Greetings, afraid I have another post without an update. I have a little tweaking to do before I’m comfortable putting A&I on CoGDemos. Things are probably working, but there are a couple of pieces of content I want done before I upload A&I again. So sadly at the moment I can’t even tell you to check it out. The plan is definitely to have the first chapter or so available again soon. I should know better than to expect myself to be productive around the New Year, what work I have gotten done lately has been on Ace of Spies.
But no update, doesn’t mean I have nothing to say. Here’s a brief section on the fourth of the Elysian crises. The surprising appearance of intelligent flora:
On Ambulatory Trees
Intelligent trees.
The phrase wasn’t exactly on anyone’s Elysian crises bingo card, partly because in billions of years humanity hadn’t met any intelligent plant life… and partly because well the trees that appeared to be intelligent were descended from terrestrial trees variants of which had been around the Beagle since the ship was launched.
Intelligent alien flora was one thing. But what this appeared to be was intelligent cedar trees and it was just weird.
There was a lot of science left to be done. This was one of those times everyone wished that the Beagle still had access to the old Nomad database. There had been plenty of writing about other ways intelligent life could’ve evolved, but most of that had been theorizing about animal life. Intelligent trees was quite literally a head scratcher. Who knew what the trees would want, if they were intelligent there couldn’t be any real communication with them until they had language, until then the immediate move was just to not bother them and allow them to develop in a relatively normal fashion.
Not exactly exciting, but it would indisputably impact the plans for developing Elysia.
Thanks for reading, hope all of you are well. Be back with an actual update when I have one.
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Greetings, no demo up on CoGDemos yet,
I’ve been slightly distracted by news and general levels of chaos. When reality gets a little chaotic it can be somewhat inconvenient for me to get into the idealistic frame of mind to get thinking about the Beagle and humanity existing for untold eons.
So I’m going to start a brief section on characters that began as name drops but have become steadily more interesting to me…
Meet Zweli Henriquez
Henriquez is a character I created as someone your character could play curling with and potentially have a single romantic episode with. It wasn’t supposed to be a big deal.
He was supposed to be highly motivated and a huge fan of curling and that was sort of supposed to be it.
Then I gave his character a PhD in psychology and suddenly he became very important. The story in a lot of ways is about people struggling with their position in society changing greatly and then with the ramifications of those effects on their souls and personalities. Suddenly someone with a keen understanding of the human mind becomes a very important character. About five different times I’ve found myself expanding Zweli’s role until he’s started getting name dropped along with the other characters that are more famous within the universe. (I make no guarantees Zweli’s observations are psychologically sound, I took a bunch of psych classes in undergrad, but that doesn’t mean I’m close to being qualified to diagnose anything.)
Thanks for reading, be back in June. Hope I have a real update for that one.
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So, have uploaded to COGdemos… so A&I is back online. Hopefully. I suspect I’ve messed things up in the process, but that’s a problem for me to fix.
I should’ve learned by now not to expect to actually get anything done on the A&I front during the French Open, major tennis tournaments have a way of diverting my attention away from A&I and to Ace of Spies.
In the spirit of my last update allow me to introduce another seemingly minor character:
Meet Tondeya Lazzeri
Lazzeri’s role in the story began as your character’s rotation mate aboard the Labrador’s sister ship. In other words she was part of B shift on the Great Dane and in missions where the Labrador has to interact with the Dane she was worth mentioning, but it quickly became apparent to me that she would grow into someone your character could trust and that’s how she wound up on the Unstable Meteorological Subcommittee and playing a significant role in a mid-game crisis.
An accomplished former chief engineer Lazzeri is someone that comes from outside of the Great Families of the Beagle, this gives her a perspective different from that of your character of Mercedes Skorupski, but as with nearly every character what gives Lazzeri a unique perspective isn’t her family heritage, but the era in the Beagle timeline that she comes from.
Lazzeri is from one of humanity’s more exploratory periods which makes her someone with more history aboard space vessels than almost anyone else aboard the Beagle. It means that compared to some of her colleagues she does have a far more optimistic view of the future.
As ever thanks for reading, be back in August hopefully I’ll have cleaned up my code by then.
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Hey, I’ll just be honest. I lost track of time on AoS and barely got anything done on A&I the last two months.
One of the things I wanted to talk about with my vision is that the main visionaries in A&I come from places you don’t normally see visionaries in sci-fi. Doc Tonde is written as a native of Burkina Faso, whose capital I have to check for spelling nearly every single time I use it. Leo Gamarra, the first chief engineer is Uruguayan, I consciously try to mix up first and last names from cultures you don’t see coexisting too often like Mamadou Aoki, for every name where the first and last name go together like Johan Vogelsong, I try to have one where they don’t seem to go together like Fatima Yanchev.
The section below is a short discussion of the difference between cities that were built up organically on Earth and those founded on the Beagle.
The Doc’s Home
You had heard of Ouagadougou the same way just about everyone on the Beagle had. It was the Doc’s hometown or home city judging from the sprawling skyline, but it was always glossed over with a ‘and then the Doc went to Cambridge’. Dispensed with in the first chapter or two of a biography and rarely mentioned again. The fact that the Doc came from a very unimportant corner of Earth had always been taught and was considered very important. Actual information about her country or city of origin, that stuff didn’t come up.
Virtual Ouagadougou looked nothing like any city you had ever seen while you were alive. In other words it was a city built before space travel. While the cities on the Beagle had diversified over the ages they still had the same bedrock, stout, angular buildings where you could visibly see the presence of a fabricator at work. More than that, cities on the Beagle were built to plan, even cities approved for development later in the Beagle’s time needed approval and planning documents.
Every planned city on the Beagle featured several commonalities.
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A central square. (The specifics changed, sometimes there was a park, sometimes the city hall, sometimes a market)
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All had access to the Beagle’s extensive mass transit system. (Often from a station near the central square.)
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Early in the Beagle every city had an outdoor forum where the local city officials met and took questions from constituents. (A few assassinations prompted a rethink on the importance of it being outdoor)
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Emergency services, typically located near the square.
In essence they were all organized.
Thanks everyone for the kind words, will try to be more on task next time.
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Hi again, still not much in the way of an update, hope to have a legit update by the end of the year.
I’ve been writing, but not always on task with either this or A&I. I try to keep myself optimistic when I’m writing A&I, it’s meant to be a optimistic vision of humanity’s future… you know despite the whole extinction of humanity thing. The idea that something endures has a certain appeal, but this isn’t always an optimistic time.
I have a sister that works doing climate science for NASA, the whole family has been sort of worried about her getting fired all year, there’s an in-law that used to work for the CDC, she did communications for them, but still she took a buyout and that was probably a good decision.
I remain optimistic that we are a resilient people and our best days are ahead of us, but it’s been a rough time for accessing my hopeful side.
I always try to add something I haven’t shared before, so here’s a cynical section on direct democracy(which I personally believe in, I think we’ll see direct democracy tried again someday)
On Direct Democracy
There probably weren’t any true die hard fans of direct democracy left. Everybody either came up through a meritocracy or was elected in what hopefully had been a meritocracy. The problem with the system that just about everybody knew to be superior was a simple one. It wouldn’t work for the current population of the Beagle. Democracy is unavoidable when the people involved consider themselves equally skilled and despite the posthumans and other eminent figures wandering about, nearly all the glorified historical footnote roaming the halls of the Beagle considered themselves to equal to all the other glorified footnotes. Everybody was going to want their input. Despite all the flaws and the failures of direct democracy, and you hadn’t run across a single historical footnote that had dealings with direct democracy and actually liked it, there just was no way around it. So you wrote about the flaws, the errors, the only times in Beagle history that Founding Principle 2a of the Beagle was actually employed allowing legal discrimination as long as the people being discriminated against were okay with it. None of those instances happened during your lifetime, but they were so few and far between that it had only happened 12 times in the incredibly long history of the Beagle.
Be back in December, hopefully with more hope… and an updated build. Hope I’ll have one of those to offer too.
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