Katawa Shoujo Forums

It's the end of an era! Thanks for the closure. You're right that art is never completed, only abandoned.

I haven't followed your story for many years, for that I apologise. When I get the time, I'll probably go through and have a read to see how things have changed along the way. I just wanted to say that whilst I haven't been able to follow the story much, I do appreciate how much effort and work you've put into it over the years, and whilst it's a shame that you feel the need to let this project go, I really truly hope that this decision is one that will help you to feel motivated in other aspects of your life.

It's always a shame when a work isn't finished, but please know that your work is valued, and it's been wonderful to see you update on the Renai so consistently.

All the best with your future works, and thank you.

First, I have to define "timeslip device". This is my one sci-fi handwavy thing, but it operates under some very tight constraints. Basically what it does is convert energy into time dilation. While it cannot stop time entirely, it can come close enough for all practical purposes with expansion ratios in the range of 100,000 to 1, or millions to 1. This provides plenty of time for medical transport of even the most grievously wounded. If it's possible to patch them back together at all, timeslip pretty much ensures they won't die on the way. Also, it can work in a manner similar to the intent of cryogenic preservation now -- a way to freeze someone until tech catches up with what killed them. It requires quite a lot of power though, which is why fusion will be common and reliable in my setting.

Somewhere around the early to mid-2030s, Satou Medical is granted a license to produce timeslip devices for use in medical transport vehicles. Neko being Neko, she steals the plans, reverse-engineers them, and has her own R&D looking at other ways to use timeslip tech, waiting for key patents to expire before trying to launch products. It doesn't, however, stop them from developing their own prototypes and deploying them in and around their own facilities, exploiting the more difficult relativistic aspects of the technology in ways the medical devices make a point to avoid for the sake of reliability and safety.

2038: A Skynet-style AI nukes all the sites it deems dangerous, choosing to do so exactly at the end of the 32-bit Unix epoch, simultaneous with launching forks of itself into space and instigating Kessler Syndrome to ensure it isn't chased down. Those that possess timeslip devices experience massive time dilation due to the energy they have to dissipate. There are four such sites, and each one "pops back" at a somewhat different time based on the specifics. When the Nekoville site (for lack of a better term) resumes normal earthly existence, they are the third to do so -- and colonies founded by the previous two have ended up burning out, but some of their infrastructure remains as there has "only" been a gap of a couple hundred years since the last colony collapsed.

Meanwhile, the dominant race on the planet is a synthetic hybrid between primates and reptiles -- basically it's a renamed yuan-ti race from D&D, complete with its various forms (all-humanoid ["pureblood"], top half humanoid and lower half snake or top half snake and lower half humanoid ["malison"], and all-snake ["abomination"]). The most important deviation is that they're merely neutral, not evil, as a whole. They're also in possession of all the tech the prior arrivals brought with them (which is identical to the tech the new colonists possess), so the new arrivals don't even have meaningful information to trade and are actually slightly BEHIND on tech now -- or so it seems, until the AI decides it has been hands-off with Earth long enough (a couple hundred thousand years since it manufactured the snake people to populate the heavily desertified Earth) and wants it back. The sliths (snake people) don't particularly want to give it back, even to their own creator, and nobody knows more about the AI, and the technology it's based on, than these new human colonists. Also, there are sliths alive that still remember humans from the last time around, as they possess the same kind of anti-aging tech the humans do. (It's very similar tech due to a largely shared genome.)

Now I have to decide what form this stage of the story takes, and it's pretty much between "novel" and "visual novel". Thoughts? I'm thinking of writing it as a Ren'Py script and hoping that by the time I finish, I'll come up with some way to produce scratch graphics and/or find someone willing to sketch them.

okay boomer

NuclearStudent wrote: Wed Jan 29, 2020 8:01 am okay boomer

Ah, snowflake! Thank you for providing the least helpful comment ever. I hope you and your parents are proud of what you have accomplished. Would you like a participation trophy?

I've written maybe one or two timeslip/alt-dimension KS shortfics. I think it's hard to make them accessible to the casual reader. To be honest, I think of my own writing as more accessible than yours, which is huge and sustained and complex—but people tell me mine is the same, and in fact have been known to say that they have avoided reading my stuff because there's too much of it, it's intimidating. So if I can offer a suggestion, I'd say that you could take some time to re-read your entire oeuvre and edit with an eye to increasing accessibility. For me, it may be too late...

brythain wrote: Fri Jan 31, 2020 3:50 am I've written maybe one or two timeslip/alt-dimension KS shortfics. I think it's hard to make them accessible to the casual reader. To be honest, I think of my own writing as more accessible than yours, which is huge and sustained and complex—but people tell me mine is the same, and in fact have been known to say that they have avoided reading my stuff because there's too much of it, it's intimidating. So if I can offer a suggestion, I'd say that you could take some time to re-read your entire oeuvre and edit with an eye to increasing accessibility. For me, it may be too late...

Who compares your stuff to this hot mess, brythain?

brythain wrote: Fri Jan 31, 2020 3:50 amSo if I can offer a suggestion, I'd say that you could take some time to re-read your entire oeuvre and edit with an eye to increasing accessibility.

The upcoming story shares some characters and plot elements with the prior, but is sufficiently different that someone could come in cold and hit the ground running. I don't plan to revisit the previous writing, for the same reason I don't revisit certain musical works -- they were shipped to a spec, so to speak, and are now frozen there, for better or for worse. I took style cues from people whose writing works in spite of those elements, rather than because of them.

I don't plan on posting anything here as a serial, just leave notice when I have something coherent worth looking at.

Due to the coincidence that I already had Neko placed in NYC (associate professor of electrical engineering at a private school), I plan to write some first-person takes about life in lockdown and what she's NOT doing now that she was doing before. Don't expect them immediately, there's much too high a chance that what I write won't age well. I'll probably start the actual writing in a week, when we have a better idea what's going on there, but my first idea is a session of D&D where everyone is sitting at a separate table, with a webcam pointed down at the tactical map and a tablet at every table to view it.

Even if not, the school being closed is going to be the reason they cut her loose, rather than any explicit norm-breaking. That's now canon. She did things worthy of getting fired over, and it ended up not mattering because the job itself went away.

I also wanted to note one other plot thread I missed above: after graduation from Yamaku, there's a nasty blow-up between Shizune and Misha. Misha ends up moving to Vancouver and going to school there, and will cross paths with Neko again when they are both living in the Los Angeles area at the same time. Not surprisingly, Misha's profession is translator. (Oddly, so is Iwanako's, although Iwanako studies dead languages. They'll probably bump into each other down the line, but it wouldn't mean much because they barely if ever met previously.) Shizune, meanwhile, is headed south as she was accepted into a top tier school in Tokyo to study Political Science. There she might have an experience (most likely a bad one, due to him being intolerant of disability) with the same Poli Sci professor Daisuke hated. If I can't think of anything better to do with her, she'll probably end up becoming an economist. You have to have money to throw around to be a philanthropist (there's money but it's not HERS yet), so in the meantime she can try to convince other people to use their money in certain, beneficial ways.