Alicornutopia

Threshold, science fiction, < 3,700 words.

Alicorn wrote:Threshold, science fiction, < 3,700 words.

That was good (not sure if guessed early what it was about) :D

Oh wow. That was fantastic and really thought-provoking.

I've been looking for a good way to introduce someone I know to Alicornfic and I think I'm going to use this.

Very good; this is probably one of my favorite of your short stories.

Like a lot of them I read it twice (I read your stories again after I’ve gotten all the worldbuilding stuff revealed throughout). I figured out the first time that they were in a sim about the same time I figured out what Simulation Engineering simulated (especially with the broken machines/no nesting hint), but I didn’t get any of the details until the reveal.

^_^ It's always a delight to read Alicornfic.

I've noticed that it's a recurring problem for you to have to move originalfic discussion threads from Announcements to Storytime. Is there a sensible way to preempt this?

For glowfics there is an announcements thread, and there is a Storytime thread. Making an Announcements thread, pre-locked, only to ever have a single post, and simultaneously making a Storytime thread for the story, seems to be the only other way to achieve this to me, and it doesn’t seem sensible.

If I had come here 12 hours later, so that this thread had already been moved to Storytime by the time I’d seen it, would the Announcements still have been red? Either way it’s probably not ideal to move the thread immediately.

The only other solution I see is to have a Short Story Announcements thread and simultaneously make a discussion thread, which seems slightly preferable to my first suggestion but still not particularly good.

I don't see why your first suggestion isn't sensible.

I think that if the Announcements thread is immediately moved to Storytime as soon as it's posted, then Announcements should still turn red. I might be wrong, though.

I just tested this. Apparently if I make a post in section A and then move it to section B (at least with the shadow topic, which I habitually use) before you read it, both sections will be red. So I should probably be moving these posts earlier.

Does silicon have any severe disadvantages compared to sim (maybe that things seem just less; that would be pretty awful), or is it just a higher cost higher permanency better res sort of thing?

You could exist in sim for a long while, if you cared to and didn't have a flesh body to look after, but everyone you met would be NPCs and they'd have to draw from a relatively limited library of possible persons, and the dreamlikeness can get really annoying after a while. Proper silicon is better for almost every purpose besides "what would happen if {thing I can't fully specify physics conditions for that involves people}", and doesn't require expensive specialist equipment (proper silicon is quite expensive but the cost is split and it's considered a public good).