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Follow all things Richard and Karl, and check out "The Minuet of Sorcery"
https://linktr.ee/rajkevis
Zero Good, unspecified quantum time state, and welcome to Carl and Richard present Deep Space and Dragons. I'm Richard. Notably I have a C in my name.
Speaker 2:And I am Carl. I notably do not have a C in my name, but I'm not named after Carl Marx.
Speaker 1:Allegedly.
Speaker 2:I'm supposedly named after Karl Marx. Allegedly I'm supposedly named after my great-grandfather. I never met the guy, but he was German.
Speaker 1:Yeah, your great-grandfather, who may or may not have been Karl Marx, we don't know.
Speaker 2:We're not historians, yet I mean, that's true, we're not yet historians.
Speaker 1:I mean, if I wanted to be a literary historian, that's a viable career path for me. Like, I seem like the kind of person to have a super specific PhD, like literally just in historical naming etymology.
Speaker 2:I gotta look up when Karl Marx died, because, oh yeah, definitely not my great-grandfather. He was old. Might have been his great-grandfather. He was old.
Speaker 1:Might have been his great-grandfather, but moving on from that what's new in the Karl-verse other than Marx?
Speaker 2:So a couple weeks ago I decided to just bite the bullet and resubscribe to Shonen Jump, because the free chapters are all fine and dandy, but the fact that there's only three that are free, like it's the three most recent chapters that are free, and then there's, like, still some series in the vault that I haven't read yet, so I'm going to pause you briefly.
Speaker 1:Is Chainsaw man in Shonen Jump, or is it just on the app?
Speaker 2:I'm assuming it's in Show and Jump.
Speaker 1:Because like dang. I feel like it wouldn't be allowed to be, but please continue, it's definitely like the most mature series that I've seen in there. Oh, that could be a full episode. And for those of us who want to hear my earlier thoughts on Chainsaw man, I believe I made a stupid episode title like how Much Chain Can a Chainsaw man If a Chainsaw Can a Chainsaw man?
Speaker 2:Couldn't even do your own tongue twister.
Speaker 1:To be fair. That's it. That's all I got. Please continue.
Speaker 2:Okay anyways. So, you know, I went back and reread some chapters of, like Kaiju No.8, because it's like I gotta know exactly what's going on. And, uh, the most recent series that I actually read now from start to finish is a, is a series called Toriko um, where it's a. It's about a gourmet hunter.
Speaker 1:Yes, yes, yes. I don't know why my brain blanked on that one, but please, for our audience, continue. But I'm like, oh yeah, it had a one piece Dragon Ball crossover, uh did it crossover?
Speaker 2:No right. And it Dragon Ball crossover. Did it cross over? No wait, it had the GameCube game. The first episode of the anime is actually a crossover with One Piece, and I assume the second half of that is just somewhere randomly in the middle of the One Piece series, but I don't know where or when.
Speaker 1:You know, if someone actually canonically had permission to use the One Piece world for their Mon Guide, I'd accept it, I'd be happy with it, like I'd respect it. But I feel like that level of communication has never happened.
Speaker 2:All I'm saying is that the first episode, luffy and his crew landed on Hungry Hungry Island, where Toriko was like hunting for gourmet foods, and then he goes on to explain capture levels and all the different mechanics of the Toriko world, which then get explained again in the second episode. Because, anyways, that's a weird aside. This what's new with me is that I feel like maybe I was spoiled by Akira Toriyama and his very, very clear, choreographed fights yes, he gets a lot of shout for that every time so the only reason we have adult Goku is so he could draw musculature better.
Speaker 1:That's canon. That's just a thing you said in the interview. It's like, yeah, I had to make his limbs longer for cooler poses.
Speaker 2:But we talked about D Grayman, where the fight scenes are just completely unintelligible.
Speaker 1:Right, you know what's funny is Jojo's fight scenes aren't intelligible, they're.
Speaker 2:what's funny is jojo's fight scenes are intelligible, they're just stupid um, but so then the first like 200, 250 chapters, ish, uh, were pretty solid for toriko. But the last 150 chapters or so, um, there's too many people throwing world-ending moves and punches and and techniques and it it becomes unintelligible, uh, and it kind of feels like that's just kind of how things go when your your scale of combat gets to that kind of ground, your level.
Speaker 1:Uh, it's funny though it's like although, to be fair, Dragon Ball Z to counterbalance a bit its power scaling is notoriously bad because it doesn't feel like people are getting stronger, Like, oh yeah, Goku just slaps Krillin in Dragon Ball Super while Super Saiyan Blue and it does nothing. It's like his fight sequences don't care about his internal logic.
Speaker 1:Because, he's still a gag artist at his core, or was so with things with Toriko, where you start building on themselves, your fight gets unintelligible because of power scaling. But it's kind of like a unique privilege he had, where it's like people assumed Dragon Ball had well thought out. Reasonable People acted like Dragon Ball had a hard magic system when it absolutely did not.
Speaker 2:Absolutely did not.
Speaker 1:It's like Roshi's just blowing up the moon for a gag bit and that's just people are using as an argument to why this character should beat this character. I'm like guys, you're thinking about this much harder than he was, I promise you. So it is hard to like have a run. Actually, a lot of it's about tempo, though, so I've given this rant a while and we don't have the episode time for me to give it again, but I call it Great Ninja War Syndrome, where a series will be reasonably paced and then just break into Naruto's Great Ninja War for some reason also felt like it was bleached at the same thing with the soul, with the hondo muco arc, where they just threw the characters already had against other characters in a bunch of fights for no real reason, like my biggest rant of my hero, academia, is they're in the epilogue now and they just made it to second year, having went through like five world ending conflicts, and they're pacing like to not have your series devolve into a unintelligible fight scene.
Speaker 1:You have to be very reasonable with your power scaling, but it's like you're almost required by the genre to keep power scaling, so characters keep getting stronger and more awesome right like Naruto had that problem a fair bit, where it almost, like, had to scale down a bit for the Naruto Sasuke fight, where it was unintelligible and still they started punching each other in their stupid faces and I loved it Deeply, deeply love, when it came down to them punching each other in their stupid faces.
Speaker 2:Well, anyway, the point of this whole thing is that I think the first two-thirds of Toriko were really good and then the final act did a lot of weird time skips, just for no reason. They did a time skip just so they could do a flashback, so they could do another time skip. It was messy, but the ending was subpar, and that's what's new with me.
Speaker 1:Ravemaster had a similar problem, not related to anything.
Speaker 2:Fair enough, all right. Well, what's new with you, though, richard?
Speaker 1:So I'll try not to use up too much of our bandwidth with this story. So, as you're well aware, I run I want to say monthly D&D, but sometimes it's bi-weekly, it shifts around a bit Scheduling's hard. So it's brought to my attention that one of my players has severe arachnophobia because spiders are terrifying Right and most games they play a spider or two will show up and they'll be like oh no, I get to feel deeply uncomfortable while fighting the spider boss in the Witcher and I'm like as a DM with infinite monsters, I don't have to attack people with their phobias, unless it's, I feel particularly sadistic that day. You know, trigger warning, caution tape, all this stuff. It's a long-running group but for a new group you literally would have people list out what they're not comfortable with to avoid from advance.
Speaker 1:So D&D 5e loves spiders. The drow's, entire things are their spider-like right. They're spider gods, spider deities, spider monsters and every random encounter table in D&D has some size of spider. So what I thought would be really funny would be to replace all my spiders with woodland mammals but leave them in the exact circumstances of spiders. So they get to this cave and they see these silken webs, the dark atmosphere cave and they see these silken webs, the dark atmosphere, and you see, skittering across the web, a possum that spits a web at you okay, and that's my strategy is I just I don't even change the flavor.
Speaker 1:Next, I just substitute the word spider. And it's been hilarious every time, like one time. It's like you look up on the ceiling and see, looking down at you, hundreds of velociraptors, their eyes glowing red in the darkness.
Speaker 2:Yeah, okay.
Speaker 1:Because it's I'm not even going to say unintentionally hilarious, it's just traditional hilarious.
Speaker 2:That is pretty hilarious.
Speaker 1:So, like the other new thing with me is I was volunteering at the year above me is convocation ceremony and got a coffee mug and a t-shirt and it was great. Oh and so I don't know if your work has this problem Probably not Cause you don't really work in a particularly bureaucratic or academic environment. But when I was a kitchen manager and you've definitely done this when something ran out, I would just fix the problem. Say, we ran out of mayo. I would just go get mayo from Walmart in the middle of the shift, just run and get some.
Speaker 2:Yeah, okay.
Speaker 1:I feel like you would just go get pineapples or go get ham, or buy a ham and use the slicer if it came down to it, if you had a supply issue. Yeah, okay. So that's how my brain's wired.
Speaker 1:Academia doesn't believe in just fixing problems right so it's like there's this budget for this event and one of the things was the every graduating class puts out an anthology where every student has a work, and this anthology is sort of like a better idea than a yearbook because it's a writing and publishing program and everyone writes something and then they publish it right. So my thought was everyone's going to want to sign each other's anthologies like yearbooks, because at the last event I went to, they did exactly that. So I mentioned oh, we need some pens. It's like, oh, I don't know, if we have pens in the budget, we'd have to fill out a form. I don't know, maybe this other department can lend some pens. And I'm like, okay, they're gonna fail to get these pens within three days. They just are.
Speaker 1:I have no, no faith whatsoever that through the power of bureaucracy, they can successfully acquire pens in time, like they're able to get like tablecloths and things. But that's because this event was planned like six months in advance and they had ordered things like three months in advance. So I have a break between when my class ends and my volunteering starts. So I'm like I'm gonna go to walmart, I'm gonna go to the mcdonald's and get myself a cheap burger and I'm gonna just buy some pens, right. But this is where it gets tricky is a student employee just donates something to solve a problem. All the administrators are like you weren't allowed to do that. We feel bad, you should get reimbursed.
Speaker 1:I'm like the amount of my time is worth about $20 an hour at the moment, so it's not worth an hour to get $2 back. So I go and buy like 100 pens for like $4 at Walmart. They're really cheap. I spent less on pens than my lunch. But then I had to like hide the pens, right. So in our box of supplies I'm like, look, they put pens in here. As I myself reverse, slide a hand, is the pens in the box. And then, like I set up the display, they're like, oh, you guys should get pens. I'm like, yeah, someone got the pens, that's awesome. And I'm kind of like gaslighting my volunteer team into thinking that the pens came from somewhere important. So that way I don't have to sit through the speech about how it's not cool for students to buy things and they would have bought them and I didn't have to do it, like it just wasn't worth it.
Speaker 2:Right, because you get caught in a bureaucratic loop explaining why you shouldn't have been in that bureaucratic loop in the first place, correct.
Speaker 1:Where instead I could just. And the thing is, I gave them the chance for me to not bail them out, right. I waited to the day of the event to see if they'd successfully acquired pens before I just went out and scot some.
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 1:And then hid them with the supplies to make someone feel like, oh, someone stepped up and did the pen thing and I don't know. I just feel really smug about it. But also, every single pen got stolen by somebody and there's just no pens left over at the end of the event. They weren't. They were default Walmart pens. They weren't signed with like the program on them, or even particularly nice pens. They probably could only manage to get the 30-so signatures out of the ink before they died. I just found it funny that every pen got swiped.
Speaker 2:Every pen. That is pretty funny.
Speaker 1:So that's what's new with me is I did a volunteer thing and then I walked away with a mug, a tote bag, a t-shirt and an anthology, which were definitely added up to a larger value than the pens plus me stealing snacks.
Speaker 1:And well, having snacks and drinks from the bar from the, not the bar, the catering means I definitely made back the value of these pens. I just think it's funny that it's like, oh no, if one of my profs is watching this podcast right now, they'll probably call me out on it tomorrow and be like did you acquire the pens? And I'll be like it was just so much more efficient. Like schools don't just have a petty cash to then reimburse yourself with a receipt.
Speaker 2:Do you think any of your professors watch their podcast?
Speaker 1:Absolutely. Our podcast is great.
Speaker 2:Oh, okay, that's fair.
Speaker 1:Plus they're like let's see if he cheated on an assignment idiot. Aw, dang it, he's legit. So that took us about 15 minutes and was as smooth as I could possibly make this segue. So explain what we're doing with this week's episode To the best of your ability and I will chime in when needed. Dramatic float clear for that one. That was like you're about to yell at Firestyle or something.
Speaker 2:No. So Richard has been working on a sci-fi project of short stories. The concept a colonizing ship that goes near the speed of light, but not quite, and thus will take hundreds, if not thousands, of years to actually reach its destination.
Speaker 1:And I believe we talked about this more a few episodes back actually.
Speaker 2:It has grabbed my attention and I've just been blasting off story ideas, short story ideas, at least in my mind. Some of them apparently are not very good for short stories To follow up a bit.
Speaker 1:I'm trying to do a Ghost in the Shell standalone complex thing, kind of like the Canterbury Tales, where it's a collection of stories but the main character of the story is technically the ship and according to my spreadsheet, the crew of the ship go through the hero's journey, even though the characters are unique for each short story with a few exceptions. The characters are unique for each short story with a few exceptions. So it's not just that any short story goes, but there's a timeline of how advanced the culture is on the ship as the culture on the ship develops over the short stories. So, for example, in the first five very few people have been woken up. It's basically a territory in first generation. Puppets are running the ship and then we start to have more and more people get woken up and they don't want to go back to sleep. And then by the end of the story there's a thriving society on the ship which causes a big ethical dilemma of if they should even bother landing anymore because things have drifted so much from their original point.
Speaker 2:Right right.
Speaker 1:So, because I mapped it out to follow this plot arc, as it were, hence my various spreadsheets literally marking off spots in the hero's journey. The idea is that you could read any one short story in a vacuum, but you get a better story if you read them all in sequence. Plus, I get to do some cheeky things with Easter eggs and characters like well, we banned this project because of the incident and then, two short stories ago, you read about the fungus incident.
Speaker 2:Is the fungus going to make it in?
Speaker 1:The fungus is absolutely going to make it in. It just needed some reworking. I love the fungus. So, with the pretext out of the way of the colony ship, people are asleep, they wirelessly control puppets collection, source stories that are arcana-themed. Let's give, let's deep dive into some of your suggestions and also some of the like. Spoiling a novel I intend to put out on a podcast seems foolish, except I've only written five chapters and none of them will be in their current form by the time it's finished, because that's how writing works. So I'm not too worried about like spoiling things. But also, like I was saying, part of it is the structure that each story has to do three things of be an entertaining story, match a theme and progress the story of the ship as a whole. It's like how they joke, one of the main characters of Sex and the City is the city of New York.
Speaker 2:Okay, so at the end of our Google Doc sheet here. I tallied up all of the different responses that you gave me via text, so for Nine out of 25 got a thumbs up, that's pretty good. Six out of 25 got no thumbs up that's pretty good. Six out of 25 got no direct response. That's bad. Three out of 25 got a fire emoji.
Speaker 1:That's the best one for me.
Speaker 2:Three out of five got a non-emoji response.
Speaker 1:Oh, where I actually typed out words.
Speaker 2:Yeah, two of them got laughter, one of them got a gasp slash shock, one of them got a meh and one of them got a small. I said sadness, but it's just a sad face.
Speaker 1:So what's funny is one of my volunteer things I do is slush pile reading for a sci-fi magazine and your acceptance rate is way higher than the average sci-fi magazine and your acceptance rate is way higher than the average sci-fi submission. I read like I don't know how much I can talk about it, but like I was doing some slush pile reading on the bus and one I'm just like six out of ten. Six out of ten, oh, you did really good. Seven needs work. So to give some context, your ideas are literally being contrasted, with me literally reading sci-fi ideas as a hobby on the bus okay, so number 19 is the one that got the sadness emoji, and I'm just wondering.
Speaker 2:So the idea is I started off by saying sci-fi, momo jumbo, because you're trying to technobabble, I guess is the phrase I was going for, but anyway. So the Arcana, which is the ship, uses an artificial wormhole network to connect any two points on the network across time and space. That allows the Earth to monitor the Arcana's progress and families to send near instantaneous messages back home. When the network fails during a call to someone's grandmother, the passengers speculate that they may be the only humans still alive in the universe and grapple with the existential crisis this causes.
Speaker 1:So here's why you got it. Is that actually like sad? So it's sad because you missed the mark in a weird way on this one.
Speaker 1:So it made me sad, not that the story was sad okay so when I gave you the original pitch which was, I think I sent you the pitch file, a couple demo chapters, and explained it to you. There's a few things in this story that are just not only incongruent but also directly rip the concept from the specific story I sent you originally. So the artificial wormhole network to connect points across time and space directly contradicts the idea that these are travelers in isolation to study the human condition, and the whole point is they don't go instant, which is the entire reason they have puppets, streamers. It's basically the core concept. It'd be like the N-Jammer Canceler in Gundam Seed. We built this machine that takes away nuclear power, but we built a nuclear reactor that works anyway.
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 1:And second, the passenger speculating that this may be the only human alive in the universe and grappling with the crisis was the entire premise of the Hanged man story that I'd sent you.
Speaker 2:Slash wrote for you specifically the hanged man story being the captain awakens someone, and yeah, and the person's like are we in hell?
Speaker 1:am I dead? Are we the only people? How is any of this real? So I'm like oh, did you not read the story I sent you was my first thought.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, okay, okay.
Speaker 1:So the concept by the way of the network. Failing to call someone's grandmother and wondering if they're only human still alive in the universe is like a recurring theme, but also like that idea will probably still make it in some form. It might even refine the original story with it a bit, to be a little more clear, but I'm like okay, okay so it didn't make me sad.
Speaker 2:It made me sad, but not in a good way okay, well, so now let's move on to math, which is number 16, um which, uh, so I'm assuming it's probably just too tropey so there's an interesting things that happened.
Speaker 1:So first, this was an absolutely an episode of star trek voyager where they see the before you know too much further, we actually do need to read the prompt, otherwise.
Speaker 1:Oh yes, solar winds cause the navigation instruments to go haywire. When everything settles down, the Arcana comes across another Arcana vessel from another timeline. So this has happened enough in Star Trek that it's a trope. But that's not actually my problem with it. If I want to take an idea from Star Trek but make it in a more grounded, grittier setting, but not boring, because it's like some of the Star Trek reboots really want to be Stargate, I'm like I don't know. I like it better as Star Trek. The best form of Star Trek is animated, because then they can just do as wackadoodle as they want. But a couple of things I didn't kind of like it. The instruments going hairwire and them thinking there's another ship is more interesting to me than another one from another timeline. Because, as I've ranted at length about Bleach, if you put time travel into your series that is a big jump. So the Arcanum's propulsion system is actually based on a real theoretical engine that drops plutonium pellets into a constant explosion to keep accelerating you.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 1:So theoretically we can get to 99 point whatever light speed by just launching enough nuclear explosions behind us in space, because acceleration is just acceleration. But the moment you have time manipulation or alternate universes, then the question becomes why is the ship driving the long way? So timeline travel makes more sense to me if I had some kind of warpy engine, if it was an existing technology. Now, if it's, the other instruments are haywire and they think there's a second ship. It could be more interesting if it was like there's multiple vessels on terraforming and they think they ran into another one, but that might even be more interesting. They think they ran into another one, but that might even be more interesting if they just ran into another one and there's just multiple ships. But part of the mad too is there wasn't really a full story there. It's like it was a story prompt, but there's no stories require conflict. That one's just a prompt. There's no actual conflict in that prompt.
Speaker 2:Okay, so then the next one that only got one emoji representation was gasp, or shock, or whatever you want to call it, which is number 11.
Speaker 1:Even though Arcana is not immune to the ravages of time. To gather materials for maintenance, the ship's trajectory is planned near an asteroid field and miners are awoken to retrieve them Unbeknownst to the workers. Cosmic radiation interferes with the puppets and they're sent down to their human bodies. I love that. One Gasp was my best reaction. So we build these awesome super advanced puppets to keep our passengers and cryostasis comfortably. So to keep our passengers in cryostasis comfortably, they don't work. So you have to wake up flesh and blood humans. To go die to save the robotic puppets is really deeply ironic, Because that is waking up people to save the Tesla factory. Like that's dark. It's like, oh yeah, the only way we could fix the Tesla factory is to send a living human into the lithium plant to fix it. It's like can't we send the machines? No, the machines cost more but, more importantly, we can't use them. So that's actually like a fun one.
Speaker 1:That's probably going to be the death chapter okay because a bunch of people especially if, like I make that I have the idea to take it to the next level. So they're calculating the supplies for the trip and they've mathed it out. But more and more people are waking up and there's more and more screwed up experiments and they're running on supplies so they fake an asteroid field to send out flesh and blood humans, to kill them, to reduce their supply bases. So it's like the council's like we can't send out real people, and another person's like actually this't send out real people, and another person's like actually this solves our people problem perfectly. So there's a lot of potential with that one. So I'm like ooh, that's good Because it flips the like, especially if I put it in like the third.
Speaker 1:So one of the writing tropes is flipping the like. You establish a world, then you create an inverted world, then you synthesize the two worlds. That is a great inverted world. To have humans die to protect the puppets Like that's a fun twist. So I like that one a lot.
Speaker 2:Okay, so then I actually I'm going to skip over to the laughter emojis, because what? Okay, well, well, what well? Space sports, which I assume you were actually more so laughing at my transition from asking me if the naturals concept made it in so the space sports.
Speaker 1:You had a couple space sport-esque ideas and I'm like okay, a chapter where they just play sports, call it the strength arcana and they just play sports. We had a full discussion in class about how a beach episode is actually really good for a story because it lets people breathe and have some character moments. So the idea that, oh, we're just playing space sports and they're just some kind of sweet zero-gravity sport, yeah, I kind of enjoyed the one where we're like, oh, it's pretty much just Splatoon. Yeah, I kind of enjoyed the one where like, oh, it's pretty much just splatoon. But a couple of them like, okay, no need for subspace, no need for paintballs, no need for this. It would be more like, how could they? Sport on the spaceship would make it more interesting to me. Like, what are these bored people come up with to kill their time? Oh, they literally just using pipes and smacking street signs at each other uh, yeah, I, I can see the appeal of that.
Speaker 2:This was me trying to like incorporate more explicitly sci-fi elements when there isn't actually a network.
Speaker 1:So to clarify the setting a bit and the third chapter I sent you, when you get around to it kind of goes a bit is they don't have like a Matrix simulation type situation. To do a matrix type simulation they literally have to put people in puppets, mess with their sensory perceptions and use regular projectors plus the puppets to crank up the feel back, because they don't actually have a. We put the brain into a computer. It's the brain literally just Wi-Fi's and the senses get all hooked up. So there is no teleporting in subspace in this situation.
Speaker 1:Because I thought those restrictions would make the story a little cleaner yeah, okay so when I'm doing the thing where like, oh, let's do a simulation of humanity, they literally built some child-sized puppets, adult-sized puppets, put in brains but disconnected the memory parts, had them live an entire life experience at 100 times speed and repeated it to do simulations on people.
Speaker 2:Yeah, okay.
Speaker 1:Because there just is no brain-computer. Like the brain-computer interface requires there to be something similar to a brain on the other end, which is why it glitches out and people end up stabbing their loved ones.
Speaker 2:Ah yeah, okay, that makes sense.
Speaker 1:So, in conclusion, I probably will have a sports episode Somewhere in there.
Speaker 2:That's fun. Then the other laughter was literally just a joke, which I don't know if that means it's going to make it in or if it's not.
Speaker 1:No, I love that one more than I should.
Speaker 2:Okay, you can read it.
Speaker 1:When one of the Archon is cleaning robots over here, someone referred to as human garbage they go to investigate the mess. So I love the idea of this little Roomba that's been evolving on this ship for like 100,000 years. Just chat, GPT in a Roomba and someone's like this person is garbage. And then the room of a short story of this Roomba trying to clean this person who is garbage and like this little disc robot doing everything in its power to fix the life of this person because it's trying to clean them like, not like in a like kill them way in a literal, this robots giving them therapy so they'll shower, so they'll like be less of garbage, so they can clean the garbage. They take it as a philosophical challenge to make this human no longer garbage because they clean.
Speaker 1:So I was going to go super wholesome with it out of nowhere. I don't know what Arcana would be, but that's kind of what I was thinking on that one. Yeah, yeah, okay, okay. I mean that's probably not where you were going with that, but I love it going with that, but I love it.
Speaker 2:I, I I'm really good at generating ideas and prompts, but I very rarely have to follow through or skills actually generate a full like story out of it. Um, so I just I just throw it into the ether for you to absorb and decide how it fits best within your, your story, right? And like part of why I don't really care whether or not you get to mix it in.
Speaker 1:Well, I have a massive list of my own too, because when trying to generate 22 short stories, you actually want to generate 30 short stories and pick the best 22. And then edit, trim, just deassemble, reassemble, combine a little girl and her dog. Do what you have to do.
Speaker 2:Okay, there, tucker Chow. Tucker needed to keep his funding.
Speaker 1:Okay, no one ever thinks about how rough it'd be for the child and the dog to both starve to death because he lost his job? Okay, it was a logical solution.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's true.
Speaker 1:No, it's not, Don't be a Chow. Tucker apologist.
Speaker 2:But what I actually wanted to move on to, which is one that you didn't respond to, which is number 23. A sentient gas cloud takes over a human body to observe the puppets and determine why they are immune to mind control, they are caught and expelled when the passengers notice this puppet is aging and acting strangely.
Speaker 1:Yeah, no, it just doesn't really fit Because I haven't introduced. So remember why I really hated Gundam 00?
Speaker 2:Because after four.
Speaker 1:Yeah, if you're going to do aliens, they should be in Chapter 1. You can't just add aliens to something. Looking at you, naruto. Weirdly enough, one Piece could get away with it, because they have people with wings on their back that are on the moon, like. That was established a long time ago. So that's the thing, is the sentient glass cloud taking over a body and being like I'm a human and they're not humans, and it confuses me, not cool. I couldn't figure out what to do with that one, so it just kind of got like. I left myself to think about it, but I never actually gave a response to that one. I think I need a new emoji for like, not valid Like. I feel like I thought about the red line and circle, but that seemed a little harsh.
Speaker 2:I just thought that this would be another excellent way to invert the story, where the human is being puppeted.
Speaker 1:So that's interesting, but if I wanted to go that route, I feel like I'd have someone reverse download themselves, like download their robot brain into a human body or something. I think it's the sentient glass cloud that broke me, because the premise isn't. The premise is workable. I think that one's. Some of the ones that have no response are like warrant further discussion.
Speaker 2:Yeah, okay, okay. All right discussion yeah, okay, okay, all right. That was the only one that I thought was like. The other ones would be fun to discuss, but the no-response ones are like yeah, okay, well, maybe we could even take a full episode to go over some of those.
Speaker 1:As I mentioned before we started the episode, I'm not overly concerned about time limits, so if we take the time to go through all these, I'm fine with that. I'll just bill you the $2 in bandwidth, which I already do, so we're good. So which one do you want to go over next, because I'm enjoying this immensely.
Speaker 2:So this episode will probably go much longer than originally planned well, so now you said that fire is the best emoji other than gasp, gasp is the best, that fire is the best emoji.
Speaker 1:Other than gasp. Gasp is the best one, fire is the second best. Gasp is like oh, I never thought of that. Like gasp was me going. Oh snap, that's what in Richard Kim to emoji dictionary.
Speaker 2:A gasp emoji is me going oh snap, all right.
Speaker 1:Like an example of that would be when Roy Mustang boiled his eyes. I'm like, oh snap. Or even better, when, actually no, when father's like, actually the center of the table is my chessboard we are not sponsored by Full Metal Alchemist.
Speaker 2:I just know quality but so the first idea was number two.
Speaker 1:As the arcana departs from its moon base, a human stowaway watches us drink in the distance. After wandering around the vessel for a while, they meet a robot and realize they won't survive the journey unless they can swap with someone in a chamber. So this one I'm so. My problem, weirdly, is using something that literally involves a moon base for the moon card. Feels like it's cheeky enough that I would get away with that once.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 1:So I'm trying to figure out the logistics of the moon base a bit Because it's like the stowaway realizing that humans don't survive on the ship and they need to go into cryosleep, which means they have to murder somebody, is great, that's fun. That is a solid 2,000-word short story of this person who snuck on aboard the ship realizing there's no way to live. So the moonbase part. I'm not certain if I can make that work. Like, did we send ahead bases to stop for refueling along the trip? Do they just send some drones ahead to build? Can they send things ahead when they're moving at max speed?
Speaker 1:But, like other than the moon base part, the stowaway part is fire. That's going to make it in one of my chapters in some way shape or form. Because just regular human not realizing that this wasn't, like there's no extra storage space, like that's such a dark Sophie's choice when you're looking at the log of all the passengers and figuring out who's the least worthy of living because your life's on the line, because I don't think any person would not murder in that situation of asphyxiation over time, like starvation would suck starvation and would suck well.
Speaker 2:So, uh, the entire reason that this even references the moon is, uh, firstly, I hadn't uh read what the uh tarot cards, the arcana cards, actually symbolize, uh, and secondly, uh, I was trying to uh be on brand for what you're trying to write, but pretty much everything from number four onward is just like okay, I'm just going to give up trying to make it fit into your vision and just send you ideas and see what ones do. So what's?
Speaker 1:interesting, though, is you accidentally had some good themes for the moon, because it's about illusion, intuition, fear, anxiety the false victory illusion, fear.
Speaker 1:So the idea that they escaped their life on this luxury ship to then starve to death is weirdly on point. But I don't know, like I said, the moon part might get phased out and it might just find a more natural place for it. But I do think that one will make it in some way shape or form, cuz it's just so good, like the classic would have. How far would a person go when left on the Titanic? They're not about to like two people could fit on that raft. Like do they just buddy system into someone's capsule and hope for the best?
Speaker 2:because that's hilarious oh, yeah, maybe all right which one is next.
Speaker 1:The next fire idea was number nine number nine, when the human body of a puppet champion a fight club is found dead, a private investigator is hired to. This may have the investigator he's the culprit having erased his own memories to see if he can outwit himself. That is the exact. So when I Like, alright, I gave you the mission statement of we're putting people in these puppets, where they're functionally immortal, to analyze the human condition. Nothing is more human condition than an investigator the ship's investigator, getting bored of investigations so to figure out if he can defeat himself murdering someone, then deleting the memory of murdering them so he can outwit himself.
Speaker 1:That is very on brand for the kind of story I'm doing like the champion of a fight club being found dead, that I might just be cheeky with it and just have it be a character who didn't die in another story, because it's fun okay because, like I think it'd be hilarious if, like in the strength story, you have the human fighting a puppet and dying, and then in, like the temperance story or the devil story, you have him trapping, him trying to solve this murder he himself set up. It's pretty great.
Speaker 2:Yeah, okay.
Speaker 1:I also enjoy the idea of the detective noir story, like that random episode of Samurai Jack where it was a noir detective's episode being the devil chapter, because you think he's after a serial killer and then he's the devil. It's not a shocking revelation, but it's shocking enough.
Speaker 2:Well, I mean the only real reason. I haven't gone anywhere with this Fight Club idea. But aside from space sports, I mean, obviously, if you're in an immortal robot body, you're going to robot fight. You're going to robot fight. And what's at stake? The very fact that you're conscious.
Speaker 1:So like to follow up on that one a bit too. You know who I am. The fact that there's no real fight scenes in my first three chapters is because I'm trying to write something with more of a literary slant. There's going to be a robot fight club chapter, like obviously I don't know if it's going to be the normal human gives himself cyborg implants to try and beat a robot and dies, or if it's just going to be just a chapter that's just rocky, but robots it's going to happen. It's a gift from me to me.
Speaker 1:Because, like I can, write a good fight scene but I'm trying not to Like. You're just gonna get to like the strength chapter and it's just gonna be blocky.
Speaker 2:The last fire idea is number 18.
Speaker 1:When all the puppets from Sector 6 of the cryotank start to feel weak.
Speaker 1:It's discovered that mutant rats have been siphoning the nutrient tanks and Exterminator has woken to deal with the pest infestation Afterward. The crew of the society is safe to let them live, or the chance they got infected by the new virus is too great. So there's some good ideas in there. I'm not sure how it's going to play out, but the idea that someone is siphoning the broth that keeps these people alive and then an experienced exterminator has to kill the infestation but then they have to decide if they want to keep the people there's a lot there Like that one is probably out of a lot of your suggestions, and one closest to as is me, just turning on the Dangerous Writing app and going at it for an hour Because, like A, I do find it funny that, like oh, a rat got aboard and the only food source is literally siphoning from the cryotanks. Right and in my brain, a cryotank for this kind of thing would actually be more like, instead of being it would need nutrients. Even though you're slowing someone's metabolism, you still need to keep them metabolized.
Speaker 2:Well, yeah, because they're using their brains. The body does need energy to be able to actually control the puppets.
Speaker 1:And rats are durable and intelligent. Plus, like there's a lot of meta-competition I can have with someone running through the maze-like ship trying to find a rat, like there's a lot you can do with that. I also enjoy the idea of these like robot rats called scraplets, but there's some, there's some fun to be had there and also it doesn't have like the alien twist on. It's like oh yeah, no, just we left rats to evolve over 100,000 years on this spaceship and, like I said that, one because the stories are standalone and complex.
Speaker 1:We have the rat one, where these rats ravage their supplies, and then we have the death one, where they send people outside of their puppets to fix the outside of a spaceship in the hopes that they'll die. So that's kind of what I mean by the stories building on each other.
Speaker 2:Right, right, right. But so then we have a couple of non-emoji responses.
Speaker 1:Those probably require further answers. I like how no response and non-emoji are different.
Speaker 2:Well, I mean, yeah, that's Well. So the first non-emoji response was Number four, a chef awake oh yeah.
Speaker 1:non-emoji means I responded, but not an emoji Okay yeah. A chef awakens to explore the shift. Upon realizing there's no kitchen, they become distraught. However, they stumble upon a memory chamber and discover they can make flavor microchips from the memories of other passengers and combine all sorts of different cultural ideas to form new flavors and share them with other puppets. So that's a fun one, like you're right the idea that you'd like take people's memories of meals to create simulated meals from people. And I'm still batting this one back and forth in my brain because, on one hand, a secret club where they wake people out of prior sleep to eat real food is such a rich person thing to do.
Speaker 1:But also trying to emulate flavor in a robot body as the chef drives himself mad trying to make something taste good, because part of flavor is imperfections. It's literally the dirt and the shit in the coffee grounds that make them have their flavor. So trying to replicate things that are completely pure never quite tastes good. There's a lot I could do with that, and I like how flippantly disengaged that character is from any big, sweeping sci-fi narrative. He's like I'm on a spaceship, I'm in a puppet, I'm a chef and that's it. I almost want to make that one the Emperor chapter about authority structure and control. But Like, I almost want to make that one the Emperor chapter about, like authority, structure and control, but about domineering, and flexibility and tyranny.
Speaker 2:Or the Hermit. One would work pretty good too.
Speaker 1:Your written response was just Chef Ramsay in space, which is kind of a bit vague.
Speaker 2:but yeah, like, no, like. There's a lot I could do with that one. So that idea part of the reason I mentioned Toriko, as Mahou Votes knew with me, is because that idea is fairly directly ripped off of Toriko, because one of my favorite arcs in Toriko was they go to the gourmet casino where you, at the highest level, you gamble with your memory of your flavors and meals that you've cooked and they just, they extract them straight from your brain if you lose, and then you just don't remember what it tasted like or how to make that meal that's actually sweet like I know you're just kind of lifting that one from a random manga, but that those few extra details are like okay, that's actually really cool.
Speaker 1:The high stakes food casino, because I want a different direction with it. I'm like, oh, that's actually uh. The gambling with memories I was already toying around with for a chapter I was working on on the background, because betting experiences is just like so dystopian. I love it. It's like what are you betting?
Speaker 2:my first kiss with my wife so I mean that's, that's kind of where I was going from, but I do. I really like the other directions that you've taken it, because it's it is very it's really funny is when I first read it, though.
Speaker 1:I saw the word flavor microchips. I'm like that sounds so dumb worded like that. And then I had to, like my brain, be like not literally in this context, but maybe literally, Maybely poker chips. You literally put the file of your favorite food in it.
Speaker 2:Well, yeah, I mean the details would need to be ironed out and the weird dystopian sci-fi technology of Toriko never really gets flushed out.
Speaker 1:to explain how they get it, but weirdly enough it gets the one-piece Toriyama defense of if you don't flush anything out, you can get away with a lot. It's flushing things out that make you vulnerable.
Speaker 2:Well and again. That's part of the reason I ended up not liking the last third of Toriko, because at the the beginning he has like this intimidating aura that's like an Oni demon, and then it turns out that that's an actual demon that lives in his cells and is this embodiment of his appetite.
Speaker 1:Boo. It's like when Ichigo's like I have Quincy powers and I'm like you already gave him all the powers. He didn't need more powers in this plot arc. He just beat the last big bad who's considered still a threat of this plot arc. He just needs to like I was so irked because he never actually got a fight in full power after the last art because they immediately nerfed him. Like you know, if you just put him back to being as strong as he was, you're good. It's a weird anime trope where they're like we need to make our character always stronger. I'm like, actually you don't. The fights are more interesting when your character is peaked and then they just fight someone else when they're both peaked, like kakashi versus obito was just sick yeah, that's true.
Speaker 2:Uh, but yes to the, the matter at hand, indeed the the. The next story idea that did not get an emoji response was number 8, which I mean the only one that you really actually responded to directly was the 8A, because 8 is a story arc that begins with A and ends with E.
Speaker 1:So this one definitely required further explanation. So one thing I'm toying around with is I have my 22 major arcana chapters and I contemplated reading this, inserting four minor arcana chapters hearts, staffs, clubs and hearts that are all like specifically connected, specifically connected.
Speaker 2:So if it was literally a four-part story, I'd put it like chapter 4, 8, 12, 16 or something. Okay, so let's read the first, the A prompt.
Speaker 1:Asteroid damages the cryogenic chambers permanently, killing the human host of a puppet. Their best friend decides to join the so-called Naturals, a group who plan to survive the journey by using clone bodies. So if we loop back to my pitch I sent you in my prologue, it's like the first generation puppets, where you put a human body in a robot, a human brain in a robot body.
Speaker 1:The second ones are just 100% robot. You Wi-Fi them. The third ones are you clone your brain and then you synchronize that one with the body in the pod, so it's like the third generation puppets are actually a clone of you that you Wi-Fi connect with. And then the fourth one was the combination of all of those ideas where, like sorry, the third one is just a straight up clone and you just go to sleep and they just one time copy your brain into the clone, but those become their own people.
Speaker 1:And then the fourth one is a combination of having the clone body and the regular body synced up so the naturals, as it were, are actually just third generation puppets, where they just straight up clone people, download their memories into them and use the clone body. So that was already a thing yeah, okay that I was planning to introduce from the beginning to show the evolution of these puppets on the journey. The fact you called them naturals, which immediately brought together the Gundam-Seed parallel, which is ironic because they were clones.
Speaker 2:Well, but see then part B of the story. I specifically worded it to be we follow the coordinator.
Speaker 1:I know my eyes glazed over. I need to get around to seeing the Gundam Seed Freedom movie Anywho.
Speaker 2:The coordinator of a plan to destroy the Naturals after its discovery. They don't use clones, but instead override the consciousness of their children.
Speaker 1:So my follow-up for number B was read my second story, because that was the plot of my second story was a person literally made a clone of themselves to take over for them, and then I was going to reveal later that they were going to in a different story that no, seriously, they are just going to download their brains in these clone bodies. That's what a third generation puppet is.
Speaker 2:And then we get to mushrooms the mycelium network is one of my favorites. It has a soft spot in my heart because the largest organism on earth is an enormous mycelium network and I really, really do wonder and think actually that it may have enough neurons that we could actually communicate with it.
Speaker 1:One of the premises in Star Trek Discovery was they had this mycelium network drive that used a subspace mushroom network to travel from place to place instantly and it was faster than warp. And the idea that there's a giant mycelium network comes up in D&D. A lot comes up in things. A lot it's fun. Part of me was tinkering around with the idea that what if, for such a long journey through space, instead of using copper wiring where we need to find more copper, we literally like, have specially engineered mycelium to work as wiring on the ship and then that can go out of control? It could be problems because it's like okay, but I'm like. So I'm trying to decide if I want the network to be sentient or if I want it to be instinctual and it causes problems, or if I want someone to connect to it and that causes the problems. I was trying to figure out how sentient the network of mushrooms is and how much I want to play with the mushroom idea. Because it's not a no much I want to play with the mushroom idea.
Speaker 2:Because it's not a no. The actual prompt that I wrote is a few naturals survive when they find a mycelium network that purifies the air and launch a counterattack when they accidentally kill the botanist. As clarification, the botanist is the mycelium network's only friend.
Speaker 1:the network retaliates, see that's fun, so there's a good chance I use that in some way.
Speaker 1:I just haven't figured out if, like mush, I haven't decided the mycelium network fits the theme enough, or if I'm literally blocking myself because Star Trek did something similar and it's fresh in my memory.
Speaker 1:I honestly don't know. But when it comes to like the idea of the naturals versus the coordinators, it's more like the different generations of puppets and naturals are basically how I was going to design one of the generations of puppets where you just clone a body, put mechanics around it, download your brain into that body and then you don't have to Wi-Fi it so you don't have to deal with solar flares and things, floor flares and things, Because the idea is that this becomes popular. After the radiation incident where a bunch of people had to die is when this plan gets proposed and it causes effectively a civil war of cloning children. To put brains in them is unethical versus yeah, but our regular puppets didn't work and a bunch of people died, and then they come up with the next one later where they're like oh, we clone a person but then sync it with the person in the capsule and that's our perfect puppets.
Speaker 2:So, then, the final prompt of this four-part story arc is the captain must do battle against the sentient mushroom network for the safety of the voyage. So, technically, a battle of AIs.
Speaker 1:What's really funny about that one is the Captain is a funny character. So I've only used the Captain in two out of no. I used him in like three stories and I have the Captain being, like his top hat, slenderman whimsical Victorian vibes he's given himself. So picturing him doing battle is actually really funny and I'd have to save it for so late in the collection where his robot arms just rip things to shreds as he's sipping a cup of tea. I want the Captain to be just an eldritch monster demolishing its foes, because he's done nothing but sip tea and read books for 10,000 years.
Speaker 2:The other interesting thing in my mind is, like I said, mycelium the largest organism in the world on Earth that is is a mycelium network. And if you were to specifically engineer a mycelium network to be able to communicate with it, that's interesting, like there's a interesting.
Speaker 1:I'm not against the mushroom network. I'm just trying to decide if this is where it gets used or if the mushroom network is good enough to get its own book.
Speaker 2:The question is is a bioengineered mycelium network an AI?
Speaker 1:I mean sure, why not?
Speaker 2:I thought it was kind of funny the idea that, because the captain is someone who volunteered to just have their original body die and have them download it as an AI robot to watch the ship for the entire journey- it's kind of the story is vague whether he has a human brain in the body or not, because he doesn't remember. Right, because it's been too long.
Speaker 1:Yeah, he doesn't know Like he makes the quippers, like the hard part was taking my own brain out.
Speaker 2:Okay, and then the last non-emoji response actually gave me a smug feeling of pride, because your response was too good for 3,000 words.
Speaker 1:Yes, number 15.
Speaker 2:That's number 15.
Speaker 1:After hundreds of years, passengers begin to fear they'll never reach their destination. The crew sets their minds at ease by terrifying the outside of the ship. So the idea that you have a spaceship and they never think they're going to reach their destination, so they build a planet around the spaceship, is such a good origin story for a fantasy setting, like if you're like oh, or a sci-fi setting like it's like oh, this planet seems to be alive. And then it's like oh, yeah, that's because they terraformed the outside of a spaceship. So there's these cool underground ship dungeons and these weird robot monsters, because we turned the ship into the planet and then some asshole could just turn the engine back on and kill every.
Speaker 1:Like there's a full novel on that one. Like imagine you're just like a farmer, you dig a well too deep and you find your way into a maintenance hash, into a spaceship. And if you turn farmer, you dig a well too deep and you find your way into a mason and sash, into a spaceship. And if you turn the core of your planet on, that's probably bad. Or you learn that your planet's getting colder because it has a generator at its core that's running out of fuel that heats the core of the planet, like if the core of the Earth was just a spaceship. That's sweet, but like it would be really hard to like because a story like that almost needs slow burn right, like in 3,000 words. It's hard to give.
Speaker 1:The journey of them terraforming the outside of the ship and the payoff of it that's one of those ones are. Like if I had one story in the book split into four parts and I decided to have going with mushrooms to go with. They begin terraforming the outside of it, that would need to be four parts, mostly because the space between them lets you go. Okay, they're starting to build a city on the outside. Okay, here's how it looks after this amount of time. Okay, here's a conflict in it. Okay, now we can no longer land the ship, but we've made it to the planet. What do we do?
Speaker 1:so it's like a B plot for the novel. As a whole it could work, but as a short story I'm like it's the problem a lot of these show and jump mangas have had lately, where when you try and rush through and get to the quote unquote good stuff the pacing gets wrecked right and it wouldn't feel as epic as it needed to be if it just went through, but if it checked in every once in a while it could definitely still work.
Speaker 2:Ah, but so now we've gone through all of the well, all the ones that you responded to that weren't thumbs up. Are there any thumbs up stories that you found particularly interesting?
Speaker 1:There are, but unfortunately, I think this is where we'll wrap up this week's episode.
Speaker 2:Ooh.
Speaker 1:So with that.
Speaker 2:We're on a cliffhanger.
Speaker 1:Absolutely. So we're going to move to our random questions and call it Actually. I'm going to mix it up a bit, so instead of a random question, I'm going to give you a closing question. What question do you have for me about this project?
Speaker 2:You have one question. I feel like if I answer wrong I'm going to get flung into the chasm like the guy on the bridge in Quest for the Holy Grail.
Speaker 1:That is fair, so instead I'm going to find her actual random question. Ooh, this one's pretty topical. If you could remove something that exists in this world forever, what would it be?
Speaker 2:Ooh, just erase something from the world.
Speaker 1:Yeah, just completely erase something. I would love to have this power, by the way, if I could just like, if I cut something with my Zanpakuto and it just ceased to exist. I'm immediately thinking of the villain who just got rid of colors, so the color theme powers wouldn't work, just got rid of blue.
Speaker 2:But I would I mean that reminds me of a manga called Madoka Box.
Speaker 1:Exactly that's what I was referencing.
Speaker 2:Yeah, because he just had the power to make things nothing.
Speaker 1:That was a weird, weird series.
Speaker 2:I enjoyed it, but it was quite weird.
Speaker 1:So I know what I would remove though.
Speaker 2:I would remove hunger.
Speaker 1:You're such a better person than me. Fuck, you just fixed hunger. Oh, that tainted my answer. I'm going to tell you what my answer was and then I'm going to have to adjust it because of what you answered. So I was going to say I'd get rid of the five-day work week and make it a much more reasonable four-day work week Because, ironically, if you just got rid of that day, across the entire world people would have to pay you a living wage, because that's just how wages stabilize. So we could just have three-day weekends. But like, wow, I was thinking way too small. Yeah, like you know what, I could just get rid of Rent, you just get housing. You're right. Disease, death, I was being way too small-brained. Time, let's just get rid of time and have everything. Live forever like death and time.
Speaker 2:Uh, those would be double edged swords for sure. Oh yeah, just get rid of time.
Speaker 1:Then like now presided, I still have the power to keep getting rid of things. I should be fine, but like I was thinking like people who play music on their phones on the bus. Oh, I hate that.
Speaker 2:I was at work the other day and this guy uh, he in and he's just like blaring some music on his little Bluetooth speaker Right, and so then I'm like, hey, I can't hear you over your music. And then he just kind of like stands there for a second, says something I still can't hear you over your music. And so then he turns it down and it turns out he didn't even want to order anything.
Speaker 1:So, like part of me wants to just get like rid of smartphones, even though I use mine a lot, I think it's fundamentally bad that I do such.
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 1:Get rid of social media, Get rid of many political parties Like that's just too much power. But you're like, yeah, I just get rid of hunger, selfish prick political party. It's like that's just too much power. But you're like, yeah, I just get rid of hunger, selfish prick. I'm like, well, yeah, fair Shit. And with that, thank you for submitting your intense random question to Richard and Carl present Team Space and Dragons. You'll be put in a draw for a mug at some point and you can submit your random questions by clicking the link in the podcast descriptions wherever you're enjoying your podcast. Thank you for tuning in Special shout out to our one listener in Athens, because it amuses me.
Speaker 2:Wait, someone's currently listening in Athens.
Speaker 1:I believe so yeah.
Speaker 2:Oh yeah, Thanks for listening to some random people across the globe. We appreciate you.
Speaker 1:Right, like I really hope we're literally they're listening to us blaring on a speaker on a bus. But yes, I don't know. Drink some water, have a lovely day, try not to be hungry. Bye. Yeah, like going over the next 10 suggestions probably would have ran us to the two hour mark.
Speaker 2:Oh yeah.