"That Shape Had None" – A Horror of Substrate Independence (Short Fiction)

[casmalia]

https://starlightconvenience.net/#that-shape-had-none

[Muromec]

Thanks, it was refreshing to feel the imaginary horrors instead of living the ones that are happening.

[DiscourseFan → Muromec]

But the truth often lies in the form of a thing, not its contents.

[varjag]

Good read. Feels like Lena was among inspirations.

[hirsin → varjag]

https://qntm.org/mmacevedo, for those unfamiliar, not the namesake of that story from digital graphics.

[Groxx → hirsin]

And for the digital graphics people, consider using a modern variant instead: https://mortenhannemose.github.io/lena/

[mijoharas → Groxx]

This is brilliant.

[flobosg → hirsin]

Discussed here a few weeks ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46999224

[dtj1123 → hirsin]

This belongs on the front page. I read it over an hour ago and my skin is still crawling.

[throw310822 → varjag]

Frankly it seems to be saying the exact same things except in five times as many words and a rather boring exposition, that contrasts with the cold but ominously normalizing one of Lena.

[varjag → throw310822]

Borges famously wrote there are only four stories, retold endlessly.

I think this is an attempt to write a SF story in Lovecraftian mood (hence the language and setting). Lena is written as a hypothetical Wikipedia article.

[nh23423fefe]

This reminds me of "Calliope" in Sandman

[the_af]

Interesting.

Lots of parallels to the (very good) videogame SOMA.

[throw310822]

I usually don't leave this kind of comments, but I really can't read yellow text on dark red background for more than 20 seconds.

[Groxx → throw310822]

Oddly, I don't get the reader-mode option in Firefox for the site... one of these days I should probably figure out why that sometimes happens

[mrec → Groxx]

It's an odd site design. Stories are loaded dynamically by script based on the URL fragment identifier; I'd imagine Reader Mode isn't geared toward that sort of thing.

I also wonder why they decided that hiding the scrollbar was a good idea.

[autoexec → mrec]

That explains why the page was blank when I loaded it. No text without JS enabled.

[jjpones → throw310822]

For me it wasn't the color, but how smooshed the post body is. I had to override the max-width and added some letter-spacing.

[cpill → throw310822]

Save to Instapaper and read on Kobo ;-)

[FerretFred]

I need to read more of that! What's the copyright on the files? I run a public-access gopher server with a small eBook section and that's the kind of material that I'd like to feature.

[DiabloD3]

This is a good one.