Is there some other way to read the full story without whoring myself for a Salon pass?

Well, lessee:

1. You could ask a friend to whore her/himself for a pass and capture the story to a text file and email it to you.

2. You could buy a Salon subscription.

3. You could break into my house and steal my backup drive.

4. You could approach the janitor and say, "My good man, I will trade you this perfectly good barometer if you will tell me how tall this building is."

Lock your doors; I've elected for #3. :-P

Do you actually consider watching an advertisement to be 'whoring yourself'? An ad that nobody is really making you watch, being that you could just click on the link, put your head in a soundproof bag and wait for a minute, after which you are given full access to the full gamut of stuff that Salon publishes, including Cory's story?

Heck, I just open another window while that ad does its thing.

-Donut

ps. HUD is "Heads Up Display". Sorry. Nerd. Taking pills for it.

I already did the free day-pass ad thing; I think I've run out of alternate emails to sign up with. Can you use a fake one?

The day-pass thing doesn't require your email, zippy.

My. This is not my night... thanks for the tips.

Excellent work, Cory!

Also, congratulations. You've earned your place in the sci-fi pantheon alongside Asimov, Roddenberry, et. al.: You have at least one obsessed, nerdy nitpicker who obnoxiously points out holes in the worlds you create! To wit:

"[T]he backup of a third-gen Bitchun, born at the end of the XXIst century... Seventy years later, her/his backup was a rich tapestry of memories... [etc.]"

So the story takes place in 2170 or thereabouts. (It's possible this person was deadheading for a century or so and thus she/he has only 70 years of memories, but "seventy years later" seems in context to be Adrian's assessment as an outside observer.)

Now, referencing Nestor's backup, you have:

"The person was so old, saurian and slow, nearly 300, an original revolutionary from the dawn of the Bitchun Society."

An age of "almost 300" in 2170 would mean that Nestor was born in the late XIXth century. So then this means that, in the universe both "Truncat" and "Down & Out in the Magic Kingdom" occupy, the Bitchun society started around 1900? The novel says that Disney World and the original Disney characters were created pre-Bitchun, so this seems inconsistent.

Thanks again for an excellent story. (Great title, too.)

The real story (no joke, afaict!): http://physics.about.com/cs/legends/a/280703.htm

Ahhhhh, you have FALLEN INTO MY NITPICKER'S TRAP. Carefully baited, it now springs, revealing two important factors that you have no considered!

1. Time dilation from relativistic-speed space travel

2. Extended duration of "generation" among immortals.

Cory! Thanks for the words! You sure are euphoric today, wow. Er, I hope it's you, there's no authentication today. If it's not you, then, well, bleah. The usual Cory responses on the discussion boards usually involve expletives and telling people to shove things places.

I just go to http://premium.salon.com/daypass/index.jsp first.

Wow. Well, there went my morning. One hour spent reading and ignoring everything else, and now an afternoon of dreaming and thinking about the story. And quite a bit to think about there too.

Bravo! Can't wait for the next!

8,000 words! How do you write so fast? Tell us the story of your writer's block and subsequent hypnosis.

He can't tell us -- it's a trapdoor in the hypnosis. If he reveals the secrets, snap, he's blocked again.

I'm still digesting the story, but I enjoyed the first pass through nonetheless. My favorite aspect was this world's background holes. Why are people living in body-sized caskets when there's so much potential living space (if only in cyberspace)? What exactly is the significant of being a "post-person"? Why are there still conventional universities when people can transfer information directly into their brains?

This story is a nice example of how potential inconsistencies can add to (rather than subtract from) the depth of narrative. (After all, real life can seem very inconsistent to us simple individuals.) The key, I believe, is to focus the story on the correct conflicts and characters. One particularly annoying type of poor storytelling (found in quite a few films) is to arrange things so illogically that you would have to tell a far more detailed and interesting story just to make sense of the original (my favorite example is "Bladerunner").

Another good one, Cory. Thanks for sharing!

Good stuff. I like!

"arrange things so illogically that you would have to tell a far more detailed and interesting story just to make sense of the original"

Um... 42!

Corey sez:
"I don't really write sequels. More than half the point of writing sf is thinking up new worlds, and sequels involve revisiting places I've left behind."

...But more than half the fun of reading them is revisiting worlds you've so firmly established in one's imagination. This is why everyone bugs you for sequels. And will continue: More please!

Great story, Cory. That'll be on my nominating ballot next year.

But Salon hates me. Safari crashed on every single page, usually well after it had loaded and I was halfway down the page reading. At least it didn't lose the cookie, so I didn't have to watch one of those stupid ads every time it crashed.

I bet it's the Flash ads on the pages. Sometimes I wish the technology for animated ads had never been developed...all they do is eat up more bandwidth and annoy people like me. And when they're poorly done, they crash browsers. :-(

I installed Mozilla firebird, but I did not bother installing flash in it. I dont go to that many flash pages, but when I do I just load up crummy ie.

The internet is much better now.

firebird also blocks popups by default and has built in banner blocking if you want.

I should check if someone has made, or maybe make it my self, a module for firebird that would let you easily turn flash on or off.

Good stuff, Cory. You make it look easy.

Cory, this is your best yet. Dynamite!

Iax: check out the PrefBar for mozilla: http://prefbar.mozdev.org/
among other niceties, it gives you a big "Kill Flash" button.

Is there another source? I don't know which one of my filters is killing Salon (particularly its Day Pass system).

Got round the filters. Very enjoyable, thank you.