Up later than I should; just finished reading floornight

nonevahed:

nonevahed:

that was very, very impressive.

A lot of it was very hard to follow, but things fit together in the end.  Further thoughts when I’m not typing on a laggy ipad.

Okay, later.

It was awesome.  The characters were strange, but very interesting and sympathetic.  The interplay between them was fun, and the whole science and philosophy of the soul thing was an intriguing mystery that kept the whole thing going.  [spoiler snipped]

Thanks!  Somehow I missed this second post even though it was tagged “floornight,” so I didn’t see your questions until now.  Answers under cut:

Keep reading

(via nonevahed)

skwrk:

i read all of nostalgebraist‘s “floornight” and the completed section of “the northern caves” today. overall i really liked both of them. 

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while reading floornight, i kept getting the distinct impression of “whoever wrote this must be an absolute genius”. which is interesting, because after i read it i saw that nb wrote about this work that he considers it low-quality and that it was written “just for fun without thought”. so either nb is extremely self-effacing, or some sort of technique he’s using is an easy way to impress me.

another thing about floornight is that it very vividly feels like whoever wrote it has had a lot of experience with psychedelics, and i do know that this is in fact true. maybe if you do enough psychedelics, it becomes a lot easier to make works of art that appear to be crafted by a genius. the fact that nb described this work as “inspired by the muses” is super super interesting to me given my established philosophy/religion.

i said in my review of hpmor that one of my favorite qualities, especially in written fiction, is what i call “novelty”, which is sort of just having a ton of surprising structures that can’t be reduced to cliche. like, a lot of popular, even acclaimed stories can be reduced to a collection of existing tropes, and are simply packaged in a way that is appealing for whatever reason. (one random recent strong example: the movie “boyhood”). but in floornight, and also hpmor, you get this nonstop assault of situations which seem like they are totally new combinations in plot-space that had yet to be discovered. floornight kind of even succeeds in being novel in a fractal-like structure, which is imho Pretty Much The Greatest Thing Ever and leads to a wonderful sensation which makes me feel like i’m on lsd. by this i mean that the overall plot is novel, the structure of each scene is novel, each sentence is in its own way novel, the metaphors and descriptions are novel. or at least that’s how it felt to me. (this is a hard thing to explain.)

another aspect of it i really liked is that the story feels kind of like a puzzle - you can imagine that the whole chaos is derived from a somewhat logical set of axoims, but they are never actually laid out in front of you. as far as i can tell, this actually is the case? in general i am a big picture guy who reads fast with not too much regard to comprehension, so i’m not completely sure of everything that was going on. i got to the end and i feel like i got about 50% of it all, which i am pretty satisfied with. i can imagine that going back and re-reading it for 100% would be fun and rewarding, but i probably won’t do that because opportunity costs.

i always wished “stories that are also puzzles” was more of a thing. i imagine one of the reasons it’s not is because it’s very hard to pull off. the story “fine structure” on qntm.org did it, but the author overestimated his audience and ended up having to explain everything in a Q&A at the end. the movie “primer” is a similar situation. homestuck tries to do this, but hussie is pretty bad at getting the reader to know even the stuff he’s meant to know, so it doesn’t really work. the movie “mulholland drive” is kind of like this, but no one can agree on the answer. floornight might be the best executed version of this i’ve seen in a while. i was confused the whole time, but somehow it was an enjoyable confusion, not a frustrating one, and i always felt like if i needed to i could slow down and i would get everything.

overall i’m really impressed with how many of my buttons nostalgebraist was able to push. psychedelica, puzzles, henry darger, multiple levels of reality, stories where everything is backed by a logical structure, apocalyptica, mundane people ascending to godhood. i wonder if there is a common element that makes a certain type of person appreciate all these? (maybe it’s just “homestuck”) 

the last bit of praise i want to give is that i thought (avoiding spoilers here) the tone of the ending was an absolutely hilarious and ingenious way to wrap everything up, and i’m surprised i’ve never really seen a story do that before.

my only real criticism is that it felt like some of the weird stuff was kind of shoehorned in there and not really fully integrated with the story as well as it could have been, like the tribe of children, the transgender bit, and the self-referential bit. i enjoyed these and liked that these existed, but they also felt kind of crazy-for-the-sake-of-crazy and unnecessary. 

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as far as the northern caves: i really enjoyed what’s there so far, probably even more than floornight. not too much to comment on yet. 

one thing i will say is that comparing the completely inexplicable, incomprehensible story-within-a-story northern caves to finnegans wake is sort of doing an injustice to finnegans wake in my eyes, a document whose existence is really not that hard to justify, and of a nature that i encourage. but whatever.

(personally it all makes me think of louis wain) 

also, i get the feeling that it’s headed into some sort of supernatural / psychological horror territory. i kind of would be pleasantly surprised if nostalgebraist avoided this approach and instead continued the metafiction as a more reality-based exegesis, just sort of exploring the question of why people sometimes make weird things. but i’m probably alone in that.

This is both very flattering and very interesting.  Thanks for writing it!

About Floornight being “low-quality”: a strange thing happened where the story ended up being much better, in my estimation, than it should have been given the amount of effort I put into it.  There were many cases, say, where I ended up with plot elements I liked without ever remembering having invented them, or realized that a plotting problem had been solved without me ever putting in any effort to solve it.

Part of this is no doubt that I set up the story deliberately to avoid all of what I consider my weaknesses.  For instance, I suck at real-world background research, so I tried to create a setting, plot and characters that would necessitate as little of that as possible.  (The reason that certain characters only have last initials, rather than full last names, is literally that I didn’t want to commit to the background details a last name would connote.)

Another, possibly more important aspect is that I ended up having what I think is the same experience Andrew Hussie had with Homestuck, which is that if you write serially and continually add new elements just because you feel like it, the whole package will end up having lots of desirable properties that you didn’t intend to put there.  For instance, you can reach a level of complicatedness such that you essentially can do no wrong: things that merely make sense appear “brilliant” because they fit into such a complicated structure, while things that don’t make sense get the benefit of the doubt, because one feels there’s probably some weird technicality somewhere that explains them.  Creating a setting in which what the Homestuck fandom calls “weird plot shit” is the norm allows you to get a lot of bang for your buck, as a writer.  (The Northern Caves is much harder to write than Floornight, in part because it is so much smaller of a story, and so I feel if I make mistakes people will actually notice them and feel dissatisfied.)

I’m sure there are older examples of this phenomenon, although I’m not sure what they are, and everyone in my social circle seems to default to Homestuck when talking about this.  (It seems like a lot of examples of serial, complicated, partially made-up-on-the-fly stories are often cited as failures, to a much greater degree than Homestuck is considered a failure.  The TV show Lost is one obvious example.)

more-whales:

nostalgebraist:

more-whales:

so now I’ve watched neon genesis evangelion and I can say pretty confidently it’s not for me even though it kind of seems like it’s supposed to be

but if anyone wants to explain to me how it worked for them I’m interested

or just point me to interesting writing about it

I could go on for a really long time about this (I think?) but here’s the short version

It worked and still works for me because I first watched it when I was 12 years old

Less flippantly, it was my first exposure to a whole lot of themes and stylistic elements which I still like as an adult: things like “science fiction where technology connects a character’s mental state to physical effects,” or “apocalyptic fiction,” or “fiction with sudden tone changes,” or “fiction with a sense of inexorable, building dread (2nd half of series),” or “the concept of dissolving the boundaries between human minds,” or “imagery that is both grotesque and awe-inspiring used to give events a Book of Revelation-like atmosphere (in End of Eva),” or “fiction in which a seemingly ordinary protagonist is enmeshed in strange and intricate schemes that were in fact already in motion from his birth onward,” or “fiction that depicts people involved in intense ‘world-saving’ endeavours not as endlessly gung-ho heroes but instead as increasingly broken and traumatized by their burdens,” and the list goes on and on

The thing about Eva is that it is not necessarily very good at any of these things individually.  It is a poorly executed show in a number of ways, from the filler episodes early on to the fact that they literally ran out of money when making the last few episodes.  All of the things I mentioned earlier have been executed more subtly and more successfully by other works.  But – I saw it when I was 12, and all that stuff was there together, and very little of it was stuff I’d ever seen before.

Thus, I imprinted on it, and its elements stick in my head as the prototypical examples of their categories, no matter what else I’ve seen the meantime.  In my mind it is fixed as the “classic” apocalyptic SF story, the “classic” psychological SF story, the “classic” body horror story, and so on.

Many years later, for instance, as a (putative) adult, I wrote a story called Floornight, which has many of the elements I described above, and takes cues from Evangelion about how to do them, to the extent that at many points it’s close to being Eva fanfic with serial numbers filed off.  Did I do think because Eva is a great work I want to make “homages” to?  No, I did it because I imprinted on it and now my mind thinks this is just how this kind of story is supposed to look.

It’s a bit like Star Wars.  (Sidenote: somewhat startlingly, Eva is so popular in Japan that its popularity can be likened to that of Star Wars in the west, or so I’ve heard.)  Is Star Wars really such a great movie?  Well, at its time, it was innovative, but numerous movies in the genre it arguably created (cheerful pulp space opera heavy on special effects) have been made, many of which are probably strictly “better” than it is.  But Star Wars tends to be the one we imprint on: every other space opera feels in some sense like it is “a Star Wars,” rather than Star Wars being simply an instance of space opera.  Likewise, even if Evangelion isn’t the best of its type, it’s the one that feels like the Platonic form everything else is imitating.

That makes sense, thanks. Star Wars is also not for me, as it turns out, I think more or less also because I didn’t end up watching any until I’d already read a lot of space opera. I had this happen to me for a lot of culture, honestly, since for a bunch of reasons I had no sense of what works were popular or considered important until at least late high school and encountered those works at rates probably worse than chance in many areas.

And for what it’s worth, I enjoyed Floornight! But even now I have trouble seeing particularly strong parallels – which is probably a combination of my failing to get at least one of Eva and Floornight, and Eva just not being my Platonic form for anything. (And I do think there were things that I just didn’t get about Eva. Like, I couldn’t really get a handle on any of the characters, and all the analysis of their personalities and motivations and experiences that I’m reading now feels like it’s coming from somewhere I just don’t have access to.)

Most of the parallels are just in the basic setup (female pilot uses her mind to fight aliens, she works for a shadowy paramilitary organization based in a big geometric shape where spooky stuff is going on behind the scenes).

Have you watched End of Evangelion?  There are some parallels to that in certain bits, and also if you haven’t seen it, it’s worth it – it’ll only take 87 minutes of your life, it’ll help illuminate Eva-the-cultural-phenomenon (contains many of the most famous images etc.), and is also just one of those classic “what the fuck did I just watch” trippy horror experiences that everyone should have at least once.

(via more-whales)

more-whales:

so now I’ve watched neon genesis evangelion and I can say pretty confidently it’s not for me even though it kind of seems like it’s supposed to be

but if anyone wants to explain to me how it worked for them I’m interested

or just point me to interesting writing about it

I could go on for a really long time about this (I think?) but here’s the short version

It worked and still works for me because I first watched it when I was 12 years old

Less flippantly, it was my first exposure to a whole lot of themes and stylistic elements which I still like as an adult: things like “science fiction where technology connects a character’s mental state to physical effects,” or “apocalyptic fiction,” or “fiction with sudden tone changes,” or “fiction with a sense of inexorable, building dread (2nd half of series),” or “the concept of dissolving the boundaries between human minds,” or “imagery that is both grotesque and awe-inspiring used to give events a Book of Revelation-like atmosphere (in End of Eva),” or “fiction in which a seemingly ordinary protagonist is enmeshed in strange and intricate schemes that were in fact already in motion from his birth onward,” or “fiction that depicts people involved in intense ‘world-saving’ endeavours not as endlessly gung-ho heroes but instead as increasingly broken and traumatized by their burdens,” and the list goes on and on

The thing about Eva is that it is not necessarily very good at any of these things individually.  It is a poorly executed show in a number of ways, from the filler episodes early on to the fact that they literally ran out of money when making the last few episodes.  All of the things I mentioned earlier have been executed more subtly and more successfully by other works.  But – I saw it when I was 12, and all that stuff was there together, and very little of it was stuff I’d ever seen before.

Thus, I imprinted on it, and its elements stick in my head as the prototypical examples of their categories, no matter what else I’ve seen the meantime.  In my mind it is fixed as the “classic” apocalyptic SF story, the “classic” psychological SF story, the “classic” body horror story, and so on.

Many years later, for instance, as a (putative) adult, I wrote a story called Floornight, which has many of the elements I described above, and takes cues from Evangelion about how to do them, to the extent that at many points it’s close to being Eva fanfic with serial numbers filed off.  Did I do think because Eva is a great work I want to make “homages” to?  No, I did it because I imprinted on it and now my mind thinks this is just how this kind of story is supposed to look.

It’s a bit like Star Wars.  (Sidenote: somewhat startlingly, Eva is so popular in Japan that its popularity can be likened to that of Star Wars in the west, or so I’ve heard.)  Is Star Wars really such a great movie?  Well, at its time, it was innovative, but numerous movies in the genre it arguably created (cheerful pulp space opera heavy on special effects) have been made, many of which are probably strictly “better” than it is.  But Star Wars tends to be the one we imprint on: every other space opera feels in some sense like it is “a Star Wars,” rather than Star Wars being simply an instance of space opera.  Likewise, even if Evangelion isn’t the best of its type, it’s the one that feels like the Platonic form everything else is imitating.

Occasionally I Google “floornight” (in quotes) to see if anyone has posted anything about Floornight that I don’t know about.  The results that aren’t about the story tend to be results where the phrase “floor night” has been accidentally combined into one word.  A very large proportion of these results are pages featuring the phrase:

“Platforms shoes crushing and dancing on cookies in the disco floornight vision”

I have not yet had the courage to click on one of these links and find out what this means.  Perhaps it is better left a mystery.

Also: while The Northern Caves is obsessive, focusing on Salby and his eccentricities and a few characters’ relationships to those things, Floornight is expansive.  I just threw every fun idea I could think of in there.  There is probably something for everyone in Floornight, even if not everything in there will appeal to every particular person.

There are submarines.  There is tragic romance.  There is a gay, probably autistic, prog rock-loving theoretical scientist named “Ratio Tile” and there are chapters about his highly technical disagreements with his colleagues.  There are multiple universes.  There are invented social groups with their own mythologies and oral traditions.  There are creepy mysterious aliens who present themselves to humans in the form of cute bugs, and speak in lower case with lots of [brackets].  There are attempts to depict in prose the experience of people living in a futuristic transhuman society.  There are Less Wrong-esque ethical debates.  There are references to everything from Ada or Ardor to Jonathan Coulton.  And those are just some of things I can tell you without spoiling too much.

I had so much fun writing Floornight and I hope people can have some fun reading it.

I said this before and this post is completely redundant, but: I feel like I have been sort of a tease by posting a bit of The Northern Caves and then taking so long to continue it.  However, this is just how things go with me: I take a long time between periods of updating.  There were (I think) entire months when I didn’t update Floornight, and yet Floornight is done, finally.

So, if you want more of The Northern Caves and haven’t read Floornight, please consider reading Floornight.  It has many imperfections, and doesn’t have the strong start that TNC has, but I’m still proud of it in a number of ways, and you won’t have to suffer through my horrible writing process because it all happened in the past.  I am really glad and flattered that a number of people have gotten excited about TNC, but I do want people to be aware that you can read stuff I wrote without suffering through serial update hell.