Okay, so I’ve started reading Narbonic, and I’m just wrapping up the arc where Dave is unstuck in time. And I’ve got a question, ’cause I gotta know: This comic and that comic exist in the continuity, right? So does that mean the crapsack future Dave visited is still going to happen?
Hmmm… I wonder…. might that war everyone’s been going on about have something to do with it?
…. have I mentioned that I love it when a myth arc comes together?
Short answer, no. The future he sees while unstuck relies on his “awakening” remaining unchecked until completion, which didn’t happen because of the filled pool. Helen was supposed to be incapacitated by the fall, but since she wasn’t, she was able to halt Dave’s actions.
Is the voting system adapted in some way in a world where somewhere around one in five citizens are incapable of even noticing referendums like this exist?
Likely it either ends up:
A) appearing as normal and being interpreted as a joke, or
B) changing to look like something innocuous, like a proposition to switch the potatoes in the school district lunches from Russet to Texas Gold, or
C) simply doesn’t appear on their ballots at all thanks to their inability to cope with the very idea.
Where are you two getting your numbers for you reality filtered population? We have over the years only met two who were so afflicted. One in five seems high. I think it’d be funny, with so many books and shows where reality filters are the norm and only a special few can see reality for what it is, if in this world reality filters are rarer than auditory-tactile synaesthesia. At any rate, of all the scores of people met, many many “normals”, only two were “mundanes” and the reaction to them seemed to be surprise at their uniqueness.
But notice we are all assuming what “they consider impossible” to mean the skin-horsey impossible stuff (zombies, talking animals, etc.) In actuality maybe many of these blockers see consider zombies perfectly possible. Maybe there are blockers that consider trees impossible. (That’d be funny.) Maybe Tip is a blocker who considers it impossible that the rest of the world doesn’t care about fashion as much as he does. Actually that seems *highly* likely.
There’s a lot of fantasy stories that use this concept of most people (usually a very high number) are blockers who simply can see magic. This is a device to explain to the reader how magic can be all around in our world be no-one notices. I’ve always disliked this device because 1) it’s too cheap and easy, and 2) it makes the characters in the story who are the rare folks who do notice magic unlikable elitist snobs. I always thought it’d be funny if a book used the blocker idea but had the number of blockers be really low. That way the reader would be explained that magic is all around but the reader is just one of the people who don’t notice it. However the reader’s mother, grandfather, dentist, garbage man, accountant, the local football jock, Dick Cheney, and just about every-one on the planet *except* the reader, is aware of the magic.
Well, for that particular trope, 20% is actually quite low; hell, anything below 50% is pretty unusual. In fact, your description reminds me of Jeff’s Mundementia One: it starts with the main character rudely awakened from his Mundanity to find that, among other things, his parents are adventuring archaeologists and his best friend is a giant lemur.
I’m not familiar with Jeff’s Mundementia but it sound like Jeff and I might have similar dissatisfication with the usual blocker trope (it’s trite; it’s easy; and it’s precious) and both want to turn it on it’s head.
A Lee Martininez’ “Monster” had a slight variation in the the typical human is simply magic amnesiatic. We experience magic frequently but we are only capable of remembering it when we are directly in its presence. Which means I might have had to deal with a yeti on the freeway just twenty minutes ago, my live-in girlfriend in the next room could be a leprachaun but for these two minutes as I type on this web site I’ve utterly forgotten and I’m certain that the world is mundane. In fact 90% of the web sites could be about the magic of every day life but at this second I’m on a fictional web site that isn’t mentioning it at this moment. … Well, I’m exagerating. Magic events in the book accounted for a small percentage of events. The average human would have two or three encounters a day; an angel with huge wings in the coffee shop here. A dragon digging up a pothole in front of your house there. And then the human would utterly forget it. Well, maybe that’s exactly the same trope but it seemed slightly different somehow. Less “you saw magic but you’re just too stupid and stubborn to believe it” and more “you saw magic, kind of accepted it but didn’t really think about it as much as you should have, and then forgot it, but it’s not your fault because it’s entirely genetic.”
Before now, nonhuman sapients essentially existed as legal outsiders, like a more extreme version of a Native American tribe or the military. They were US citizens, but not necessarily citizens or residents of a state.
No matter where they were, their crimes always had federal jurisdiction and were then automatically shunted into an administrative court run by the other NHS’s rather than a criminal court, so they also didn’t have the same constitutional protections at trial, similar to the lower expectation of rights for a serviceman under court martial in the UCMJ.
For major crimes, they got sent to the Cave. That’s why H.T. got sent to an abandoned mine in California, rather than getting jailed in Ohio. They shouldn’t necessarily walk out free right now though; they’d most likely now get fair, full, civilian trials in whatever jurisdiction they committed the crime, which for H.T. would be Cuyahoga County, Ohio, or possibly the federal Northern District of Ohio.
Under Ohio law, H.T. would be charged with attempted arson, terrorism, and unlawful use of a hoax weapon of mass destruction. Under federal law, he’d be charged with terrorism and attempted arson, possibly aggravated with a hate crime rider.
Oh, it’s established that they’re citizens? Then why the heck didn’t they petition the court by now? The current makeup is rock-solid when it comes to US v. Wong Kim Ark, and the Fourteenth is pretty explicit about affirming state as well as national citizenship.
So, I’m still not getting it I’m afraid. If they’re citizens under federal jurisdiction, without state affiliation then I’m still not getting how any California law would have an impact. Isn’t that like saying a change in Kansas law would theoretically alter the status of inmates of Leavenworth? For that matter I don’t even see how it changes anything for the Undead population of California, unless they have different standing before the law than transgenics. Unless this is a “legalize pot” situation where the Federal gov’t is just opting not to enforce, and letting the state do what it wants, which seems unlikely in the case of a terrorist.
Article IV, Section 1. “Full faith and credit shall be given in each state to the public acts, records, and judicial proceedings of every other state. And the Congress may by general laws prescribe the manner in which such acts, records, and proceedings shall be proved, and the effect thereof.”
…And I just spent twenty, twenty-five minutes trying to assess the post-passage history of Proposition 39. Assuming that somebody petitions for relief and assuming that the courts rule that anybody has standing, it’d pretty much go to the Supremes like a bullet. Those guys aren’t going anywhere any time soon, in other words.
Somehow I have a feeling that lawyers and judges have a higher rate of weird-blindness than the general population. That might cause problems with deciding the constitutionality of this Proposition or a particular interpretation of it.
I was trying to calculate that, but I don’t know what other traits are a reliable signal of weird-blindness. For all I know it’s randomly rolled for at character gener… um, ‘birth.’ 🙂
So, when does Renard get crushed?
Okay, so I’ve started reading Narbonic, and I’m just wrapping up the arc where Dave is unstuck in time. And I’ve got a question, ’cause I gotta know: This comic and that comic exist in the continuity, right? So does that mean the crapsack future Dave visited is still going to happen?
Hmmm… I wonder…. might that war everyone’s been going on about have something to do with it?
…. have I mentioned that I love it when a myth arc comes together?
The working hypothesis is… wait, you haven’t finished the entire series, it’d be a huge spoiler. Damn.
Okay, I’m finished. Esplain.
*spoilers*
Short answer, no. The future he sees while unstuck relies on his “awakening” remaining unchecked until completion, which didn’t happen because of the filled pool. Helen was supposed to be incapacitated by the fall, but since she wasn’t, she was able to halt Dave’s actions.
That universe is also envisioned in “Li’l Mell”, so the answer is…. maybe.
Is the voting system adapted in some way in a world where somewhere around one in five citizens are incapable of even noticing referendums like this exist?
Likely it either ends up:
A) appearing as normal and being interpreted as a joke, or
B) changing to look like something innocuous, like a proposition to switch the potatoes in the school district lunches from Russet to Texas Gold, or
C) simply doesn’t appear on their ballots at all thanks to their inability to cope with the very idea.
People do have that reality filter, so maybe just people that follow the Narbonic universe realize these things happen 🙂
Where are you two getting your numbers for you reality filtered population? We have over the years only met two who were so afflicted. One in five seems high. I think it’d be funny, with so many books and shows where reality filters are the norm and only a special few can see reality for what it is, if in this world reality filters are rarer than auditory-tactile synaesthesia. At any rate, of all the scores of people met, many many “normals”, only two were “mundanes” and the reaction to them seemed to be surprise at their uniqueness.
In the filename story, Sweetheart said “About twenty percent of humans psychologically block things they consider impossible.”
Well, that explains that.
But notice we are all assuming what “they consider impossible” to mean the skin-horsey impossible stuff (zombies, talking animals, etc.) In actuality maybe many of these blockers see consider zombies perfectly possible. Maybe there are blockers that consider trees impossible. (That’d be funny.) Maybe Tip is a blocker who considers it impossible that the rest of the world doesn’t care about fashion as much as he does. Actually that seems *highly* likely.
There’s a lot of fantasy stories that use this concept of most people (usually a very high number) are blockers who simply can see magic. This is a device to explain to the reader how magic can be all around in our world be no-one notices. I’ve always disliked this device because 1) it’s too cheap and easy, and 2) it makes the characters in the story who are the rare folks who do notice magic unlikable elitist snobs. I always thought it’d be funny if a book used the blocker idea but had the number of blockers be really low. That way the reader would be explained that magic is all around but the reader is just one of the people who don’t notice it. However the reader’s mother, grandfather, dentist, garbage man, accountant, the local football jock, Dick Cheney, and just about every-one on the planet *except* the reader, is aware of the magic.
Well, for that particular trope, 20% is actually quite low; hell, anything below 50% is pretty unusual. In fact, your description reminds me of Jeff’s Mundementia One: it starts with the main character rudely awakened from his Mundanity to find that, among other things, his parents are adventuring archaeologists and his best friend is a giant lemur.
I’m not familiar with Jeff’s Mundementia but it sound like Jeff and I might have similar dissatisfication with the usual blocker trope (it’s trite; it’s easy; and it’s precious) and both want to turn it on it’s head.
A Lee Martininez’ “Monster” had a slight variation in the the typical human is simply magic amnesiatic. We experience magic frequently but we are only capable of remembering it when we are directly in its presence. Which means I might have had to deal with a yeti on the freeway just twenty minutes ago, my live-in girlfriend in the next room could be a leprachaun but for these two minutes as I type on this web site I’ve utterly forgotten and I’m certain that the world is mundane. In fact 90% of the web sites could be about the magic of every day life but at this second I’m on a fictional web site that isn’t mentioning it at this moment. … Well, I’m exagerating. Magic events in the book accounted for a small percentage of events. The average human would have two or three encounters a day; an angel with huge wings in the coffee shop here. A dragon digging up a pothole in front of your house there. And then the human would utterly forget it. Well, maybe that’s exactly the same trope but it seemed slightly different somehow. Less “you saw magic but you’re just too stupid and stubborn to believe it” and more “you saw magic, kind of accepted it but didn’t really think about it as much as you should have, and then forgot it, but it’s not your fault because it’s entirely genetic.”
I thought their crime and imprisonment were in Ohio – how does California law matter? (Or am I misremembering?)
Before now, nonhuman sapients essentially existed as legal outsiders, like a more extreme version of a Native American tribe or the military. They were US citizens, but not necessarily citizens or residents of a state.
No matter where they were, their crimes always had federal jurisdiction and were then automatically shunted into an administrative court run by the other NHS’s rather than a criminal court, so they also didn’t have the same constitutional protections at trial, similar to the lower expectation of rights for a serviceman under court martial in the UCMJ.
For major crimes, they got sent to the Cave. That’s why H.T. got sent to an abandoned mine in California, rather than getting jailed in Ohio. They shouldn’t necessarily walk out free right now though; they’d most likely now get fair, full, civilian trials in whatever jurisdiction they committed the crime, which for H.T. would be Cuyahoga County, Ohio, or possibly the federal Northern District of Ohio.
Under Ohio law, H.T. would be charged with attempted arson, terrorism, and unlawful use of a hoax weapon of mass destruction. Under federal law, he’d be charged with terrorism and attempted arson, possibly aggravated with a hate crime rider.
Oh, it’s established that they’re citizens? Then why the heck didn’t they petition the court by now? The current makeup is rock-solid when it comes to US v. Wong Kim Ark, and the Fourteenth is pretty explicit about affirming state as well as national citizenship.
Can we get the hippo thing to crush all lawyers first?
…I don’t have time this morning; but Act IV, Scene II of Henry VI (Part 2) is remarkably adaptable to this situation.
http://shakespeare.mit.edu/2henryvi/2henryvi.4.2.html
If you removed the current crop of lawyers, new ones would just crop up.
Crushing all the lawyers would mean crushing Mell, and I’m pretty sure no hippo-based life form currently in existence is capable of that.
So, I’m still not getting it I’m afraid. If they’re citizens under federal jurisdiction, without state affiliation then I’m still not getting how any California law would have an impact. Isn’t that like saying a change in Kansas law would theoretically alter the status of inmates of Leavenworth? For that matter I don’t even see how it changes anything for the Undead population of California, unless they have different standing before the law than transgenics. Unless this is a “legalize pot” situation where the Federal gov’t is just opting not to enforce, and letting the state do what it wants, which seems unlikely in the case of a terrorist.
Nothing more to get. I’m saying H.T. is wrong about what will happen to them.
Article IV, Section 1. “Full faith and credit shall be given in each state to the public acts, records, and judicial proceedings of every other state. And the Congress may by general laws prescribe the manner in which such acts, records, and proceedings shall be proved, and the effect thereof.”
…And I just spent twenty, twenty-five minutes trying to assess the post-passage history of Proposition 39. Assuming that somebody petitions for relief and assuming that the courts rule that anybody has standing, it’d pretty much go to the Supremes like a bullet. Those guys aren’t going anywhere any time soon, in other words.
Somehow I have a feeling that lawyers and judges have a higher rate of weird-blindness than the general population. That might cause problems with deciding the constitutionality of this Proposition or a particular interpretation of it.
I was trying to calculate that, but I don’t know what other traits are a reliable signal of weird-blindness. For all I know it’s randomly rolled for at character gener… um, ‘birth.’ 🙂
I suspect a lack of a sense of humor is indicative.
If you think that’s the case you haven’t met many lawyers.
Oh crumbs, I gave H.T. my address during the book 3 Kickstarter. Now I guess he’s gonna want to crash on my couch or something. What a bother.
http://patmyers.tumblr.com/post/31160956953/this-is-basically-the-greatest-thing-ever-from
I am now kicking myself for not upgrading my own pledge level.
I salute the sacrifices Pat will eventually be making in order to bring us this awesome Q&A now.