Author Topic: EP2**8: The Mermaids Singing Each to Each  (Read 31764 times)

knigget

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Reply #25 on: September 08, 2010, 02:06:25 AM
Just hit me:

2**8 is (in the old FORTRAN notation) 2 to the 8th power, or 256.  Someone is showing off their geekredentials.

Becoming neuter is a dysfunctional response to psychosexual trauma on more levels than I care to enumerate -- which is PRECISELY why, once the option becomes available, someone with too much time and/or money on their hands will dedicate their lives to seeing it used on everybody. 

http://www.apoGrypha.blogspot.com

What would have been written. 

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malaclypse

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Reply #26 on: September 08, 2010, 02:09:34 AM
This story was beautiful, and like all of the Cat Rambo stories I've read, it made me sad. I think Jenfullmoon was right -- the protagonist decided to stop being a little girl because that's what zir uncle was attracted to. That, and living on the street, took zir out of his hands. As it said in the story.

But zie couldn't actually escape, because there are always more predators.

I love EscapePod, and I'm going to keep listening. But. Maybe I listen to too many podcasts, but I would like to hear more things on EscapePod that I haven't heard elsewhere. I know it's hard, since Clarkesworld podcasts all of their stories, and their stories are the best. And because we're just coming off of the Hugo series... Anyway, I'll probably be skipping the next episode -- not that it's a bad story, but it pinned the needle on my skeeve-o-meter, and once is enough.

Though for the life of me I can't remember where I heard it...



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Reply #27 on: September 08, 2010, 02:13:27 AM
Just hit me:

2**8 is (in the old FORTRAN notation) 2 to the 8th power, or 256.  Someone is showing off their geekredentials.

Becoming neuter is a dysfunctional response to psychosexual trauma on more levels than I care to enumerate -- which is PRECISELY why, once the option becomes available, someone with too much time and/or money on their hands will dedicate their lives to seeing it used on everybody. 

I can't take the credit.  It was Heradel.

Facehuggers don't have heads!

Come with me and Journey Into... another fun podcast


kibitzer

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Reply #28 on: September 08, 2010, 02:54:23 AM
2**8 is (in the old FORTRAN notation) 2 to the 8th power, or 256.  Someone is showing off their geekredentials.

In the interest of being excruciatingly pedantic, that's standard for most programming languages, not just FORTRAN or Python. Even COBOL! Strangely, not C, C++ or Java.

EP2**8. Hehe -- I like.


Wilson Fowlie

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Reply #29 on: September 08, 2010, 04:51:14 PM
2**8 is (in the old FORTRAN notation) 2 to the 8th power, or 256.  Someone is showing off their geekredentials.

In the interest of being excruciatingly pedantic, that's standard for most programming languages, not just FORTRAN or Python. Even COBOL! Strangely, not C, C++ or Java.

EP2**8. Hehe -- I like.

** is the most exponentiation operator, but several less-used languages (BASIC, J, MATLAB, R, Microsoft Excel, TeX, and a few more) use ^.  Haskell uses both ^ and ^^ (the former for nonnegative integer exponents, the latter for the rest).

Algol, the granddaddy of the C family of languages, used ↑ 1 (as did Commodore BASIC ... ah, good old Commodore BASIC... <sigh>).  I have to wonder if the absence of the up-arrow in later character schemes contributed to the fact that C doesn't implement an exponentiation operator at all.



I have to admit I had a little trouble with this story.  For a lot of it, the reading felt flat and unemotional to me.  There were a few passages where Ms. Ellis admirably brought out the emotion of her character, which made me wonder if the more monotone-ic parts were a deliberate attempt to portray Lolo as having tight emotional control or something, but it didn't really work for me; my mind kept wandering off and I kept having to rewind to catch what I'd missed.

I was a little taken aback that Lolo arrived back in the harbour with so little for all of her efforts.  Was this really the first time she'd done this operation?  I hadn't gotten that impression, but if not, why didn't she know what the mermaids would do to her mini-lump and take steps to prevent it?  At the very least, in such a small, tight-knit community, she (or one of her partners) should at least have heard that she would need to do something to protect their haul.



1 In case your browser doesn't support that character, it's an up-arrow.

"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


Talia

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Reply #30 on: September 08, 2010, 05:35:07 PM
I don't think s/he was expecting to get ship-jacked by a violent criminal mid-voyage. That's enough to throw anyone off their game plan, I'd think.



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Reply #31 on: September 08, 2010, 05:51:10 PM
2**8 is (in the old FORTRAN notation) 2 to the 8th power, or 256.  Someone is showing off their geekredentials.

In the interest of being excruciatingly pedantic, that's standard for most programming languages, not just FORTRAN or Python. Even COBOL! Strangely, not C, C++ or Java.

EP2**8. Hehe -- I like.

** is the most exponentiation operator, but several less-used languages (BASIC, J, MATLAB, R, Microsoft Excel, TeX, and a few more) use ^.  Haskell uses both ^ and ^^ (the former for nonnegative integer exponents, the latter for the rest).

Algol, the granddaddy of the C family of languages, used ↑ 1 (as did Commodore BASIC ... ah, good old Commodore BASIC... <sigh>).  I have to wonder if the absence of the up-arrow in later character schemes contributed to the fact that C doesn't implement an exponentiation operator at all.

These days ** is also used by the inline calculators of both Google and OS X's Spotlight. I initially wanted to have it be EP11111111, but as was pointed out to me under modern binary notation that's just 255 because they start counting at zero (somewhere my High School CS teacher is feeling the urge to scold me for blanking on that). I'll have to remember to do it for EP511.

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Wilson Fowlie

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Reply #32 on: September 08, 2010, 06:00:59 PM
I don't think s/he was expecting to get ship-jacked by a violent criminal mid-voyage. That's enough to throw anyone off their game plan, I'd think.

Sure, except that (as far as I recall) the depredations started before the ship-jacking occurred, and in fact, seemed to be the trigger that set Jorge Felipe off.

If they'd been prepared when they set out - as they would/should have been if, as I would expect, they'd known in advance that the mermaids would vulch* the travelLump to that degree - Lolo would have been left with something at the end, if not the whole thing.  (And in fact, would have taken it into account as a standard loss when calculating the net take for the caper.)



*Vulch: to scavenge. (deliberately incorrect back-formation from the fact that 'vulture' sounds like 'vulcher')

"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


alllie

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Reply #33 on: September 08, 2010, 06:08:23 PM
I was a little taken aback that Lolo arrived back in the harbour with so little for all of her efforts.  Was this really the first time she'd done this operation?  I hadn't gotten that impression, but if not, why didn't she know what the mermaids would do to her mini-lump and take steps to prevent it?  At the very least, in such a small, tight-knit community, she (or one of her partners) should at least have heard that she would need to do something to protect their haul.

Maybe I just don't remember it but did the story explain why meat-eating mermaids living independently in the sea would want plastic trash. In The Old Man and the Sea when the sharks were eating the fish, well, it was food to them. But why did the mermaids want this trash. It wasn't like they could sell it or eat it.



Wilson Fowlie

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Reply #34 on: September 08, 2010, 06:10:04 PM
I initially wanted to have it be EP11111111, but as was pointed out to me under modern binary notation that's just 255 because they start counting at zero...

That's not quite the case, for the same reason that the decimal number 99 doesn't count one hundred items because we start counting at zero.  '1' is one, no matter your counting system.

If you do notate episode 511 in binary, please put a 'b' at the beginning of the number, or some of us may think we've missed 11,110,600 episodes! :D

Sorry to be such a didact, but, hey, programmer.  (Presumably a member of the 'they' in your sentence above. ;) )

"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


Wilson Fowlie

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Reply #35 on: September 08, 2010, 06:10:49 PM
Maybe I just don't remember it but did the story explain why meat-eating mermaids living independently in the sea would want plastic trash? In The Old Man and the Sea when the sharks were eating the fish, well, it was food to them. But why did the mermaids want this trash. It wasn't like they could sell it or eat it.

It was a presented as an unknown fact.  Lolo herself wondered the same thing.

"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


knigget

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Reply #36 on: September 08, 2010, 06:42:57 PM
Maybe I just don't remember it but did the story explain why meat-eating mermaids living independently in the sea would want plastic trash? In The Old Man and the Sea when the sharks were eating the fish, well, it was food to them. But why did the mermaids want this trash. It wasn't like they could sell it or eat it.

It was a presented as an unknown fact.  Lolo herself wondered the same thing.

Nice juxtaposition with JF wanting all the money, without a clear idea why.  You know, paper or plastic?

http://www.apoGrypha.blogspot.com

What would have been written. 

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kibitzer

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Reply #37 on: September 08, 2010, 11:03:02 PM
Sorry to be such a didact, but, hey, programmer.  (Presumably a member of the 'they' in your sentence above. ;) )

Purely for my amusement, then, which particular language(s) do you use at the moment?


Wilson Fowlie

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Reply #38 on: September 08, 2010, 11:06:23 PM
Sorry to be such a didact, but, hey, programmer.  (Presumably a member of the 'they' in your sentence above. ;) )

Purely for my amusement, then, which particular language(s) do you use at the moment?

Mostly C (we do a lot of embedded firmware and network protocol stuff that requires the speed) with a sprinkling of Python.

I'd like to find an excuse to do something moderately significant with Erlang, but that hasn't come to pass yet.

"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 #39 on: September 09, 2010, 02:44:08 AM
Mostly C (we do a lot of embedded firmware and network protocol stuff that requires the speed) with a sprinkling of Python.

I'd like to find an excuse to do something moderately significant with Erlang, but that hasn't come to pass yet.

Yipes. A REAL programmer! Me: mostly Java-based stuff in the integration space: BPEL, BPMN and that kinda thing.


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Reply #40 on: September 09, 2010, 01:53:11 PM
Excuse my anatomical explicitness, but if you want to make yourself impossible to rape, you can't just get rid of your genitals. You basically have to become spheroid in shape with no points of ingress.

Thank you!  That bugged me in the story she'd stated something along the lines of making herself "unfuckable".  Well, removing your genitals ain't gonna do that.  If, like scattercat suggested, she'd been doing it for entirely psychological reasons, then fine.  But the word "unfuckable" suggests that's not the case.



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Reply #41 on: September 09, 2010, 01:54:14 PM
I'd argue the word unfuckable is subjective. :p



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Reply #42 on: September 09, 2010, 02:02:05 PM
I initially wanted to have it be EP11111111, but as was pointed out to me under modern binary notation that's just 255 because they start counting at zero...

That's not quite the case, for the same reason that the decimal number 99 doesn't count one hundred items because we start counting at zero.  '1' is one, no matter your counting system.

If you do notate episode 511 in binary, please put a 'b' at the beginning of the number, or some of us may think we've missed 11,110,600 episodes! :D

Sorry to be such a didact, but, hey, programmer.  (Presumably a member of the 'they' in your sentence above. ;) )

11111111 would also mean -127 if we're dealing with signed integers.  :P

Yipes. A REAL programmer! Me: mostly Java-based stuff in the integration space: BPEL, BPMN and that kinda thing.

Jumping in where I wasn't asked, but I write C++ at my day job, writing video processing algorithms for embedded chips on traffic cameras (not enforcement cameras, but ones that help improve traffic flow).



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Reply #43 on: September 09, 2010, 02:13:43 PM
Well, I'm glad that I didn't flash on "The Old Man and the Sea" because I hates that book.  This one, I mostly liked.  I liked the juxtaposition of advanced tech with less-advanced tech, the AI on the ship in particular, and the presence of mermaids due to the previous generations rich body-mods gone wrong.  I appreciated there being a plot where things happened, and where I could understand the entire arc.  Her character growth was done well, though like scattercat I thought her reaction to Niko's death needed something more.

The main thing I thought was lacking was simply some much needed description, especially of two things:
1.  What do the gender-neutral people look/sound/act like differently from other people.  We know they don't have the genitals, but are they missing all sex characteristics?  Do they look something like eunuchs?  Would they have to do major surgery to restructure bones to remove these characteristics?  Do their voices sound androgynous?  Did she have a histerectomy as well as a... uh... vaginectomy?  Does she behave or think any differently with the different mix of hormones?  Much of our adult selves, both physical and mental, are formed by drastic hormone changes during the teen years--if you remove the hormones, then what happens? 

In the story it seemed that her only changed trait was her name change and lack of vagina, but to me, removing gender has too many implications to have them all just ignored like that.

2.  What do the mermaids look like?  Are they Little Mermaid style with fish bottoms and human female top halves?  Are they like those mermaid hoaxes that spread around in past centuries by sewing together a monkey and a fish?  Do their top halves or faces look at all human?  Do all of them have female sex characteristics even if the original person was male (I sort of guessed this because his father became a MERMAID not a MERMAN).  Do they have sharp teeth the better to tear fishmeat with?  When they said the mermaid on the net was big, is that big as in person-big or big as in orca-big or what?

I understand that mermaids in this world are just another element of the world and so they may not dwell on them, but it's a major obstacle to me picturing the scene if I have no idea what they look like or how big they are.



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Reply #44 on: September 09, 2010, 04:04:37 PM
2.  What do the mermaids look like?  ...  Do they have sharp teeth the better to tear fishmeat with? 

This was the only visual aspect that had any description at all - Lolo mentioned something about 'parrot beaks', which, frankly, didn't help much.

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Reply #45 on: September 09, 2010, 04:52:59 PM
I was a disappointed with the summary of the Spar discussion.  I feel a major aspect of the forum was overlooked: the criticism of the repeated implication that this was 'porn' or that the author was indulging in a 'kink'.  There was a lot of airtime for those viewpoints and nothing about the almost universal condemnation of those few posts.  If anything, it seemed like the assertions that this was prurient got exclusive airtime.

I always enjoy hearing my name on the podcast (rare as that is), though whenever I do, I invariably shake my head and wonder "whoinhell thought that was worthy of repeating in audio?  ???

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Reply #46 on: September 09, 2010, 05:24:14 PM
One patch of this story held one of the most chillingly excellent bits of narration I have ever heard in a podcast: the recounting of the narrator's childhood rape.

Years ago a friend of mine spoke to me of having been sexually abused by her father, at just about the same age as the story's narrator.  The deliberate, understated, icy dead cadence of Christiana Ellis' delivery, betrayal and abasement and revulsion kept in check only by bands of cold steel, brought that conversation back to me in full detail.  The reading was perfect.  It left me hoping that the realism was just superb scripting and voice acting, and not the voice of experience from either Cat or Christiana.  But it felt so real that I had to wonder.



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Reply #47 on: September 10, 2010, 03:23:06 PM
It is established early on that the boat has a connection to the internet, would it not logically follow that the boat has the ability to contact the authorities.  I can accept that the boat wouldn't speak up about the rape years ago, because doing so would be against the will of its owner.  But why wouldn't an internet ready boat make contact when its crew was in trouble? 

I feel like the rules surrounding the AI needed to be better established in order for me to buy this story.  The AI is given a sort of magical carte blanche to do whatever it wants to suit the story at the time, especially at the end when it goads Neco with some sonic something or other, I was left with the feeling of "where did that come from?". 




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Reply #48 on: September 10, 2010, 04:53:48 PM
can we please get a different feedback reader besides bill peters? nothing against him personally, its my opinion that he is just not good at reading the feedback. at all. it takes talent to read aloud a do it well, and unfortunately bill peters just does not have this talent. i'm sure he's a wonderful person, but it is difficult to listen to feedback when he reads it. sorry.
« Last Edit: September 10, 2010, 08:51:04 PM by Calculating... »

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Reply #49 on: September 10, 2010, 05:08:58 PM
Of the storm of Cat Rambo that has been podcast lately, this is probably the best of the bunch because it had a distinct plot -- that is, stuff happens. And I totally get the parallels to "The Old Man And The Sea". I guess the narrator did too because she read the story at a very slow pace, so slow that I started to get annoyed. I needed faster pacing.

Of course, TOMATS wasn't very fast-paced either.

I like boats, and boating. My grandfather had boats. As an ex-SCUBA-diver (my license lapsed, but I had both Open Water and Advanced), I know how to handle myself on boats and around heavy equipment on rolling seas (mostly: avoid it). So I appreciated the boat parts. Also, the non-battle with the corporate scavengers at the Lump was pretty cool. But the journey there and back was long, and Jorge Felipe had absolutely no redeeming qualities (the best villains have at least one, I think), so I didn't really feel anything when he died. Nico's return annoyed me -- where was he hiding all that time? an air bubble in the mini-lump? -- and I almost wonder if the author wrote herself into a corner and had to grab a rope and swing back to the doorway.

But what annoyed me about the story was the mermaids. The story title says mermaids. Even the Eliot poem has mermaids. Mermaids attack Lolo's mini-lump until it's gone. Mermaids are evil. That's about it. I suppose there's a commentary there on how the rich (who became mermaids, spawned, then turned back) are still screwing the poor (Lolo et al, by taking away this chunk of treasure), but I don't want to think about that. Not when I have to think about the rape thing, and the action thing, and the boat thing... it's too much.

Speaking of the rape and gender-removal thing... *sigh*... I don't see how the story was improved by adding it. Lolo could've remained Laura, learned some form of martial art, and still have been a girl (I'm guessing she was late-teens by this point). Adding the gender-removal was just another SFnal thing, and these days it seems like nongender has taken over the "shock" role of male homosexuality. Think about it -- in "Tio Gilberto and the 27 Ghosts", the MC was gay. Good for him. But the story wasn't about his sexuality, and I doubt any readers were shocked by it. In this one, Laura made a choice to become the nongendered Lolo because of a fairly obvious reason, which has been covered by other commenters. And that's fine... if that's what the story was about. But it wasn't about her choice to become nongendered. So what was the point, exactly? Showing how far people will go to try and escape the memory of / prevent the recurrence of a violent event against them? Showing Lolo's regret at her choice, at the bait-and-switch comparison between choosing nongender and parenting hundreds of mermaid spawn?

So, in the end, I didn't love this story, although I liked it a lot more than other Rambo stories (although I do think "Sugar"'s descriptions blew this one's away -- which, given the TOMATS comparison, I suppose is all right). Actually, I read "Seeking Nothing" in Daily Science Fiction today, and I actually kind of liked it -- which tells me that I guess Rambo's writing, at least in my eyes, is better suited for the printed page.

Feedback went on a tad too long this episode as well.

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