#ttou memes

[calandrinon]

@derinthescarletpescatarian I can't find where I got the original meme now, but nevertheless I fixed it

[aon-dork]

I recently reread Time to Orbit: Unknown by @derinthescarletpescatarian, and it has infected my brain. Please enjoy these memes about this extremely normal and functional spaceship. This story definitely 100% has not messed my sleep schedule up on multiple occasions.

[be-gay-do-crime-ahaha]

tal :D

[ln-g]

me, a brand new college student missing home, reading "And then I lay down among old, familiar scents and textures. And I go to sleep."

[mamzier]

Aspen be like

[iamreallytryingiswear]

since i started reading i couldn't take this ideia out of my mind

[oswaldide]

look at fanart without spoiling myself challenge

[nehswritesstuffs]

From the list of questions for fic writers (way late on this one): What do you wish someone would ask you about TTOU? Answer it now!

Aaaaah, you are not too late! By all means, I love asks/ask memes, so the more the merrier. :D

What's a question I wish someone asked me about The Thick of UNIT? Hmm... that's a good one.

Aside from, you know, asking something that sort of uncorks the block I've got in the story writing process (*Sign of the Cross*), I guess it would be something about how UNIT is structured and how it fits within the current UN's system. I have lore. Did you know that the TTOU-verse UNIT is actually UNIT 3.0? Yes, there were two short-lived prior versions of UNIT within-universe... and that's only the tip of the iceberg. You can get some hint of lore in the author's notes of Rocks Are Dumb and So Are Lizard People, but that's neither here nor there. Anyhow, there's a lot to consider, and while I haven't considered everything, I have taken lots of thought into shit.

Want one of these fan fiction questions answered? I'm still taking asks!

[nobrain-nothoughts]

You should, just so we can witness the disaster that will inevitably happen when said cat attacks Tinera's chickens.

[3hobbitsinatrenchcoat]

@derinthescarletpescatarian

The entire experience so far of reading TTOU can be summarized by this meme:

Anyway I'm 44% done. This is fantastic.

[comatosecartesian]

in honor of the latest chapter, have an incomprehensible TTOU meme. This story has my attention in a vicegrip.

if you want to comprehend:

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

derin, is there an established tag on tumblr for javelin memes or fanart?

i need to know for reasons, please

I have no knowledge on this. There's a fair bit tagged as "ttou" but I don't know if there's an agreed upon convention.

[alexanderwales]

Book Review: Time to Orbit: Unknown

My habit of putting colons in my review titles bites me for the first but probably not last time.

Spoilers for the whole thing follow, and I think you should take that seriously, because this is largely a mystery. I'm going to assume that you read it.

Time to Orbit: Unknown is a scifi web serial by Derin Edala. The meme pitch is that this is a Very Normal Spaceship where Nothing Goes Wrong. The more conventional pitch is that our protagonist Aspen Greaves wakes up from chronostasis on a damaged colony ship with no crew in sight and has to figure things out from there.

I read TTOU basically straight through, binging rather than getting weekly installments, and some of this review will probably reflect that. Pacing is a difficult thing to start with, but it's way more difficult when you're trying to pace for two different audiences who are receiving the text in very different ways. As a binge reader, I thought the pacing was mostly fine, though did suffer a little from being formatted for serial chapters, particularly the implied cliffhanger ending to most chapters e.g. "I could only hope that everything would be fine ...". There's also a little bit of reiteration, where characters are going over what the open questions and issues are, which felt to me like it was in service of the weekly reader. As a binge reader, it was often just going over things I had read half an hour ago.

TTOU starts as a mystery. Why was Aspen woken up with no one to help them with chronostasis? Why is there no crew? Why have they been chosen to become captain in spite of their nearly complete lack of qualifications? Why are the crew dead? Where are the dead bodies?

As a mystery, the starts off really well, with a nice sequence of reveals and further questions. Aspen talks to the ship's AI, goes on some adventures around the ship, gets answers and more questions, and we gradually learn just how many weird problems this ship has.

Eventually though, the story starts running into a problem, which is that too many pressing problems get solved, and the ticking clock stops ticking. This isn't great for the pacing, and the sense of momentum temporarily leaves the story, especially because these big questions have been what's propelling it forward. As soon as it feels like we're not unraveling those, my interest started to wane. This was particularly true when characters would say "well, that's actually not a problem right now, guess we'll figure it out later".

Aspen doesn't stay alone for terribly long, and soon starts reviving other people from chronostasis, which is where we get the rest of our cast of characters from. I enjoyed these additions, though this is also the part where the serial gets very talky. There are, of course, some mysteries associated with the new crew, and I think here is where I need to talk about how TTOU handles mysteries.

To my mind, mysteries are at their best when there's a singular moment when everything snaps into focus. I like epiphanies, not necessarily from the characters, but from myself. The pieces have been presented to me, and in theory I could have solved it early on my own, but instead I get to solve it concurrently with the final piece being pushed into place. A good mystery author dangles the mystery in front of you, feeds you pieces, and then gets you to share the epiphany or at least feel smart when the protagonist rips off the villain's mask or whatever.

TTOU sometimes does this in exactly that way. There were a handful of times when I thought to myself "ah ha!" right at exactly the correct moment, which is just prior to the reveal after I had been led there by the nose.

There are other times when the reveal doesn't feel like things are snapping into place, it comes with caveats and bumps and occasionally, an admission that this was not actually a mystery at all. I might be projecting here, but writing a web serial is hard, and sometimes I would get a whiff of either course correction or bailing out. I'm tempted to go through everything I would label a "mystery" and then go through resolutions one by one, but I think that would require a partial reread of the story, would possibly not be illuminating, and might just be a matter of my own personal preferences and experience of reading. I'll give two examples though:

There's an enduring mystery of what killed off the crew of that gets locked at the front of the ship. This is one of the first mysteries in the book, and it doesn't get its resolution until very far in: they got pneumonia and don't have the medicine to treat it. While their deaths do feel like they're treated as a mystery, the reveal is not treated as much of a reveal, in spite of how longstanding the mystery was. It makes sense, but nags at me, like there was a mystery there that turned out to be a red herring. (This is probably a matter of signaling, though I'm not entirely sure.)

The captain went through and killed a bunch of sleeping colonists with an ax. His initial motivation for doing this is explained as just psychosis, and later, explained as him fighting the AI, which has been taking over the brains of colonists for use in compute. We get some additional context that his husband has been secretly put on the ship, and if the AI continued, it was going to kill him (or possibly, he was already dead). This ... still kind of doesn't work for me, as it sort of makes sense, but it doesn't feel like my understanding snapped into place. It's like someone told me the answer to the riddle and I said "eh, I guess" rather than "ah, right, that was it all along". Partly the captain is crazed, acting on emotion more than with a plan. It makes the resolution of his motivations hit a lot less hard. (I think this is at least partly an issue of how the resolution is delivered, or how it all unfolds. Maybe I would have wanted to get in the captain's head more. There are decent beats in that plot, but as a mystery it felt a little meh.)

The titular unknown time to orbit is caused by an engine problem, and this felt like a mystery, until quite late in the story someone said "oh yeah, I looked at the engine and I guess it just failed or something". It looked like a mystery, and felt like it was treated as a mystery, but it turned out to just be nothing, which made all the fuss made about it retroactively feel pointless. (Technically this is tied into future issues, but it's still essentially just an accident that no one actually intended, and felt really arbitrary and pointless to me, especially given it's one of the first mysteries we learn of.)

Overall, the various mysteries are hit and miss for me, and became more miss than hit toward the middle of the book (or what feels like the middle of the book, I'm not going to go through and get word counts).

The problems start with the revival of new crew members, particularly Captain Sands, who becomes captain due to his ranking within the AI systems. He immediately becomes a soft antagonist, and Aspen immediately takes a back seat in terms of agency. More people get revived, and they have their own stories, and then there's a hard pivot into a murder mystery, and ... this is where I sat and thought for a bit about whether I wanted to continue reading.

I think there was some good character work in the murder mystery arc, but it felt like there were too many characters, and I cared about too few of them, and our protagonist wasn't doing all that much proactive about anything. I didn't care about the victims, and the only reason I found the question of their murder compelling was the idea that this tied into some larger plot, that it would reveal some of the outstanding questions about the ship.

The resolution to what I'll call that middle chunk of the book seemed to me to be a soft reset, and I found it very welcome. The "new crew" were all dead, some old plots got somewhat messy wrapups, and we were very clearly off to new horizons. I don't have any idea if that's how it was written, but it came off as "alright, let's go back to what works".

And the good news for me was that there were more mysteries, this time as the crew reached the planet they'd been aimed at. From then on, I liked basically everything again. There's a big ask that happens in the middle, and conventional wisdom is that your scifi is Like Earth Unless Noted and that you should put your notes at the start ... but I was interested enough that I didn't mind it in this particular case.

The new planet is already settled, you see, and the how and why of that is fun to explore, as well as sort of making sense of a few earlier things that were pointed out. And the settlers have their own weird societies with their own mores and quirks, and there are culture clashes, and mysteries, and ...

For the most part, I found the sociology stuff more interesting than the mysteries. I wanted to know how these weird new people worked, how they organized their settlement, what their tax policy was like, how they made their houses and what they did in their leisure time. Thankfully, the book seemed as interested in this as I was, and while there are places that I think some readers might have found it to be "slow", I really did enjoy all the time and effort spent on describing these people and how they operated given their circumstances.

I don't know how well this all works in terms of resolutions. At least some of the outside threat is treated almost like a joke, and while there was some tension, it wasn't the sort of tension/release dynamic that I like in my stories, just tension followed by things going right in spite of that tension, with not much feeling of climax. I didn't particularly mind that though. And in the end the ship gets retrofitted, and Aspen becomes the new AI, and it all felt to me like it fit, even if there's quite a bit of fridge logic about why they couldn't just stay on the planet, and what a slow death as a generation ship might look like.

So all in all, I think I enjoyed the story, if less than I hoped I would. The beginning was a banger, made retroactively a little weaker by some of the resolutions to the mysteries. The middle was a slump, but after the soft reset, I was much more enamored with the story, and glad that I didn't actually put it down. I liked it better when it wasn't trying to be a mystery, when it was about the characters and the engineering, the vibes and an interesting future.

(It probably suffers a little bit from me comparing it to the last "woke up on a spaceship with dead people and no idea what's going on" book I read, Project Hail Mary, which was not written under the constraints of webfic.)

[diceheist]

im LOSIGN my mind this is exactly the fic and also i just posted the next chapter 😏

I’m reading The Warmth of Life by @diceheist and

she is so obviously in love it’s actually funny, but whatever, stay in denial if you think it makes you cooler

[nehswritesstuffs]

Ask game! 💋💥💞💫

Ooooh, yay! Thank you~

This got kind of long, so my answers are under the cut!

💋when you leave comments on a fic, do you want to hear back from the writer?

Yes! It's rare for me to not want to hear back, but I know and understand that sometimes you got nothing else to say, since I've been on that end too.

💥find your least kudos'd fic - say something wonderful about it.

That would be TTOU Big Finish Snippet: Workplace Security [AO3] with its all of THREE KUDOS! *paper confetti* I really enjoyed writing something for The Thick of UNIT that was Jamie, Sam, and Bismuth. One of the great things about both Doctor Who and The Thick of It is the side characters and what they can bring to the story. While Doctor Who is able to access all of time and space with its side characters and give us more Human voices to lean upon for anywhere from an episode to a whole series/season, the side characters in The Thick of It give us a sense of just how many cogs are in the system and how big and far-reaching everything is, especially what the ministers and aides are cocking up. It's a reminder of all the banal shit in a government or other large organization and how much of said shit happens and yet you have to carry on best you can. Here we're able to explore all of those concepts in a short audio script fic that has no shortage of Bismuth attempting to figure things out, Sam being a sort of grounding force, and Jamie being... well... Jamie. my next-least at five is the beginnings of a rewrite of an old One Piece fic i haven't touched in years and i really need to get back on that bc i haven't touched the rewrite in more than a few months lol i'm too many dozens of thousands of words into the conceptualization to just drop it at this point

💞what's the most important part of a story for you? the plot, the characters, the worldbuilding, the technical stuff (grammar etc), the figurative language

I'm going to answer this in regards to fan fiction only, since it has factors that don't impact published original fiction and vice versa. A tough one, but I would have to honestly say it's a weird combination of factors that can vary if certain criteria are met. Sometimes I begin to go through a fic where something's not up to snuff and I'll go "I'll entertain this for now" and it's lead to some surprising things. Part of this I think comes from cutting my fandom teeth with varying anime as a teen back in the 2000s. One of the things that I think makes sense when you think about it but we're easily able to take for granted is that one can utilize fandom as experimentation and practicing and figuring shit out. For some people, that's learning how to write a story. Others might know how to make words do things (wording is hard!), but they need practice at worldbuilding and storycraft. Some are trying to figure out how to stay consistent with a character, while on the opposite end of that, there's shit so silly that it can't help but be funny. If there's the right balance, then there are definitely things I can look over, but too many infractions clashing with one another and whoops Nehs out. There's also people who use fandom to practice foreign language skills in general. We see it often with weebs learning Japanese, but it also goes with people writing in English-as-a-Second-Language too. I've seen some really questionably-crafted stories that were rife with spelling and technical errors, but the soul of the story is there, if that makes any sense. They KNOW the characters, they KNOW what they want to tell, they KNOW how to get everything across in every possible way, and probably write really well in their native language, but in English...? They're working on it. And that's great! Part of me wants to branch out into that sort of thing one day, but the problem is that the communities whose languages I'm trying to learn are already very bilingual in English. But yeah... because all of those things were so weird and fluid and just desperately wanted in Anglophone weeb spaces FFN that it made sense to take what we could and encourage others when it came to writing about our anime blorbos. I dunno about everyone else's experience, but I rarely was in the middle of flame wars, so most of my fandom experience tended to be pretty cool. Also, having ESL family helps. It's no joke that it's hard translating everything in your head before you say it--some stuff gets lost in translation... literally!

💫what is your favorite kind of comment/feedback?

In lieu of a mini book report like was common in my teen years (lol), I really enjoy the ones that take something(s) that the reader liked about the story/chapter and picks it all apart. It could just be that they really liked a line or exchange of dialogue, or mentioning how events are going and how that messes with the story, or using context clues to try to parse out what's coming next. Knowing what clicks and whirs and gets into people's brain is so interesting to me and I love getting that information because then that's stuff for me to figure out as well about my writing and how it interacts with folks. Bonus points when someone does it on a by-chapter basis and/or on older stuff! I do also appreciate when someone legitimately corrects me, lol, 'cause Lord knows I'm not perfect.

Anyone else interested in having me answer some questions as I avoid writing actual fic? See what other prompts there are here.

[silly-jellyghoty]

I'm perfectly normal about this story, i promise

@derinthescarletpescatarian I can't find where I got the original meme now, but nevertheless I fixed it