Month: November 2024

Read after Episode 15. Here be spoilers.

Gratuitous is one of those words that, in most people’s heads, just translates to “the bad stuff.” I wanted to refer to Fight Bar as gratuitous violence, but that made me consider the actual meaning, and whether you could apply that term to superhero violence in general.

Officially, gratuitous means “with no reason,” as with a gratuity. I suspect that most people think that the word is derivative of gratification. The problem with trying to use the word that way is that all entertainment exists for gratification. Is Bridgerton full of gratuitous drama? Using that definition devolves into tedious arguments around whose taste in film results in behavior harmful to society. I don’t like it, therefore you are morally obligated to also not like it. It’s the American way.

Sticking to the “pointless” definition, in most cases where gratuitous is applied, the sex and violence is the purpose of the film. If you aren’t watching John Wick for the fight scenes, there isn’t a lot to recommend the series. All martial arts films are like that. Any serious contemplation of the term must set aside cases where the expressed purpose of the video is sex and violence.

An obvious case is where a director thinks that “insert violence here” is a viable narrative technique. We see copy-paste fight scenes characterized by ad-hoc environments, unoriginal techniques, choppy cuts, and tight framing. It’s not necessarily purposeless, though. It’s just badly done. Artless.

Maybe a better case is violence that doesn’t relate to the story. You expect a bit of violence in a spy flick or a heist, but slotting a punch-fest into a slice-of-life drama can be jarring. The worst case of this I’ve seen was a French film that included two overweight guys slapping each outer around in slow motion while obviously bouncing off of a plexiglass wall. Interesting to watch, but it did nothing to advance the plot-line.

I think the gold standard for gratuitous is where the film makers throw a brief glimpse of bare breasts into a film to get an R rating, increasing a film’s revenue. It’s common to contort an entire scene around that one opportunity, briefly side-tracking the narrative for a single half-second shot. I can’t say that I don’t enjoy such shots, but they do nothing to advance the story line.

Advancing the story line is the key take-away here. If the story involves overcoming punch-happy goons, then violence isn’t really gratuitous. If gun-wielding enforcers are one of the hazards of our heroes’ jobs, then the violence serves a purpose. If acts of war are a natural part of the backdrop, then they belong in the story.

For the superhero genre, the entire point is to give the writers an opportunity to show off superpowers, and superpowers are generally combat-oriented, or at least conflict-oriented. In that context, is it even possible to have gratuitous violence? I think that such things defy the definition, even if people are in the habit of using the word that way.

This scene was fun to write because it’s the first time the team has run up against a physical opponent that could make them break a sweat. It’s no fun to write a series where the main characters never really seem to get injured. I’ve seen numerous cases where the concept of a bar fight was milked for satirical value, and had fun envisioning an environment where bar fights were a polite expectation.

The Flash was one of my favorite comic books, mostly because it was vaguely scientific. Like all things vaguely scientific, it was inevitable that I find the edges. If you think too hard about it, you realize that someone who could even move double normal speed would be unstoppable in a fist fight. Someone who could move at the speed of sound could throw a rock through a tank.

Also, I never really bought into the idea of a speedster who didn’t have time for things outside of crime fighting. Barry Allen’s issues were cute, but not realistic.

My inspirations for Serpentine include one of Larry Niven’s Gil Hamilton short stories, where the scientist was looking for a way to reduce momentum, but wound up with a way to speed up time. The math doesn’t quite work out right, but it made for a decent mechanism. When she speeds up, her mass decreases, not quite proportionally. She’s still OP, but not so badly that she can’t be around people.

Another thing that speedster fiction does poorly is portraying how a speedster would effect the air. Take the trope where the hero zips back and forth to make it look like there were two people. If someone tried this, they would create a near-vacuum between the two locations. Leaving a room in the blink of an eye would result in a vacuum trail that collapsed with a deafening boom, shattering windows.

Water is around 800x as dense as air. At 250x normal speed, a brisk walk would break the sound barrier. As you approached the sound barrier, air would compress in front of you, making it harder to push against. You wouldn’t quite have the walking underwater experience because the air wouldn’t be able to get out of your way fast enough. I always wondered at what point the air resistance would exceed a person’s shoes’ grip on the ground. It would be natural to reach your hand forward, knifing through the air to push the air out of the way. At some point it would be indistinguishable from swimming.

Dealing with electromagnetic radiation was a fun math problem. If you sped up your frame of reference, how would it effect light? Certainly your eyes would receive proportionally less light. How would light behave if it had the same wavelength, but lower frequency? That one stumped me, so I decided that wavelength was a function of frequency, and the frequency was preserved, adjusting for time skew. When she got faster, the corresponding frequencies of light decreased.

This had a few surprising effects. Our vision only covers a single doubling of wavelength. Compare this to sound, for which we can perceive twelve or thirteen doublings. Just outside of the optical range, normal air is increasingly opaque. I interpret this like wandering around in a fog. At the fun extreme, the limit of Serpentine’s ability, normal light interacts with her like radio waves, passing through her.

Something I had to basically ignore was body heat. Really, this convinced me that I couldn’t be 100% physics based, even with my exception. A human body gives off about 350 btu. At a measly 20x normal speed, a body gives off as much radiation as your typical home furnace. Even worse, the light is in the part of the ultraviolet spectrum that causes cell damage. I do reference this aspect, but didn’t want people dropping dead from radiation poisoning any time she wandered by, so I limited the emissions to non-blinding levels. That’s where the rainbow flashes come from when she’s popping in and out of slowtime.

A second issue that made 100% accuracy untenable is oxygen. Humans need a shocking fifteen cubic feet of air per minute for normal ventilation. At speed, any room she was in would quickly be depleted of oxygen. This would provide an interesting limitation that I might explore in future fiction, but it’s not what I wanted from Serpentine.

A final influence that I’d like to credit is the movie, Over the Hedge. It was released in the same year as Hoodwinked!, and I particularly appreciated the difference in how they portrayed over-caffeinated squirrels.

Don’t read this until you’ve listened to chapter 9. Here be spoilers.

We’ve been inundated with people talking about AI, arguing about whether or not we can call it artificial general intelligence yet. In 1980, just before the IBM PC was released, a guy named John Searle published Chinese Room Argument. The gist is that you have a guy in a room with a book full of rules, and people pass paper with Chinese writing under the door. He doesn’t speak or read Chinese, but he can look through the rules and figure out which Chinese characters to pass back as a response. Today, this is vaguely analogous to ChatGPT.

Does he understand Chinese? Does the rule book? Is the rule book better categorized as a comprehension? Don’t try to answer this here. It’s a thought experiment, posed entirely for the purpose of bringing up questions for people to discuss.

Some people, when asked what they think about it, will respond, “That’s a stupid idea.” I think that this is a cognitive dissonance reaction, but can’t tell because that kind of person bristles at the thought of self-analysis.

The life-year as a monetary unit is one of those thought experiments. The premise is that you calculate what it costs to keep a human alive for a year, and then peg your monetary unit to that value. This gives you a dollar that is 100% inflation-proof, but the important part is where you realize that you can start thinking of how much things cost in terms of how much life is consumed in order to create them.

The first issue that comes up is “how do you adjust for quality of living between different cities.” We currently have that problem in the US, when remote workers in Hickory, NC take remote jobs posted in Los Angeles. They deal with this in one of two ways. Either they adjust the pay scale for where you’re living (very unpopular), or it pours money into the underprivileged areas, equalizing the cost of living between geographical areas (also unpopular).

It further complicates matters when the underprivileged areas that you’re improving the quality of living for are in India or Mauritius. The idea of raising the quality of life for people in other countries is like poking a hornet’s nest. This is the kind of conversation that you can’t have in polite society because people don’t want to admit why they are opposed to it. It gets even worse when you ask if the same factors apply to Hickory, NC.

I had to think a lot about how a life-year converts to US dollars. I started with a living wage, but that’s adjusted based on how many people you are supporting and the city you’re living in. Given the variation between regions and the reality that each working person supports around 1.65 lives, I decided to run with US$40,000 for the year 2020. That’s a nice, round number that describes roughly what it takes to feed, clothe, house, keep healthy, and transport 1.65 people.

The thing that most appeals to me about the l-y is that, when you start thinking in those terms, it gives perspective to the cost/value of what we pay for things. Converting a life-year to US standards, you have to start with a living wage. A typical new sedan costs one to two life-years and is paid for across five years, creating a .2 life-year per year (LYy) drain on a person’s resources. The median 30 year mortgage generates a .86 LYy drain.

Things get even more entertaining when you talk about big items. The current US federal budget is $6.2 trillion. When numbers get that big, it can be hard to think in those terms, but it we can think about it spending .46 LY per person. The world’s biggest toy, Jeff Bezos’s yacht, reportedly cost only 12,500 LY. Imagine one person working on a boat for twelve thousand years. Noah would be proud, having only lived to 950.

I could go on, but this is a thought experiment. It wouldn’t be a very good thought experiment if I could describe all of the facets in a blog post.

This post is spoiler-light. It doesn’t reveal any plot details, but it does describe the deeper logic behind the Children’s common capabilities. There might be a few “oh, that’s why that happened” points in here.

I can’t help but notice that The Three Gifts sounds like cheesy crap that an amateur writer comes up with. It’s the kind of mumbo-jumbo that gets thrown in to make something sound mysterious. How did that get past basic editorial common sense?

The Gifts hang a lampshade on things that are generally ignored in action films. Communication issues usually just confuse the audience. Action films would suffer if the heroes needed a long healing time between action scenes. Watching someone heal is boring. There are only so many times you want to do a “find the portal” story arc. Really, one was enough for me.

The standard practice is to ask the audience to suspend disbelief, but I don’t like to pretend that these things don’t exist. It takes the fiction an unnecessary step further from reality. Ok, it’s hard to say if telepathic translation services are more realistic than every alien in the universe speaking English, but I’m pretty sure my way is more fun.

Passage

Clempson’s original life story took place in the Everyway RPG, where portals mostly gave the characters access to an infinite variety of settings. This suffered badly in the translation to science fiction. The challenges in the translation of the portals themselves defined a lot of the requirements of the Gift.

The biggest difference is that all of the worlds are full planets, not just isolated magical kingdoms, and the tech level ranges from modern day all the way back to the stone age. I could have dozens of portals on each planet, but that mode tends to smear storytelling across many worlds, and I love me some world building.

Thus, portals wind up being a couple thousand miles apart, and travel between them can be as treacherous as the Lewis and Clark expedition.

The absence of fantasy-world tech-stagnation also means that the portals have to be able to move as civilizations rise and fall. They have to stay close to major population centers, but not too close. Non-Children have no way of sensing the portals, so the Children would have no maps (and no magical bazar to sell those maps) or local rumors to follow.

Given these limitations, it became necessary to let the Children sense them from at least as far as the next portal over. An experienced wielder of Passage can find a portal across an entire continent, even across trackless jungles. After a few centuries, they can even sense a path that avoids the trackless jungle. Eventually they figure out that they can use Passage like GPS, and never get lost again.

The need to move around required me to make the portals sentient, and aware of the planetary empires. They aren’t above hiding when they think the Child should stay in a world. Passage has therefore become a method of communication with those entities.

Vigor

Vigor is the most straightforward of the gifts, but still provides a few surprises. If you watch a lot of action flicks, you’ll notice that the speed of healing is only limited by the audience’s attention span. Broken arms and bullet wounds can be gone in a matter of days.

I took a swag at the healing speed in most action flicks, estimating that most injuries heal in about ten times the normal speed. For me, this is as realistic as guns that never need to be reloaded. Nonetheless, bed rest isn’t very heroic, so I hung a lampshade.

My universe has a hard limit on which abilities can break the laws of thermodynamics, so I decided that Vigor used a Maxwell’s daemon style mechanism. Healing is the end product of a great deal of Brownian motion, so all it takes to speed it up is a ludicrous amount of luck.

Preventing pathogens was tougher. You need something that can differentiate between harmful and beneficial bacteria, for instance, so having a complex intelligence behind the gift became unavoidable. Not necessarily sentience, mind you, but definitely intelligence. The same intelligence differentiates between the alcohol required to get drunk and the alcohol required to blind someone.

The intelligence keeps a snapshot of the Child when they first passed through, and usually works towards keeping the Child in that state, minus any maladies, deformities, or age-related deficiencies. It cures arthritis, will regrow lost organs, and clears up mental degeneration.

The surprises come in when you apply Vigor to beneficial changes. When you work out, you build muscle. That’s a healthy change. I always wondered how Phil in Groundhog Day could learn the piano if his tendons and neurology reset every day. Vigor considers these kinds of changes to be within the range of healthy, but will consider the normal muscular damage sustained during exercise to be something that it needs to repair. This makes muscle building and physical skill acquisition significantly faster for Children.

Tongues

Star Trek’s universal translator and the Babel fish are crude solutions to the language problem. I didn’t want to go that way simply because it ignores a lot of the complexities of linguistics that I find fascinating.

Tongues allows a Child to borrow another person’s understanding of a language. This distinction means that the Child is incapable of mis-translation with the person they are borrowing the language from. The linguistic kernels are directly translated into words that mean exactly what that person thinks they mean. Tamarian metaphors would pose no obstacle.

This doesn’t mean that it ensures grammatical perfection. We’ve all had cases where we hear someone say something, and know what they mean, even though a conscious parsing of the words suggests something different. Listeners who are not the borrowee will have variable results.

To further complicate matters, Tongues guarantees translation into words that mean the right thing, but the Child’s own expectations of language can taint how the words are presented. Tongues does nothing to erase accents, and has limited benefit for providing instruction on how to pronounce difficult sounds. Every Child needs to learn how to click and cluck.

There are a couple of unexpected implications for this. The first is that Tongues has to work for any language. It’s basically a telepathic code-cracker for human information exchange. It doesn’t even require the language to be a spoken one; it just requires that the person doing the communication be within range, and that they are intending to communicate. It can’t translate code words, but something like Morse code is a snap. Given a little exposure, they could translate Bridge bidding signals and Baseball hand signs.

Another side-effect is based on the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. SW suggests that we have a hard time thinking about things that we don’t have words for. If you turn that on its head, having an extra language should then improve your ability to turn ideas over in your head because you have more avenues. This linguistic perspective also allows skilled Children to tell when they’re within range of someone whose language understanding they’ve been exposed to.

Why three?

Three is a magical number…holy trinity…tripod…triple redundancy…ick. I could make up a bunch of stuff about the significance of threes but, really, three is the number I needed. Two wouldn’t have been enough, and four would have been too many. Five is right out.

I’ve never been happy with how these capabilities generally get glossed over or taken for granted. I hope I’ve presented a new and thoughtful twist on these Stock Superpowers.