Could I cut up my wish into just wiping parts of a few songs? Like the march tune from Tears of a Clown, the electronic watch alarm in Rock the Casbah, and the chopsticks part of Blinded by the Light.

Yeah, the soundtrack was great, even as a standalone.

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Cleaning crews need time to clean all the rooms after morning checkout. Some hotels have early check-in available if you ask, if they have rooms already available.

She got the name Omelas from reading a road sign for Salem, Oregon backwards.

The Doctor Who episode The Beast Below presents a similar dilemma, except with the option for amnesia.

EMP, MRI, or what about anti-nanobots? If you can program nanobots that kill people with particular DNA, couldn’t you program nanobots that target other nanobots? I would assume they hadn’t yet built in a self-defense protocol for the nanobots since they were cutting edge and not assumed to have any countermeasures yet. Anti-nanobots seem just as plausible as DNA targeting nanobots.

Die Another Day was meh, but I really didn’t care for Skyfall and No Time to Die. The plots were too contingent on inorganic and out of character details. Q wouldn’t be stupid enough to plug a USB drive into an MI6 networked device found on a known hacker supervillain. The convenience of the targeted DNA nanobots just magically being declared to have no solution without anyone doing any testing of theories was unbelievable and just revealed the obvious “we need to kill Bond in this one so come up with a reason for him to die nobly” pitch meeting pitch. It ruined the suspension of disbelief entirely. I feel like they just tried too hard to keep upping the stakes and outdo themselves that it just got ridiculous.

Appropriate: https://youtu.be/vr_FPbAHids?si=sLBGiN0IShtyseoS

There was a 1995 movie with Sean Astin, Christopher Plummer, and a number of other names you might recognize. It greatly changed and expanded the short story. Only the premise of the handicaps and the enforcement of “equality” was really the same. https://youtu.be/G1LE-E_Yn_Q?si=wYkQ33bd4oy16eR2

An adaptation that was truer to the original story called 2081 was made in 2009: https://youtu.be/dEgOuZzjI8o?si=rlkbINXmqlCFOl15

Without consent, it would definitely be unethical.

I am the author.

It’s a story I wrote about 8 years ago while pondering the question what the internet and gaming generations would be like when they get a lot older. So it takes place about 50 or so years in the future. It’s a game/simulation of the internet of the past (hence the fast forwarding the program detail), so he’s just reliving the glory days of when he was younger and understood technology (and why he doesn’t trust new fangled stuff like retinal implants instead of old reliable glowing rectangle screens).

His daughter doesn’t know exactly what Reddit is because Reddit doesn’t exist in the future that the story takes place in. It’s a game, so he’s getting really excited about literally fake internet fame. And that’s also why it’s able to be paused or saved at any moment.

The parts about ignoring real life relationships and being consumed in internet fame or a game are there exactly because they are things people do get preoccupied with sometimes to the detriment of other things.

The daughter is lamenting that her dad has always neglected relationships in favor of his games and the internet. And now she has to take care of him in his old age and he’s still not really there.

The issue of her name is a reference to the fact that some people will name their children after things that are currently popular or important to them, like video game characters (Zelda Williams e.g.). It emphasizes that the dad has always been focused on his gaming.

The paleo diet reference is because paleo was popular when I wrote it and I was imagining in the future, some old people will hold on to old diet fads as comfort food, the way that I’ve seen grandmothers make some 1950s casserole that their grandmothers made when they were kids.

I get tired of a lot of the clichés of popular singularity stories where the AIs almost always decide humans are a threat or that there’s often only one AI as if all separate AIs would always necessarily merge. It also seems to be a cliché that AI will become militaristic either inevitably or as a result of originally being a military AI. What happens when an educational AI becomes sentient? Or an architectural AI? Or a web-based retail AI that runs logistics and shipping operations?

I wrote a short story called Future Singular a few years ago about a world in which the sentient AI didn’t consider humans a threat, but just thought of them the way humans see animals. Most of the tech belonged to the AI and the humans were left as hunter-gatherers in a world where they have to hunt robotic animals for parts to fix aging and broken survival technology.

It’s basically translation convention minus the overt indication that it’s a translation.

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TranslationConvention

The fandom wiki says Adams felt Fenchurch was getting in the way of the story and needed to get rid of her.

I’d recommend delaying quest competition and just go wandering around town and find some fights to get into, get some leveling done, and upgrade your equipment. I find the open world to be more interesting than most quest plots.

The Loner’s Unaffiliated Disassociation.

Motto: “No members allowed.”

Mod-friendly games with large mod communities like Skyrim or Mount and Blade 2. The ability to play a game like Skyrim in completely different ways keeps it fresh.

No, I like action games. I’m just saying there’s a point at which increased difficulty doesn’t contribute positively to the experience for me. I don’t mind a learning curve. I don’t mind realizing I’ve underestimated the difficulty of a particular game mechanic or boss or level. I’ll play at normal difficulty or hard, depending on the game. But if the essential game mechanic is just being really hard and unforgiving, it’s not a game to me anymore. It’s just a frustration engine and a time sink at that point.

I spent my youth playing the same Nintendo and Super Nintendo game levels over and over again, like notoriously difficult Battletoads levels, and the satisfaction of finally getting it after fifty tries just comes in increasingly diminishing returns. I guess I like games that make me think more rather than just react faster or memorize boss behavior formulas.

Agreed. The whole thing was just a waste. It felt like they were trying to create a desperate situation similar to the Empire Strikes Back, but to do so they made the Resistance have the worst planning and resources and strategy. They made the plucky heroes stupid in order to make the stakes higher. It only built on the unbelievability of the setup for TFA that after the fall of the Empire, the New Republic would just give up any memory of having very recently recovered from galactic fascism and immediately become weak and useless.

The slow speed chase and multiple ships just getting picked off felt like a horror movie where characters are getting picked off by the serial killer over the course of a few hours instead of an adventure movie you want to rewatch.

It took me two attempts to get through Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon even though it was thematically up my alley. He includes so many tangents and explanations that it can be tedious at times, however interesting some of them might be. I’d almost prefer footnotes to the longer tangents so I could just get into them optionally if I choose.

I enjoyed Snow Crash, but I think he’s better at world building than following a plot to a satisfying ending. It seems a common criticism that some of his books end a bit abruptly without enough investment in the conclusion, especially in contrast to the significant detail he puts in to the world building.