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Messages - Serack

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31
DF Spoilers / Re: Summoning Question
« on: July 27, 2017, 10:12:51 AM »
Harry is going to be summoned to the Mirror Mirror universe by his evil doppelganger. 

32
DF Spoilers / Re: Better Guns for Dresden and Co.
« on: July 22, 2017, 09:56:39 PM »
That's an incredibly generalized idea. It aligns the info we already know quite well, don't get me wrong, excellent organization on it. I just can't see it being the definite answer to anything. With all your inside info your theorizing has suffered with this generalization effect in recent years. Even what you choose to respond to as far as others theories has changed... avoiding heavy or major topical theorizing. Not really fair that, as the main chooser of 'quality theories'.

Thanks, I'm glad to have contributed to the forum, and I try my best to harvest other contributions before the autodelete monster gets them.

If you have anything positive to generate that you feel is worthy of conservation please point out your efforts to me.

33
DF Spoilers / Re: Better Guns for Dresden and Co.
« on: July 22, 2017, 11:49:01 AM »
That's probably a part of it, but it doesn't explain very well how that belief came into existence in the first place. It's not something Harry alone believes, it's shared by all wizards as far as we know.

Ok, so are you familiar with Jim's comments about... blah, I'll blanket quote em.

Quote
As technology advances, will wizards become marginalized?
It sort of depends on where magic goes.  Magic wasn’t always screwing up post WW2 tech.  Before WW2 magic had other effects.  It sorta changes slowly over time, and about every 3 centuries it rolls over into something else.  At one time, instead of magic making machines flip out it made cream go bad.  Before that magic made weird molls on your skin and fire would burn slightly different colors when you were around it.  I do mention this in Ghost story (in passing).  It’s not really aware or something like that, but it is something that changes along with the people who use it. 

Quote
PR: So, do you, yourself, when you're writing them, do you draw lines in your head between, say, the sort of magic that Harry does and the sort of magic the people in Bayport are capable of? Or is it just an issue of skill and quantity?
JB: Well, it's all a little bit different, but everyone interacts with that kind of energy in a different way. For instance, wizards cause disruptions in technology and other things around them because, you know, people are never all one thing or all the other, people are a conflicted group of weirdos, and so when you have human beings that are using magic, that sort of self-inner conflict, that's one of the side-effects that comes out, that's why they wreck things that are around them. If you're a fairy who's using magic, you're doing the same thing as a human being, but you don't have that cluttered human nature. You can sit around as a fairy and play X-box all you want, you're never going to ruin it, and still be an awesome wizard, but not as Dresden.

Now here's my more detailed theory on how the murpheonic field came to be.  Quoted from my theory on black magic. (note:  I wrote the below outside of the context of this nit-picky argument about gun mechanisms.  I'll try to tie it to that after the quote)

Reality Pushes Back
In other words, if you use your will/mind as an applied force to change reality, reality will exert an equal and opposite force upon your will/mind that could be changing it as well.

My thoughts on this idea of reality pushing back come from multiple inspirations.  One of the most poignant is how Harry insists to Lash that if she has been changing him, she pretty much has to have changed in return.xrt#X 

Even more fundamental is the nature of the "murpheonic field."  Or at least why it exists from my theorizing PoV.  As a wizard develops his ability to shape reality according to his will, he is coming into direct conflict with the fact that humanity has been doing a pretty dang good job of defining just exactly how reality is supposed to work, and as a result is accomplishing all these really cool technological things.  But because the wizard is a member of humanity, and is breaking these hard and fast "rules" that this cool technology is based off of, his magic interferes with it and makes it likely to fail. 

You could even say that the wizard's mind has been warped by his continued use of magic to reshape reality, until the parts of reality that utilize highly specialized physical laws that his magic flies in the face of [I.E. technology] become highly unreliable to him.

Ok, back to gun mechanisms...  let see.  Another way of framing the above murpheonic theory is that modern mankind has used the Scientific Method to nail down the mechanisms of how stuff works pretty well.  But outside the lab, things break down, or have failures.  Somehow when the side effect of magic making cream go bad, morphed into the murpheonic field, it manifested into emphasizing the things brake down or have failures aspect of technology, and even though the M1911 was a WW1 service semi-automatic pistol, the fact that it's generally perceived that it has modes of failure that are a part of it's technological advances over Harry's trusty '38 make it susceptible to his murpheonic field. 


Here are two anecdotes slightly offset from this discussion but that are relevant. 

Compared to me, my step father is a gun nut.  He prefers a trusty revolver too, but he doesn't have a problem with an "automatic" so much as a problem with a police force deploying them without sufficient training in how to clear a failure.  And he once stopped and showed me the house that was involved in a shoot-out when the local county sheriff's office converted from revolvers to automatics across the force.  Several deputies died during that shootout, and he blames it on their not being sufficiently trained in clearing a failure in their automatics. 

When I was a soldier, in basic training, they drilled me in clearing my M-16 to the point where we did it in synchronized formation step by step, eyes front until we all in synchrony slanted our weapons and looked down to check that the chamber was empty.  Look up and tilt the weapon back to the vertical plane.  Release the bolt. *Slam* the entire formation's bolts slide home at once.

Ok second anecdote.  As a green beta I once tried to call out referring to the P90 as a carbine in a beta comment.  Jim responded with a WALL of text about the P90, carbines, sub-machine guns, and the differences between them.  So Jim knows more about guns than me.  Although I doubt he's spent as many nights cuddling with an M-16.

34
From what I've seen, Yrrah has largely been replaced by -Harry, /Harry, !Harry, and ~Harry.  I thought most had decided on -Harry, but then the others keep popping up.

Ah, I'd missed that evolution.  There's time for it to drift elsewhere anyways.

35
I think Jim is being coy. 

Though I love the idea of Jim going back and identifying potential easter eggs for down the road, rather than having intentionally put them in way back when. 

Don't get me wrong, I LOVE easter eggs.

He says he's ended up working out a few things like this, like wizard longevity being related to Harry's ability to recover from injuries long term. 

As for pretty deliberate Easter eggs, there's a gorgeous one about Molly in the third paragraph of Small Favor, and I've theorized that Uriel showed up in book 2

You're probably aware of the famous light saber comment from Butters in Ghost Story, and the theories that Lacuna's name is a direct reference to the Latin word for a gap, as in between teeth, making her the tooth faerie. 

36
DF Spoilers / Re: Better Guns for Dresden and Co.
« on: July 22, 2017, 02:19:29 AM »
How about this. 

Harry's magic is tied up in his belief of what reality should be.

Harry believes revolvers are older, more reliable technology, and thus are less susceptible to his wizard's aura. 

Harry believes automatics are newer, less reliable technology. 

Automatic weapons fail around him more frequently than his revolver.

Actual complexity and failure rates may matter, but what really matters is what Harry believes about his magic.  And thus, his natural hex is more likely to cause failures in the automatics who's technology he is suspicious of. 

And even if that understanding is incomplete, it explains the body of evidence well enough that I'm satisfied. 

37
So during theorizing I've started using a few acronyms for... alternate versions of characters in theorized future story lines.  Specifically the Mirror Mirror (MM) book and the theorized Time Travel book.  So I'm going to start cashing potential acronyms and slang for these characters in this post, but won't add them to the official dictionary until we get closer to the actual books and the predominant slang becomes more solidified.

The terms:
MMcone=MM Marcone
PGH=Proven Guilty Harry
TTH=Time Travel Harry
Yrrah=MM Harry

38
I've taken "OG" to literally mean "Original Gangster" and to have a meaning something along the lines of "Street Legit."

39
DF Spoilers / Re: Mirror Mirror Opportunties
« on: July 20, 2017, 08:17:44 PM »
Why?  Do you think Mirror Harry went to work for Marcone?  It's not like there will be a different Marcone.  The split in timelines occurred near the end of book three.  Marcone was already Marcone by then.

I'm not sure why everyone thinks everyone else will be so different.  Different choices will have been made, but the basic characters will remain.

The WoJ again

Quote
Actually the character that's really interesting is the Mirror Mirror universe Marcone, and we'll get to him in a few books.

My reading of this is that Jim is implying MM Marcone is not the same character as the standard universe Marcone, and that the differences are "really interesting"

I have very specific, bad ass theories on some of those differences.

As we get closer to MM, I'm going to start using the term MMcone. 

Kinda like Harry Yrrah for MM Harry and TTH for time traveling Harry. 

40
DF Spoilers / Re: New short story in process
« on: July 20, 2017, 08:08:37 PM »
Do we get an information dump at all?

I'm sorry I'm not sure what you mean.  In the story?  Information about Jim's writing situation?

Also, If I knew what you mean, I would then have to judge if this is something that should be RAFO'd as beta exclusive info. 

41
DF Books / Re: Does Jim have a new story?
« on: July 19, 2017, 12:54:02 PM »
Yah, Even Hand has gotten around a few times that way.

Shame, since Jim was denied rights to include it in his own anthology shortly after he wrote it. 

Check the main sight, there was an announcement today for new stories.

42
DF Spoilers / Re: Mirror Mirror Opportunties
« on: July 18, 2017, 08:20:45 PM »
I think there will be some information on Marcone that Harry isn't aware of based on what Jim has said.  Harry is very guilty I think about the Red Court, and Susan.  He might see things in this reality that make him realize that the alternative was much worse.

Oh I'm pretty confident you're right and we will find out some interesting things about Marcone.

Quote from: WoJ from KC signing
Actually the character that's really interesting is the Mirror Mirror universe Marcone, and we'll get to him in a few books.

I think we will also find out some stuff about Mavra since he said this during last year's Reddit podcast:

Quote from: WoJ
When are we going to see Mavra again?
Um... 19?  *pondering*  Wait, I'm sorry we'll definitely see her in Mirror Mirror.  She's a fast ally of Dresden's in Mirror Mirror.

I'm in agreement with Zaphodess though in that Mirror Mirror will reveal a lot about the "Black Council" that will then translate into vital intel when Harry gets back to his home reality. 

43
DF Spoilers / Re: New short story in process
« on: July 18, 2017, 01:58:13 PM »
I'M not the one that needs such fixing. It's the one who should be delivering the Mercedes, but is only delivering the Smartcar. I'd be thrilled to get both as you seem to think we will be getting, but if he's asking audiences for ideas about what to put in the book, it's nowhere close to being done. I'd imagine that this time next year, we will still be wondering where Peace Talks is.

I haven't gotten an update on the disposition of his new house, but if the June 30th deadline wasn't another blown deadline for the contractor, and he's moved in, I would be surprised if the opposite weren't true. 

Anyway, I get your complaint, but even though there will be plenty sympathetic to it, a significant portion of the audience here will be more sympathetic to Jim.  And respond accordingly.  After all, the term "fan" comes from "fanatic." 

Further defense of either viewpoint isn't really necessary. 

44
DF Spoilers / Re: New short story in process
« on: July 17, 2017, 05:17:28 PM »
Jim's mentioned at signings that he wants to write a short story about a trip to the zoo for the three of them.  If I remember right, it's going to be the same story told from the three different perspectives, although Jim followed up that it's turning out to be much more difficult and frustrating than he anticipated.

I didn't know what Serack just told us, but in the main site here, there is a section to tell us the news about JB works. It has been recently update to tell that Jim is working in a story exclusively for Briefcases (just like he wrote Aftermath just for Side Jobs) and it said we will see Maggie and Mouse POV

Coming back to reiterate my original post that Jim's said it's the same story about a trip to the zoo told from all three perspectives. 

And I'll add that... It.  Is.  Awesome.

I might be suffering from the latest short story is the best short story itis.  But if we don't count the novellas it's probably the best short story yet.  (granted the others have moments just as good)  It's good on multiple levels. 

I say again.  It.  Is.  Awesome.

45
DF Spoilers / Re: New short story in process
« on: July 13, 2017, 11:03:39 AM »
Jim's mentioned at signings that he wants to write a short story about a trip to the zoo for the three of them.  If I remember right, it's going to be the same story told from the three different perspectives, although Jim followed up that it's turning out to be much more difficult and frustrating than he anticipated.

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