitalbrain.bsky.social)
https://bsky.app/profile/yourdigitalbrain.bsky.social/post/3mhlwvcuegk2s
> The Snow Fairy: Japan's Cutest Bird Weighs Only 8 Grams 🐦❄️
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Reviving a Cursed Sun SPARCstation IPX
SPARCstation IPX running Solaris 2.6. (Credit: This Does Not Compute, YouTube)
The best part about retro computing is the idea that you’ll save some poor system from being scrapped and revive it to a working state, at which point you can bask in the glory of a job well done. That’s when reality often strikes hard, and you find yourself troubleshooting a maddening list of issues as you question everything about your life choices. Such was the case with [This Does Not Compute] over at YouTube with a Sun SPARCstation IPX that decided to put up a big fight.This is the second video of a series. In the first installment, the PSU was repaired, and a boot failure was diagnosed. The system’s onboard diagnostic led to the assumption that one of the 8 kB SRAM ICs was defective. You can readily get SRAM replacements, so it seemed to be an easy fix. Unfortunately, the fun was only beginning as the system reported the exact same error after the SRAM was replaced.
After flipping a virtual table, the mainboard was swapped with a donor one from a scrapped laptop system. With this, it booted, but the video output showed only vertical lines. Obviously, the solution here was to insert a replacement video card, which not only fixed the display output but also demonstrates once again that you can fix many vintage computing issues by simply replacing hardware.
With the system now seemingly happy, a disk drive was added so that Solaris 2.3 could be installed. This turned into another confusing job. Getting into the GUI was seemingly impossible. Ergo, this virtual table got flipped, too, and Solaris 2.6 was installed. Finally, the system got to the desktop GUI. At this point it was clear that this 40 MHz mid-range SPARCstation from 1991 is no speed monster. Just drawing windows was slower than an X11 remote session over 9600 baud dial-up.
Installing more RAM might have helped here, but the system requires parity FP RAM, which could have been purchased, but at some point, you have to decide how much money you want to throw at an old system like this. Although these are still pretty interesting systems in their own right, it should be clear that they are not easy systems to repair or maintain.
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🍎$tr€gh€tta🌶💬🦋🍉 (@trilly153.bsky.social)
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