What a weird world it's become. I don't like it at all. Not the isolation. I can handle that. It's that the customers at work have become crazier and more picky, if that's possible. Yes, we have a plague on, but sure, twenty pounds of ground beef in half pound packs. Yes ma'am!
How is everyone? I've been busy working on projects. I've started a longish work on Hamlet which is more like a fugue meditation on what the play does to my brain than an actual work of criticism. I estimate it will take six months to write the rough draft and probably clock in at 70k words or so. While doing this, I have a novel in the works which is basically CSI in a 1920s fantasy setting. Watching CSI (and Star Trek too!) there is a lot of techno-pseudo-forensic babble and I thought, "You know, I bet I can create the same sort of babble but with magic." So, you set up a character with a degree in forensic thaumamancy or whatever nonsense and have her solve cases by finding out what spells killed whatever poor sap is the victim of the week: “You can tell by the praecantatio cerebromedullospinal pseudocoma. This leaves the patient brain dead.” “So you can’t get a witness statement?” “No, but given the state of the body, we’re looking for a sorceress with a yellow magical aura.” Or something like that. Canned dialogue that should be pretty fun to read, even if it is nonsense.
But, what people tend to forget about technobabble is that it often does actually mean something in context of the story. Or at least the good kind does. The offender “modify the phase variance” which is dragged out as the standard for this trope (and I believe comes from a Star Craft cheat, originally) means that you are altering protein expressions to avoid needing to evolve new traits to rapidly changing environments (in context of the Zerg, this means your now unlocked buildings allow you to bypass the tech tree, so the code is accurate to what it does).
A Star Trek gem: “The temporal surge we detected was caused by an explosion of a microscopic singularity passing through this solar system. Somehow, the energy emitted by the singularity shifted the chroniton particles in our hull into a high state of temporal polarisation.”
This isn’t nonsense. I mean, it is, and high Trek nonsense, but it actually means something. “Time went funny because of a tiny blackhole exploding. Time particles polarized and moved us forward quickly.”
I’d contrast this with something that doesn’t mean anything or at least seriously misunderstands what its own words mean. From CSI: “I'll create a GUI interface using Visual Basic, see if I can track an IP address.” GUI is a graphical user interface, Visual Basic is a programming language, and an IP address is an Internet Protocol address. So far, so good, I suppose. But the term GUI interface is redundant, why Visual Basic specifically, and why would you need to have a GUI to track an IP address? The problem here seems to be that because the writer is using technical terms from the real world that he or she doesn’t understand, the sentence gets a little silly. Personally, I’d just call the killer’s internet provider and have them find his IP address. No need for all the work.
And while on tracking killers, because the story is set up in a 1920s era world, I looked up how one would track a phone call in 1920. Turns out it’s actually easier than you would think; Killer calls from a local diner, maybe to taunt the police at their own headquarters. The police then call the telephone operator back, find out which switchboard the last call came from, then talk to the operator there, and narrow the call to a few city blocks, or in smaller towns a single building. Then they send out foot patrols to canvas the area. And because this is a Twenties Crime Drama with Sorcery, the cops beat the shit out of the killer while cracking wise and we’re totally on their side.
Anyway, have a good year y’all and Happy birthday. To me. 35? SHiiiiT.