Poking the GURPS rules for Mind Emulates

Right then. I need to figure out how many Mind Emulates I can run on a Gestalt Brain Matrix, and how smart they can be. And the rules say several things and have errata. So I'm going to put them all in here, and then I am going to poke them until they make sense.
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199,595 people experience 100 years in the last 10,000.
Then the Matrix crashes a complexity.
Suddenly there's only 19,959 people around, and they're still only experiencing 1 day for 100 of ours.


If they all went dormant while up to 86 component minds got out and pushed, or hunted for the 4 minds they're missing to make up their world again... that's a lot of monsters in the basement. Possibly very smart monsters. Possibly many daft ones instead.

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My math might be wrong. But it's pretty.

Still need to do some deciding, but it looks like it's a very small world, in the basement. It could be planet sized to look at, but in population, small.



Woah, I've been working on this for a lot of hours, and it's just useless imaginary maths that I've probably got wrong anyway. Oops?

Still, it is absolutely stuffed full of story idea. I think I like it.

Welsh otherworlds

I have been thinking on naming again.
My series that I wanted to call Offworld or something like that, and the planet they go and find, which has names in half a dozen different languages when they first meet the locals.
Today I realise it's not what the locals call the place that usually sticks, it's what gets written down by the guy who makes a map. And that guy on this expedition is Rhodri. Who speaks Welsh.

I need to name another planet in Welsh.

... aside from the slight difficulty with not speaking Welsh at all, I'm sure that'll simple things up immensely.

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But the world they would name early and then see how it wears.
I mean, he's stepping out onto a new land. He might just name it This Land, but how often do you get to name anything?
... what is This Land in Welsh?

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The more I think about it, the more I like 'This Land' in Welsh, because it's a Firefly joke and a 'your finger you fool' cartography joke both at once.

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Tir Hwn sounds like a nice name.

Words are fun to play with. Pity I don't understand them at all proper. Names need connotations and to know what they're actually saying.

I kind of want to name a planet in Welsh now though, seeing as there's all sorts of Terra Nova or Alpha whatsit or New Earth. Welsh should have a turn.

Genre crossovers

I woke up with thoughts on why when non-genre writers come up with something that is science fiction but they're all It's Not Science Fiction it doesn't tend to work.

Or, more broadly, on why the rules of genre need to be understood by writers, because they're part of the understanding of readers.

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So genre is a long history of texts to reference, that will have built patterns and expectations and a shorthand the reader is drawing on. But it is also a set of writing and reading tools, techniques that foreground different aspects, and ways of approaching decoding the story. If you approach a new genre without familiarising yourself with all that, you're just not going to be communicating what you think you're saying, let alone giving the experience your readers thought the packaging promised.

If a writer thinks they can somehow walk into a genre, pick up on whichever tropes have caught their eye, and otherwise have a clean sheet to start from... language doesn't work like that. Not at the word sized unit, and very much not at the level of story.

We're all working on palimpsests, and we need to understand what we're overwriting.