And then I dreamed a plot

Went to sleep after 5, woke up 0730 (ha), 1230 (blergh), 1530. Now I'm all enthusiastic about the latest way I dreamed the world ended / restarted.

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... many people would experience dreaming of post apocalyptic witch hunts as a nightmare, but here I am feeling all chipper and enthusiastic. Writers!

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Yesterday I bought bread, quorn slices, mayo and salad, to make new and improved sandwiches.
... today I ate all the bread, quorn slices, and mayo.
so, I think it is safe to call the mayo a success?
but I need to go shopping again before there's anything to eat the salad with.
*facepalm*

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The thing I hate about speaking out loud is it's always first draft.
Plus the stuttering and the thing where the words jumble.
But mostly, it's first draft, it's the thing you just now thought of, you don't have the time or resources to properly cite sources or look up the details, it's just mouth noise imitating brain noise and now everyone can hear it.

So then conversations come back to me days, weeks, years later, pasted over with the 'citation required' signs, with every kind of editor marks, and noticing all the times I not only failed to make my argument but managed an internally inconsistent statement right there where everyone was listening.

It's really difficult to adjust my standards of true down to pub levels. Pub true means it was the thing I thought I remembered at the time. That's clearly not true enough.

... it is for most humans most of the time, I get that, but that's part of why humans are really frustrating.
they do not do the reading and then they say things out loud which they only think are true.
how do we even function like that?

... yeah, that's... I have a problem, this is my problem in my head, but my head will not shut up about it.

I want to go back, edit, and rewrite, all my out loud talkings for... always.

ugh.

After the End

So this morning I dreamt a plague apocalypse that killed up to 97.5% of people. I was thinking that was maybe too many. As in, the stories kind of run out if there's no longer a self sustaining population.

But GURPS Space reckons a colony world can be self sustaining with a population of 10K (see page 90). It's a guess, but we can work with it. It also has some ideas about tech levels and how they may or may not work after major population crashes, see page 180. It reckons TL8, which we have now, needs a population of 100 million or more, and since they're talking space colonies they're presumably talking planetary. Lower tech levels require smaller populations, and a town of a few thousand can be self sufficient and self sustaining at TL4.

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You know, the main thing you learn when researching the end of civilisation is it don't seem all that difficult to break it all. We're remarkably fragile, as it stands. I'm kind of thinking that any serious plague apocalypse just kills everyone. Like, everyone everyone. Because what the plague don't kill the sudden collapse of infrastructure will.

That answer hasn't much story in it though.



Okay, so the story in this is that civilisation will cluster up around the water and power sources. The power is needed to keep the water flowing. You could have little islands that are doing pretty okay, and they'd have people flock to them, if they heard about them. So then you get actual overcrowding problems in a world with 2.5% of the population? Assuming they get past the transport problems. Slight lack of buses, probable surplus of abandoned cars blocking the roads.

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I think this morning's dream is from a couple of generations after the big crash. Some places would have gathered around generators and water supplies and kept up their basically TL8 society, probably staying in contact around the world. Others would be more isolated, hence more likely to get quirky fast.


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It seems to me like dropping tech levels or losing the global transport network even for a little while would be seriously more difficult than just surviving at that lower level was in the first place. The resources got torn up and used up, it's a different landscape now.

The sort of immediately post apocalypse story that concentrates on looting for survival and the sort where there's significant rebuilding kind of have a really big gap in between.

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A generation after a big crash is an excuse to have whatever patchwork you can think up.


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If you want a perfectly ordinary world in the bit of the city the protagonist lives in, but have it be in contact with... anything you can dream up, then that's plausible enough to be going on with.



Also, if the plague is making people magic, that... that makes the odds do whatever you want. The large scale effects of a Purify Water spell would be just like having your own generator. Civilisation would clump around magic users too, if they could provide for them. A very different civ than the ones blaming the magic users for the plague, of course, and plenty close enough to put them in conflict.


I still reckon cities would mostly empty out though. Between fires and disposal issues they're going to be really nasty really fast. But then at some point they'd be down to smouldering wreck the scavengers have been at. Would people even want to move back in? Depends what kinds of shinies are still there, I guess.