NaNoWriMo update: failure!

[tuftears]

I got about 8.5k words done on the proposed Genies: Rocking the Cradle story.

I kind of bogged down though... The real world is too depressing for writing about a bunch of psychopaths. I'm trying to think of a replacement writing project, something that will be just more silly fun.

What do you guys think of the idea of a Starfleet Cooking Academy?

Comments

[tuftears]

Holodecks are just plain trouble. :)

AI is certainly a fully viable thing in some sufficiently advanced technology, I just need to limit it for the purr-poses of the story setting. Think of it as a game feature and how players might abuse it: "My character is an AI! Therefore I can copy myself into all available space and all these copies can try to crack this code simultaneously. Rolling for hacking..."

Yep, exactly right, regards cooking difficulties. I'm thinking of a mix of cooking obstacles to overcome:

* Learning to cook in a variety of circumstances (cafeteria mass production, alien environments, multiple courses, "live performance" cooking, etc.)
* Mastering alien tastes, biology, and customs and tailoring recipes for those
* Food safety and cooking processes - you don't want cross-contamination i.e. using the spatula you were using for a heavy metals-laden dish for another dish!
* Understanding alien ingredients, recipes, and techniques
* Logistics (planning meals for a 5 year mission, dealing with a closed cycle life support system and the limited selection of materials available from hydroponics)
* Competing against fellow students, maybe in terms of a sporting competition, maybe with bets on the line or to right a wrong

[jordangreywolf]

Ooo. One challenge I can imagine -- but might be very hard to set up story-wise -- would be the ever-present problem of trying to make one dish to serve to two different aliens at the same table. Depending on how alien your aliens are, that might be simply IMPOSSIBLE in a number of settings (especially if right from the get-go, you can't even share the same atmosphere to safely breathe, hence how in the world would you eat at the same table ;) ). But I imagine some situation where there might be something built up around commonality in palates, wherever that happens.

I'm not sure how to model that with alien species, though. Perhaps it would be easier if the alien races were closer to "on this world, CATS came to dominate," while "on this world, our dinos didn't get wiped out, so it's DINOPEOPLE" and "the cockroaches who survived the nuclear apocalypse* were the predecessors to this world's insectoid race."

(* I've heard that the idea of "cockroaches as nuclear-armageddon-proof" is grossly exaggerated. But I'm running with it anyway just for silliness. ;) )

So what could Periplaneta Sapiens enjoy while sharing a table with Homo Sapiens? ... Well, duh, of course, he'd eat the leftover scraps! :D Ahem. Okay, bad example. But he'd gush over the Kool-Aid (sugar water).

No chocolate for canines. ;)

Eh. I can't think of any *serious* examples. Drat it. It's well out of my area of pseudo-expertise.

[tuftears]

Yeah, I'm going to take the approach that most aliens have a sufficiently similar biology that cooking cross-species is actually doable and not an exercise in futility. :) Progenitors blah blah DNA seeding blah blah. There will still be differences but not to the point of having to figure out how to cook rock.