"That Shape Had None" – A Horror of Substrate Independence (Short Fiction) | Hacker News Reader

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

starlightconvenience.net

101 pointscasmalia20 comments

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

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

Good read. Feels like Lena was among inspirations.

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

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

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

This is brilliant.

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

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.

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.

This reminds me of "Calliope" in Sandman

Interesting.

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

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.

Save to Instapaper and read on Kobo ;-)

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

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.

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

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.

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.

This is a good one.

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