Author Topic: EP281: The Notebook of my Favourite Skin-Trees  (Read 38231 times)

Scattercat

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Reply #50 on: March 04, 2011, 01:27:13 AM
I feel like the idea of a body-mod subculture based around miniature trees came first, and then someone - maybe a beta-reader, maybe the author - asked, "But why would everyone want these?"  The answer being "advertising" turned an interesting idea into a "Wait, what?" moment for me.  Like others, I was bemused by the idea of people protesting in favor of their weird advertising method.  I'm trying to imagine a protest in favor of higher quality cloth for Nike shirts or something, and it's just not gelling in my head.

I think it would have been a stronger story if the skin-trees had just been a thing, like extreme piercing or tattoos are now, that a particular subculture embraced completely without a clear reason why.  I would have believed an eco-youth subculture getting really into skin-trees and eventually migrating over to the other body-mod subcultures out there; I didn't need some kind of money-based reason for them to exist.



Talia

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Reply #51 on: March 04, 2011, 02:26:16 AM
My problem with the story (well, in addition to many of the others listed already) was that the protagonist had a durian tree grafted to her, but still managed to find lots of sex partners.  How could they stand the smell?!?   :o

I'd thought about that myself, then reasoned they genetically modified it to remove the odor, or change it to be appealing.



Scattercat

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Reply #52 on: March 04, 2011, 02:28:53 AM
My problem with the story (well, in addition to many of the others listed already) was that the protagonist had a durian tree grafted to her, but still managed to find lots of sex partners.  How could they stand the smell?!?   :o

I'd thought about that myself, then reasoned they genetically modified it to remove the odor, or change it to be appealing.

In a game of Hunter: The Vigil, my wife once attempted to use a couple of durian fruit to force an evacuation of a suburb so her team could assault a suspected group of vampire house-sitters.  Trufax.  Everyone else thought she was crazy because they had never encountered a rotting durian before.



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Reply #53 on: March 04, 2011, 03:08:21 PM
The second reason is - bad botany. Occicat mentioned the smell of Durian trees, a detail that the story conveniently forgets. But the story starts with bananas - bananas don't grow on trees. They grow on tree-sized herbs. There are some crucial distinctions - one of them is that each banana "tree" only flowers once and only produces one set of fruit. After that, it will start producing shoots that will grow into other banana "trees", and the main stem eventually dies. If it's smaller, it will go through it's life cycle quicker.

I've never been near a Durian tree, and I don't know anything about where bananas come from, but this seems less problematic than other aspects of the story.  These are clearly not the same trees that grow in the wild, since they're able to root in human flesh and show advertisements on themselves, as well as bearing miniature fruit.  The story mentioned that the pointy bits of the Durian were designed to be more rounded to reduce the chance of injury.  I don't see why the trees couldn't be altered in other ways, like removing Durian stinkiness and making bananas bear fruit in a different way.  They're not the Durian trees or banana herbs that today's botanists know.



tinygaia

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Reply #54 on: March 04, 2011, 09:25:30 PM
Full disclosure: I am biased in favor of the tiny trees. In case you missed my avatar and my username, you should also know that I have a giant tattoo of a tree on my back. I would personally never get a facial piercing or have a tattoo anywhere it couldn’t be easily covered up, but if it was possible to have a bonsai tree grafted onto my body, I’d probably do it. Therefore, take my comments as you will.

Some have said the story didn’t have enough conflict for them - “The trees would have died. So what?” - but it was enough for me. As someone who loves trees (though, admittedly, not as much as the main character loves them – I mean, good lord!), I really thought the disease was going to win and all the trees were going to die. That made me genuinely sad. I was pleased with the happy ending and the renewal / regrowth implied by the orchid.

However, I couldn’t get behind the advertising angle. It didn’t fit with the nature of this story at all. (See what I did there?) To me, love of nature involves voluntary simplicity and the minimalist mindset and is usually in direct opposition to all the things advertising represents. When Saruman said “The old world will burn in the fires of industry,” he was being a villain: we’re not meant to emulate him. Also, he was later stomped by a bunch of angry trees. Karma’s a b#$%h.

You all had me worried this story was going to be embarrassingly graphic (I saw the thread about lesbians before I had time to hear the story), so I was surprised at how tame it was. Other than the bit with the dildo, I didn’t hear anything that made me blush. As Talia said, the skin-trees were a fetish for the main character and (to me, anyway) that overshadowed the lesbian elements considerably. The character was so focused on the trees, it was almost as if there wasn’t another woman involved. The sex scenes emphasized that the trees were beautiful and sensual, literally body art, and their loss would be lamented.



ElectricPaladin

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Reply #55 on: March 04, 2011, 09:28:47 PM
You birch, you're lucky my bark is worse than my bite.

I think you're getting to the root of the problem.

Not alder way there yet.

Take it too far and you'll rowan in.

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tinygaia

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Reply #56 on: March 04, 2011, 09:30:46 PM
You birch, you're lucky my bark is worse than my bite.

I think you're getting to the root of the problem.

Not alder way there yet.

Take it too far and you'll rowan in.
Nobody ashed yew, EP!



Listener

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Reply #57 on: March 05, 2011, 12:15:05 AM
My problem with the story (well, in addition to many of the others listed already) was that the protagonist had a durian tree grafted to her, but still managed to find lots of sex partners.  How could they stand the smell?!?   :o

I'd thought about that myself, then reasoned they genetically modified it to remove the odor, or change it to be appealing.


I'm with you there... but much in the same way that some people use piercings and/or tattoos in ways that are more "yeah, you forgot to NOT do that" than "hey, that's a nice earring/tattoo", perhaps the MC chose a stinky tree just to be That Person.

"Farts are a hug you can smell." -Wil Wheaton

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SF.Fangirl

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Reply #58 on: March 05, 2011, 08:36:00 PM
Boring.  This was clearly a mood piece, but I sure didn't find the mood interesting at all.  And like many other have said the skin-trees replacing advertising on signs and billboards is a ridiculious notion.  I could see some srange body art augmenting other advertising, but never replacing.

I did wonder though if that was really the world.  Kim Cuc was definately a zealot about the skin trees and anti-advertising and quite possibly crazy or drugged or mentally deficient.  I began to suspect that she's an unreliable narrator.  There was no confirmation of that by the end, but the what we saw of the world didn't feel like it made sense. 



yicheng

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Reply #59 on: March 07, 2011, 05:46:53 PM
Gorgeous prose, good reading, but that was about it.  The skin tree mods were an interesting idea, but they don't really make sense for advertising, nor did their disease/cure.  I couldn't bring myself to care about the characters, and the lesbianism seemed to be all fluff.



kagillogly

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Reply #60 on: March 07, 2011, 08:20:07 PM
In the spirit of the recent call on a sister Escape Artist podcast for readers of different cultural backgrounds, let me offer my help here. I found listening to this story disorienting because of the really bad mispronunciation of local Thai place names. It was not until near the end of the story that I realized the setting was Chiang Mai in Thailand. I'd thought it was an imaginary city named Shung Mei, presumably in China.

We can't reasonably expect all readers to know how to pronounce these 'exotic' place names, so let me offer my help. I speak Thai, Lao, Northern Thai, and Vietnamese, and even know some Khmer (I know other languages, too, but these are the relevant ones here). I don't have the equipment to volunteer to record stories - as much fun as I think that would be! - but if you have any future stories set in SE Asia, I'd be more than willing to help readers with pronunciation.  You can reach me at kagillogly AT gmail.com.

I really mean this. I'd be more than happy to help out.



Wilson Fowlie

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Reply #61 on: March 07, 2011, 08:54:10 PM
We can't reasonably expect all readers to know how to pronounce these 'exotic' place names, so let me offer my help. I speak Thai, Lao, Northern Thai, and Vietnamese, and even know some Khmer (I know other languages, too, but these are the relevant ones here). I don't have the equipment to volunteer to record stories - as much fun as I think that would be! - but if you have any future stories set in SE Asia, I'd be more than willing to help readers with pronunciation.  You can reach me at kagillogly AT gmail.com.

I am totally going to try to remember this.  Thanks to a year-long course I took many years ago, I can pronounce Japanese reasonably well (though only if it's written in a Latin alphabet - I have long since lost my never-better-than-meagre ability to read kana or kanji), but have no experience with any other East Asian languages.

Thank you!

"People commonly use the word 'procrastination' to describe what they do on the Internet. It seems to me too mild to describe what's happening as merely not-doing-work. We don't call it procrastination when someone gets drunk instead of working." - Paul Graham


kibitzer

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Reply #62 on: March 08, 2011, 01:47:39 AM
I don't have the equipment to volunteer to record stories - as much fun as I think that would be!

You need surprisingly little to get started...

I agree with Wilson -- pronunciation is notoriously difficult to get right so your offer is a generous one. Many thanks!

(I recently had to do a line of Latin and after listening to it sung(!) for maybe 10 minutes, I still think I fluffed it.)


Raenestro

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Reply #63 on: March 08, 2011, 12:44:55 PM
Man, I'm glad to learn I'm not the only one who thought this was crap. I seriously thought I had missed something, because the only thing I got was thirty minutes of moaning narration from the diary of a hypersexual Vietnamese lesbian with a body mod fetish. The only thing redeeming about it that I can find is that at least Kim never said "Me so horny." Wasn't there supposed to be a story in there somewhere?



eytanz

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Reply #64 on: March 08, 2011, 01:18:18 PM
Raenestro - word of warning here - your opinion is welcome, but your post crosses the line of what is acceptable in an episode commentary. Negative feedback is fine (as you can see in many other examples in this thread), calling stories "crap" is not. I hope you come back and comment on more stories in the future, but please see the one rule for guidelines on what is allowed and what not in a post.



Raenestro

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Reply #65 on: March 08, 2011, 01:41:55 PM
Raenestro - word of warning here - your opinion is welcome, but your post crosses the line of what is acceptable in an episode commentary. Negative feedback is fine (as you can see in many other examples in this thread), calling stories "crap" is not. I hope you come back and comment on more stories in the future, but please see the one rule for guidelines on what is allowed and what not in a post.

Noted, and I do apologize for the transgression. My intent was to be blunt, since much of what I had to say has already been said, but not actually offensive. 



jesso

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Reply #66 on: March 18, 2011, 03:23:36 AM
I'm another who didn't care for the story. I think this is only the second time I've ever left feedback, that's how much I didn't care for the story.

First, I had some problems with the whole idea of the story. You want a tree growing out of your shoulder? OK! Not anything I would ever sign up for, but I can buy the idea. But... You want a tree growing out of your shoulder so that you can be walking advertising so that advertising will magically disappear from other places? Not so much. I'm not sure how that even works... radio ads weren't replaced by tv ads, and internet ads haven't replaced newspaper ads, but somehow we're meant to believe that some people getting skin trees will replace all advertising?

Also, heeeyyyyyyyy gratuitous sex scenes! Whoa. I'll be the first to admit that I'm kind of a prude, so I'm not really a fan of any kind of sexy-time scene. I know that's just my personal taste. But usually, I can ignore the awkwardness and get the idea of how it's progressing the story or developing a character or what have you. In this story, it didn't do either of these things. It was a complete derailment of the story to talk about the narrator's fetish. Yes, we get it, she likes trees. A lot. Do we really need to "see" every detail of her sex life? It doesn't really have anything to do with the story, except perhaps to explain why she was getting so upset about the possibility of the trees being gone.

In the end, I guess we were supposed to be interested in saving the little trees because a) they magically hand-waved all advertising away, and/or b) they were someone's fetish? Neither reason really works for me.

The really disappointing part is my own fault, though. I was listening to this at work, and at the beginning there was noise in my office that half-distracted me, so at first I thought that the story was being written about humans from the perspective of a plant. The humans were the skin trees, because to a plant we might look like trees covered in skin, and the plant was totally in love with the human race. I thought this was a totally awesome idea, and then when I figured out what was really going on, I was completely let down. But this let-down was not the fault of the story, just me  ::)



Talia

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Reply #67 on: March 18, 2011, 03:29:26 AM

In the end, I guess we were supposed to be interested in saving the little trees because a) they magically hand-waved all advertising away,


Actually just the opposite, the trees WERE advertisements, they had them printed on their leaves. The interest was that the hip new fad was to have cool little trees growing on you. Ones that even bear fruit. :)



Scattercat

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Reply #68 on: March 18, 2011, 03:34:44 AM

In the end, I guess we were supposed to be interested in saving the little trees because a) they magically hand-waved all advertising away,


Actually just the opposite, the trees WERE advertisements, they had them printed on their leaves. The interest was that the hip new fad was to have cool little trees growing on you. Ones that even bear fruit. :)

He's correct that one of the claims made in the story was that skin-trees were valuable because they would somehow replace regular advertising with tree-based advertising and thus save the aesthetics of the world or something.  This doesn't make a lot of sense, which is why most of the reactions here were, I think, confusion about what purpose the trees were supposed to serve.



Talia

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Reply #69 on: March 18, 2011, 03:49:34 AM

In the end, I guess we were supposed to be interested in saving the little trees because a) they magically hand-waved all advertising away,


Actually just the opposite, the trees WERE advertisements, they had them printed on their leaves. The interest was that the hip new fad was to have cool little trees growing on you. Ones that even bear fruit. :)

He's correct that one of the claims made in the story was that skin-trees were valuable because they would somehow replace regular advertising with tree-based advertising and thus save the aesthetics of the world or something.  This doesn't make a lot of sense, which is why most of the reactions here were, I think, confusion about what purpose the trees were supposed to serve.

Fair nuff, I missed that I guess. :)



FNH

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Reply #70 on: March 18, 2011, 11:35:55 AM
Hated this story.  It's same sort of hate you get for cats that crap on your daffodils, every darned day.

A few minutes of interest, only a couple, until I get what a skin tree is, then.. nothing... does nothing, goes no where.  Didn't expand my horizons, engage my interest or do anything for me.


tinygaia

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Reply #71 on: March 18, 2011, 01:15:00 PM
at first I thought that the story was being written about humans from the perspective of a plant. The humans were the skin trees, because to a plant we might look like trees covered in skin, and the plant was totally in love with the human race. I thought this was a totally awesome idea, and then when I figured out what was really going on, I was completely let down. But this let-down was not the fault of the story, just me  ::)
You're right. That is an awesome idea. Someone needs to write this.
/nudges Scattercat



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Reply #72 on: March 18, 2011, 01:22:20 PM
I think this is only the second time I've ever left feedback, that's how much I didn't care for the story.

You could always stop by for stories you don't dislike, also.    :) 



Scattercat

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Reply #73 on: March 18, 2011, 08:14:12 PM
at first I thought that the story was being written about humans from the perspective of a plant. The humans were the skin trees, because to a plant we might look like trees covered in skin, and the plant was totally in love with the human race. I thought this was a totally awesome idea, and then when I figured out what was really going on, I was completely let down. But this let-down was not the fault of the story, just me  ::)
You're right. That is an awesome idea. Someone needs to write this.
/nudges Scattercat

Well, I have done a bit of a recurring motif of a hypothetical world of talking, mobile trees that become dangerous businessmen and monopolize the financial industry.  I don't think anyone's ever called anyone else a skin-tree, though.



Gamercow

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Reply #74 on: March 21, 2011, 07:33:12 PM
Well, I have done a bit of a recurring motif of a hypothetical world of talking, mobile trees that become dangerous businessmen and monopolize the financial industry.  I don't think anyone's ever called anyone else a skin-tree, though.

More off topic, but I picture the trees in your stories like the Arbors from Chowder:

The cow says "Mooooooooo"