Eleven
April 2252
New Albion
Mostly hidden in the tall grass, an open Navy drop boat stood empty under the stars. A faint trail, visible only to a trained tracker, led away to the north. At the end of the trail, already six kilometers away from the empty boat, three figures trotted north. The heavy packs on their backs slowed them not at all.
Leading the group was Master Gunnery Sergeant Gregory Smith, Confederate Marines. Following him was Gunnery Sergeant Tinker Morris, a recent transfer from the United Kingdom’s Special Air Service, and in the rear ran First Lieutenant Mark Jerrold, Honors Graduate of the first class of the Confederate Marines Force Recon School.
“Ell-tee,” ‘Gunny’ Smith called over his shoulder. “Brightening up some. Reckon sunrise in about half an hour.”
The lieutenant pulled a tiny device from the cargo pocket of his fatigue pants, pressed a contact. “There should be a stream about half a klick ahead. We’ll stop there and belly-up until nightfall.”
“Good deal, sir.”
The guerrillas they were to contact could only be in the thin strip of forest at the edge of the Crow Ridge range. The Marines planned to find cover and hide until the next evening, and cover the rest of the distance to the mountains the following night. How they would find the guerrillas after that remained to be seen.
The Orleans Task Group
“Message for you, Admiral.” A young Ensign handed Admiral Gauss a message form. He took the plastic pad, placed his thumbprint on the edge, and read the scrolling text quickly.
“Humph.” He turned to the Combat Information Center Tactical Action Officer. “Commander, send to all ships, prepare for formation subspace jump in ten minutes.” He walked over to the Tactical holo-display. “Set up standard battle group formation, with the Mountain View sixty klicks behind the flagship, the Cairo, Reuben James and Perry stay with the carrier. I want the Dallas, the Bob Pritchard and the MacKee sixty klicks to our front in a standard pyramid formation with the cruiser at the twelve o’clock.”
“Course, sir?”
The Admiral punched up a display of the Fortune system. Fortune was a new world, only opened to colonization three years earlier, but it was a prize indeed, rich in minerals, petroleum products, and plant life, a pleasant world of open forests, beaches, and temperate oceans.
“Right here,” the Admiral pointed at the symbol representing Fortune. “A Grugell Occupation ship escorted by three cruisers just entered the Fortune system. A listening droid on an asteroid six AU’s out from Fortune orbit picked them up as they entered the system’s ecliptic, and they’ll make orbit in about sixteen hours. We should be there about ten hours after that.” He punched up a course track. “We’ll come in from south of the ecliptic, and use the system’s big gas giant as cover. They won’t know we’re around until we’re already on their sixes.”
“I’ll get the course plots out to the Task Group.” The Commander grinned. “Payback’s a bitch, ain’t it sir?”
The Shade Tree
A quick pass to the edge of New Albion’s atmosphere had disposed of the drop boat, after which the Shade Tree retreated to the shelter of the system’s sole gas giant.
“Give me a weapons count,” Captain Barrett snapped, for the third time that morning.
“Six Shrikes, Captain, two magnetic mines, particle beam projectors charged and operational.” The Bridge crew was under enormous stress; the sensor suite gave almost constant warnings as Grugell drive fields crisscrossed the system.
“Where’s that big Occupation ship?”
“Still orbiting New Albion, Captain,” Indira Krishnavarna called out. “I don’t expect it will be going anywhere, will it? I should think it is providing logistical support for their troops on the planet.” Krishnavarna was using a new toy, added on to the Shade Tree in the Tarbos spacedock. Three tiny, unmanned reconnaissance drones – the Navy called them ‘proxies’ – were serving as the Shade Tree’s eyes and ears closer to the inhabited planet.
“It would sure help those people on the planet if we could take out that Occupation ship, wouldn’t it?”
The Weapons tech, Orlando Taylor, spoke up. “It would that, Captain, but I don’t see how we’ll get close enough without them detecting us – and I’m not sure six Shrikes will be enough, anyway. That’s one hell of a big ship.”
“One of those mines might. Those are 1-megatonne nukes.” The Navy didn’t know the Shade Tree had those, and Captain Barrett wasn’t about to reveal her source for that sort of hardware.
“But we’d have to get it into New Albion orbit.”
“Yeah.” Barrett snapped her fingers. “Didn’t we hear something about the Orleans engagement, something about the tactical fighters being too small for the Grugell to pick up?”
“Yes,” Krishnavarna confirmed. “But we’re a lot bigger than an A-66, Captain. And I wouldn’t be surprised if they’ve recalibrated their scanners to pick up small craft now – they lost a cruiser to fighters from the Mountain View that time.”
“We still have a spare parts kit for that drop boat, don’t we?”
“We do indeed, Captain.” Weapons tech Taylor frowned. “But what…”
“There are spare solid-fuel maneuvering thrusters in that kit, right?”
“There are, Captain,” Taylor replied, grinning widely now.
“Indira, are you still monitoring that type II comet that’s inbound?”
“Yes, Captain, but it’s going to pass way away from New Albion – it’s really pretty in the night sky right now, but that’s about all.”
“That’s enough. We’re going to use it. We’ve got three days before we have to head back to Tarbos, if we want to get our bonus. Let’s make use of it to do something besides hide behind this damn gas giant and record drive signatures. Indira, recall one of your proxies; you’ll have to make do with two until we get back to Tarbos. Orlando, call your relief to the Bridge. You and I are going to modify one of those mines.”
“Yes, ma’am,” the Weapons tech replied.
The Orleans Task Group
One of the Orleans’ quirks was a slight, ship-wide flutter when it was decelerating out of subspace. The flutter always caused Admiral Gauss an uncomfortable feeling in the pit of his stomach, and never more so than now, when they were expecting to emerge only a few kilometers away from a Grugell task group. And with any luck, the Grugell would have their attention on the planet Fortune.
“Approaching subspace now,” Captain Jensen intoned. “All stations report battle stations manned and ready.” The Admiral had called the task group to General Quarters a half-hour earlier. Around the Admiral and his ever –present Chief of Staff, the flagship’s CIC was quiet as a tomb, essential conversations were carried out in anticipatory whispers. “Entering normal space in five, four, three, two, one – normal space!”
A thousand or so kilometers away, there hung the three-kilometer, gleaming silver bulb of a Grugell Occupation ship, looming rapidly larger as the Orleans closed.
“Launch Lancers!” the Tactical Officer barked.
Four six-meter Lancer missiles burst from bays on the Orleans’ flank. The flagship was decelerating hard, the thrum of the Gellar drive rumbling underfoot as the mass tunnel fought to slow the ship. The missiles accelerated away, homing on the unsuspecting Occupation ship.
Larger, faster and longer-ranged than the fighter-borne Shrikes, each Lancer carried a fifty-kiloton fission warhead. The first pair hit the Occupation ship at the very aft portion of the main hull, blossoming into sun-bright bursts even as the second pair flashed through to burst against the forward portion of the Grugell ship, obliterating it in a flash of nuclear flame.
“That’s a kill,” someone shouted on the Orleans’ CIC.
“Settle down!” Admiral Gauss barked. “Did you think we couldn’t hit something that big? Tactical, where are the rest of them?”
“Searching now, sir. Something at two o’clock high… Looks like a Grugell cruiser, sir, showing turn to starboard, he’s turning in towards us, range sixteen hundred kilometers and closing. Another ship at three o’clock – belay that, sir, three ships at three o’clock, five more at eleven o’clock low, in lower orbit.”
“Send the Dallas group that way, tell them to engage with missiles. Watch for fire from cloaked ships. Signals, start the Task Group on a one-minute countdown, I want all ships to be ready to accelerate back to subspace at one minute from this mark.”
“Sir, the Mountain View?”
“Tell them not to launch fighters. Not yet. We took out the Occupation ship, but we’re outnumbered eight ways to hell. Hit and run time, folks.”
The Orleans shook once, hard. “Incoming fire, sir, unknown source. Tracking back now.”
“Targeting particle beams,” Tactical called out.
“Targeting on what, exactly?” The Admiral’s voice was deceptively calm.
“Source of the fire, sir, you can detect them for just a moment when they power weapons… There! There! Target that emission and fire!”
A shimmering line of force shot from the Orleans port forward emitter, playing in an arc around the detected location of an anti-proton projector. A flash of sparks and a puff of flame announced a hit.
“He’s moving off – trailing gases and plasma.”
“Let him go,” the Tactical Officer ordered. “Secure emitter. Scanning, keep your attention forward. Forty seconds left.”
Beneath their feet, the rumble of the Gellar drive increased as the battle cruiser accelerated again, straining for the Subspace transit.
“Admiral, you’ll want to look at this. The Dallas group is romping and stomping, sir.”
Gauss leaned to look over a Chief Petty Officer’s shoulder at a scanner tank. The Dallas and her two accompanying frigates had romped into the vanguard of a Grugell formation consisting of two cruisers and a frigate and launched no fewer than ten Lancer missiles; the Grugell ships were exploding like milkweed pods on a windy day back in Admiral Gauss’ native Iowa.
“Sir, the carrier and her escorts are gone back into subspace, ten seconds early. Reuben James shows minor damage. Dallas group is jumping… And there we go,” the Scanning station petty announced, watching his display turn to hash as the battle cruiser leaped back into the surreal world of subspace.
“Well,” Admiral Gauss observed. “That was a hell of a show. Now, let’s get to our rally point. We’ve got another hit to prepare for.”
New Albion
“OK, we’re coming in right behind the comet,” Indira Krishnavarna pointed out, unnecessarily – the Shade Tree’s entire Bridge watch was watching on the ship’s main screen.
What the screen showed was a faint luminous glow; the cannibalized proxy scanner now riding the front of a thermonuclear mine relayed the image. A nudge now and then from a pair of solid fuel maneuvering thruster made course corrections as needed, but Indira Krishnavarna’s initial trajectory calculation had been close enough to require little correction.
“Ten minutes to targeting burn,” the Scanning tech announced. Jean Barrett glanced at the Bridge chronometer, trying to force the numbers to click past faster by force of will.
“Five minutes.”
Barrett shifted in her Bridge chair, kicking off her sandals and curling both legs under her. She frowned at the screen. The glow had brightened somewhat as the mine gained on the comet.
“This just might work,” the Weapons tech announced. He was looking at a small screen on his panel tuned to one of the remaining intact proxies, which was keeping an eye on the Occupation ship. “The bad guy is motoring along just as he has been for the last two days, regular high orbit.”
“It’ll work,” Captain Barrett muttered.
“One minute. Initiating gyro realignment.”
“Go, baby, go,” Barrett whispered. On the big screen, the view changed as the mine rotated slowly; through the faint, hazy glow the massive form of the Grugell Occupation ship moved into view.
“Cruiser behind them,” Barrett noted.
“Time. Initiating burn.” Krishnavarna’s hand stabbed down on a stud. A few seconds later, the haze disappeared as the mine moved out of the comet’s tail and accelerated.
“No reaction from the target. Mine is on course. Sixteen minutes.”
Captain Barrett went back to scowling at the chronometer. The minutes ticked away with agonizing sloth as, on the screen, the image of the Occupation ship swelled to dominate the screen.
“Five minutes.”
Barrett got up and began to pace.
“Two minutes. Still no reaction from the target. The cruiser’s just tooling along about five hundred meters to their aft port side – even money says the nuke gets them both.”
“One minute.”
“If you start counting seconds, I may just blow you out the sally port,” Barrett snapped. The crew exchanged grins.
“And there we go!” The main screen flashed to a scattered pattern of random interference.
“Switch to the proxy,” Barrett ordered. The image on the main screen fluttered once, finally resolving on a view of an expanding cloud of gas and rubble. At the top of the screen, the Grugell cruiser wallowed, trying to regain drive control with one drive pod knocked off. A trail of gas sparkled in the light from New Albion’s sun.
“We didn’t quite kill the cruiser, but that Occupation ship is history.”
“More’s the pity,” Barrett said. “Still. That ought to give the people on the ground a break, anyway. Indira, recall your proxy. Helm, bring us about, head south out of the system’s ecliptic, ahead full. Navs, get us a course to Tarbos. We’ve still got to collect our bonus.”
To see more of Animal’s writing, visit his page at Crimson Dragon Publishing or Amazon.
YAY! Shit blew up!
😱 Not the Sewage Treatment Plant! 💩🎇
A fifty-kt nuke in skin contact with your ship would ruin your whole day. Do the Groogs not have CIWS capability on their occupation ships? Or does it just suck?
A civilization based around conformity, sucking up and backstabbing would be expected to have a LOT of gaps in their tactical playbook.
The nuke yields seem a little light for the future. Don’t most US warheads in ICBM MIRVS have about 300-400kT yields?
Something like that. Although, exactly how much yield do you really need to take out a spaceship at close proximity? Even very large spacecraft are probably going to be dwarfed by a city core.
For a nuke in space you don’t have any shock wave effects, only the fireball and radiation. For a 50 kT vs a 1MT bomb you will have a fireball duration of 1.2 vs 4.5 seconds with a radius at thermal minimum = 131 vs 434.8 meters. So intimate contact with the fire ball is required to do significant damage beyond the X-ray exposure, heat, and radiation pressure in vacuum.
That’s what I mean. Inside the fireball radius (~300m according to https://www.nukesim.com/simapp) any matter would be vaporized almost instantly, by a temperature spike in the millions of degrees. Having a 300m chunk of your ship reduced to plasma is certainly going to render it combat-ineffective, at least.
Interestingly – the US B61 tactical nuclear warhead can be dialed down to 50kt yield.
Nerds!
Loving the story Animal
The world we are in today is astonishing. My X feed is inundated with people like this
https://x.com/i/status/2074109009888477629
People desperate for everyone to hate America. Desperate to create an impression that *everyone* hates America.
It isnt some fringe fetish, it is mainstream on the left. Politicians and pundits, not just pink haired crazies.
And you have to pay him to be insulted by his blather.
I’m good.
Hahaha yes, I would rather do anything else than read his twaddle.
Warren James Kinsella is a Canadian lawyer, author, musician, political consultant, and commentator. Kinsella has written commentary in many of Canada’s major newspapers and several magazines, including The Globe and Mail, the Toronto Sun, Ottawa Citizen, the National Post, The Walrus, and Postmedia newspapers.
Fuck Warren James Kinsella.
The politicians and pundits on the left are no less entitled and narcissistic than the pink-haired crazies. They just conceal it better.
It isnt so much what one guy says. It is the volume. It is everywhere. Someone posted that only 30% of registered democrats consider themselves patriotic. A friend asked why this may be…
I think the reason is simple. This is the communist party at work. They have been in education since the beginning, and have owned it outright since the 90s.
The democrats have embraced them. They openly talk of tearing down society so they can remake it. This is communist manifesto stuff. Obama said his Healthcare plan was designed to fail so that they could then replace the entire Healthcare system with socialized medicine. I.e. nationalizing the entire industry.
Obama is to the right of the party – and he nationalized 2 major automakers.
The end game is Soros idea of using money in high-leverage places like local DA, election officials, judges.
So we went from a post-racial society to everything is race in 5 years. Race riots despite good economy in the black community and good race relations. All in just a few years. And no prosecutions for rioting. Not even police presence.
All part of an intentional plan.
Destabilize society and bring in Marxism.
They have been marketed this from childhood. Of course they believe it. It is how they can cry online about children in the US starving while billionaires flaunt their wealth – despite the fact that children arent starving and they know it. It doesnt matter. If everyone says it, they believe it.
People in large groups are terrifying.
Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.
https://despair.com/products/idiocy?srsltid=AfmBOoo2lMGQlZwJiWPY01_SNEgUrA8O6TiScsE7eif_fY8gnpM1h629
Tower of Babel II, Electric Boogaloo.
I had that poster on my wall.
There is such a thing as mass hysteria. Unfortunately our government has figured out how to use it as a weapon, and one party in particular is applying it to their own ends.
We had some lefty friends over this weekend. One is convinced Renee Goode was murdered in cold blood, and “THAT’S NOT OK”. She and her husband are planning on selling their house and moving into an RV. She wants to become a Canadian citizen. I hope she tries, and realized that the country she thinks is superior to the US has its own immigration procedures and restrictions, and you can’t just walk over the border and declare you’re a citizen. I doubt she’ll find that racist or attend protests against it.
Some moron(s) started a fire in E Washington and the retards are doing their told you so about fireworks. Also Magats.
Fuck those commies, they are broken and brain dead.
My Twitter feed:
https://x.com/nwsspc/status/2074033802565861593
Hahaha. I get my local weather weather from the Weatherbug app on my phone. It just alerted me of lightning in the area.
I dont have anything local in my feed. Are you guys using it for local news? In what way? Should I change my habits?
Damn, the Great Lakes are fucked…
I think part of it is that so many people accept the general tenets of big government, managed pathway to utopia. Everyone is embracing it except the US. Since the US is so rich and powerful, it is preventing a global utopia from coming into being.
Thank goodness.
Someone posted that only 30% of registered democrats consider themselves patriotic. A friend asked why this may be…
They have been fed a steady diet of envy and resentment?
In order to radically change a country, you must first convince enough people that its essence is somehow deeply flawed and deserving of destruction. “Smash the old world, establish the new world!”, as a caption on Chinese Communist poster during the cultural revolution said.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/HFegcgvaIAAxEQa.jpg
The favorite tactic of US leftists in this aspect is to constantly bleat about racism. It is the sin that gets the greatest reaction from Americans. They yell “racism” for the same reason Pilgrims yelled “witch”.
They forget that if you call everything racist, then nothing is, and eventually people stop caring about accusations of racism.
Charles Bukowski on good writing:
https://youtu.be/MTPxWkBgW6U?si=EJBy1jZBfshdTYjY&t=60
“When you write, your words must go like this: bim-bim-bim! bim-bim-bim! bim-bim-bim!..writing must never be boring.”
Animal’s writing is seldom boring.
***
Stephen King strongly advocates for using the plain, unadorned dialogue tag “said” in most cases. In his memoir and writing guide On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft, he argues that “the best form of dialogue attribution is said”
…
King also famously says, “The road to hell is paved with adverbs”, meaning that overreliance on adverbs (e.g., “he said angrily” or “she whispered softly”)
***
***
Elmore Leonard, one of fiction’s great dialogue writers, famously advised using nothing but “said” for attribution. His novels demonstrate the principle: the characters’ words and actions convey tone without the tag needing to do that work. Cormac McCarthy goes further in novels like No Country for Old Men, often omitting tags entirely when context makes the speaker clear.
***
***
Hemingway says: “Good dialogue is not real speech-it’s the illusion of real speech.”
This means that when we want to write good, immersive dialogue, we sometimes need to deviate from true speech. Here’s a quick passage from A Farewell to Arms:
“Your brigade?”
He told them.
“Regiment?”
He told them.
“Why are you not with your regiment?”
He told them.
“Do you know that an officer should be with his troops?”
He did.
There are numerous times where Hemingway will insert a “She told them,” or a “He said it,” in lieu of the full explanation.
…
Hemingway will often use dialogue tags in the middle of speech to show the character pauses for thought. Here’s an example from Hills Like White Elephants:
“The beer’s nice and cool,” the man said.
“It’s lovely,” the girl said.
“It’s really an awfully simple operation, Jig,” the man said. “It’s not really an operation at all.”
The girl looked at the ground the table legs rested on.
“I know you wouldn’t mind it, Jig. It’s really not anything. It’s just to let the air in.”
The girl did not say anything.
***
King is one of the best-selling authors of all time and Hemingway got a Nobel Prize in literature. They know what they’re talking about. I try to follow their advice in my fiction. To each, their own.
One of the great pleasures in reading Discworld by Pratchett is seeing text pop up in small caps and knowing exactly who is communicating even though there is no attribution of any kind.
Second best is seeing Susan switch from standard dialog format to small caps in the middle of a conversation.
Vonnegut’s 8 rules of writing a short story.
*Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.
*Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.
*Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.
*Every sentence must do one of two things—reveal character or advance the action.
*Start as close to the end as possible.
*Be a sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them-in order that the reader may see what they are made of.
*Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.
*Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To hell with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.
He then added Flannery O’Connor, whom he gave highest praise, broke every rule except the first: “Great writers tend to do that.” <– Goes to a great universal teacher: 'Master the rules before you try to break 'em.'
Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for
So much modern fiction is unreadable or unwatchable because all the characters are unlikeable.
Getting back to Arcane — it was brilliant in that every character — even the “evil” ones — were likeable and understandable at some level while still being deeply flawed.
I have bailed out of several TV series because every single character was an asshole.
Including, notably, Breaking Bad. The one exception, that I stuck with, might be Better Call Saul.
I disagree with several of those as written.
I can also easily describe how someone obediently following them produces the most awful thing imaginable.
Especially the frontloading of information. Following that rule encourages infodumping. Better to meter the information so that it is properly absorbed. Also, of note – Vonnegut didn’t write mysteries. A whole genre around delaying the reveal of information to the reader because not knowing until later is the whole point.
If readers could finish the story themselves what do they need you for? Your job is to entertain them.
One of the things I really liked about Worm was the almost total absence of exposition, except as it would be actually delivered in life (as in a mission briefing). If something was common knowledge in universe, it wasn’t mentioned. The reader would need to figure out WTF they were talking about in context and by the various character reactions.
@UCS: To be fair, he made that list for short stories, not novels etc, but his point remains. I think his caveat that these ‘can’ be broken sets up the most important and first rule: Don’t waste the reader’s time. That’s universal good advice.
@RC: God, BB was so good, and stuck the landing. I was rooting for Walter until I wasn’t. And even then, kinda. (Masterfully done.) I think Jesse’s the one you can root for. And he ‘wins’ in a ‘cheap,’ but most important way. Tremendous build-up. It and The Wire are my two favorite non-comedy, this-century series.
“ If something was common knowledge in universe”
I like writers who do the same. It yanks me out of universe when they are clearly writing to an earthling or something for no reason.
Too heinous to show
President Donald Trump on Sunday posted a falsified image of former President Barack Obama and his wife, Michelle Obama, waving before boarding an Air Force One that had been spray-painted with graffiti.
It came months after another racist post by the president that showed the couple as primates in a jungle. That one was deleted after stiff, bipartisan backlash.
The latest image shows the Obamas smiling and waving at the top of stairs alongside a baby blue and white presidential plane with graffiti painted on it that included the Democrat’s campaign slogan “Yes We Can,” “Obama” and “BLM,” short for Black Lives Matter. The post also shows graffiti in Arabic on the plane that says the phrase “alhamdulillah,” which means “praise be to God” or “thank God.”
The use of graffiti is a coded message to remind people of crime and urban decay and has been used in racist messaging against Black people in the past.
No hammer and sickle?
This sounds like a perfect example of, “If you’re taking flak, you’re over the target.”
+1 Soul Plane
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-GesXJRSWzE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YZr7v_t-i2c
“The use of graffiti is a coded message…”
*Makes jerk-off motion
But only when Donald does it.
Thankfully we have all these super smart people to break the code for us.
Pull my finger.
I’ll break some code!
Jeebus downtown Binghamton is even more depressing than ever somehow. Onwards to PA!
Oops not a reply dammit I hate phoneglibbing.
Although there is graffiti everywhere so maybe it fits.
I guess the intro to the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air is racist: graffiti, basketball, violence, black people…
The gangsta rap version is hilarious:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O3xs5slMkbk
Not entirely clear on how showing the Obamas in front of graffiti is racist.
Graffiti generally is found where there is high crime, and high crime is from black people, and from Democrat policies, and Obama is a Black person who implemented Democrat policies, so this is a racist dogwhistle to try to fool people into thinking that crime is bad.
Hoo boy!
https://www.nbcnews.com/pop-culture/pop-culture-news/tilly-norwood-ai-actor-denounced-actors-union-star-feature-film-rcna353134
Pr0n of the future is going to be insane.
Remember that article I wrote? I’m curious to see how well that ages. So far I feel like it’s still doing ok.
I really hope there is a video made of Tilly weeping over the treatment she got from her fellow actors.
Leave Tilly Alone . . . .
I am changing my mind about AI in acting. I now approve of it. There is no reason not to replace expensive soulless woke scolds with cheaper soulless actors that you can turn off when not needed.
I know! AI actors will never go on a show and badmouth the movie or otherwise poison the well. It’s a win/win for producers.
ITA
My thoughts exactly. I read, “It has no life experience to draw from, no emotion…,” and thought for a minute they were talking about Zendaya.
There just something about jerking it to something that was actually a real woman somewhere down the chain though.
Slightly(?) upset with myself. I played with Grok to give me a sexy story, adding my own bits and seeing what it could/would do. Then I got an AI chick to read it to me. My masturbatory hijinks are straight-up female, apparently. I realized I was already making my own stories in my head, so why not have a sultry-sounding ‘woman’ read it to me?
First, grok grokked the idea and did pretty damn well. Second, I found “grokgems” on 4chan, erotic clips that are, uh, really really good. All of me strongly approves. This is also damning, but research is research. Important research.
Pr0n of the future? Uh. Relationships will become extinct. Automated Fleshlights, audio+vid +the newest wave of touch-tech, likely assisted with much drugs, and men will realize they can get what they want without having to put up with a female. This will largely be true for gals as well, methinks. (But more expensive?)
Folk satisfied will drop out of the market, folk who actually want ‘a person’ will be rarefied.
Universal truth will continue: Of those remaining, attractive people will meet attractive people. So when ya see a flock of hotties marching on central Indiana…? Well. They’ve witnessed the Ev-Signal shining in the night sky. (“SALE!”)
I wonder if some cave whore got made at the first troglodyte to beat his meat to drawing.
prehistoric pornography:
***
Around 37,000 years ago, a Stone Age human carved a vulva into a cave in Southern France, according to Huffington Post.
In 2007, researchers at the Abri Castanet archaeological site in Dordogne, France, discovered the erotic depictions. Not only are they the first known examples of erotic art, but they may be the oldest stone carvings ever found.
About 10,000 years after the groundbreaking vulva was engraved into the French rock, someone else in Paleolithic Europe carved a woman’s body into limestone, creating the famous Venus of Willendorf figurine. The sculpture features large breasts and distinct labia, and experts believe it was made as a representation of fertility.
***
https://allthatsinteresting.com/erotic-art
I like to think a distant ancestor of Sugarfree got the ball rolling by telling stories around some ancient campfire.