(Spoilers) The Irritatingly Mysterious Snerking Thread

Pretty much everyone is tempted to snerk. Everyone gets different previews on the amazon and google book sites. So...I propose the following rules for this thread:

1. Take something you've read and hint at it
2. Make the hint juicy
3. Do your very best to make it utterly and completely misleading

Tararoys wrote:Pretty much everyone is tempted to snerk. Everyone gets different previews on the amazon and google book sites. So...I propose the following rules for this thread:

1. Take something you've read and hint at it
2. Make the hint juicy
3. Do your very best to make it utterly and completely misleading

Y was in bed diddiling with a winsome wench when X summoned him with exciting news about Z!

Is that good enough?

Charybdis wrote:

Tararoys wrote:Pretty much everyone is tempted to snerk. Everyone gets different previews on the amazon and google book sites. So...I propose the following rules for this thread:

1. Take something you've read and hint at it
2. Make the hint juicy
3. Do your very best to make it utterly and completely misleading

Y was in bed diddiling with a winsome wench when X summoned him with exciting news about Z!

Is that good enough?

...so, accuracy is optional?

Part of my preview included scenes where City class ironclads arrive in the Gulf of Dohlar and start conducting offensive operations. Before the KHIV's are ready.

I've not turned up any of these yet (and to be fair, I'm not looking all that hard), but some of my favourite sections in all of the books are where the cause is explained for Clyntahn indulging in another office-wrecking session In this particular book, I'm looking forward to finding out what happened in St Thyrmyms – and please, nobody tell me!
.

Part of my preview includes the scenes where Iris is giving birth. Hillarious dialogue aside, there's also an eye opening infodump on the state of Safehold medicine.

Yes, Safehold DOES have antibiotics and what not, most from genetically engineered plants and mosses and instructions on how to extract and use them in the Book of Pasquale. Safehold medical practice is actually almost as good as anything Earth had up until the mid-TWENTIETH century.

The preview I was able to see varied depending on how I accessed it. Without logging in to Amazon (US) I was able to see a pretty basic preview. After logging in, I was able to see a much more extensive preview. In another thread, I saw that one could do a google search and find the search result that had a "preview" available (on my results screen from the US it was about the third result down). This gave me a much more extensive preview, with (as others mentioned) occasionally missing pages (sometimes only a page or two, sometimes 10-15 pages). In either case, It was great IMHO. I read the various previews with great interest and will intentionally NOT write anything here that draws from any preview other than what's available at the "official snypphets" that are posted here. I guess it'll be as hard for me to do that as it is for Merlin and Nimue to keep up with their various alter egos...

evilauthor wrote:Part of my preview includes the scenes where Iris is giving birth. Hillarious dialogue aside, there's also an eye opening infodump on the state of Safehold medicine.

Yes, Safehold DOES have antibiotics and what not, most from genetically engineered plants and mosses and instructions on how to extract and use them in the Book of Pasquale. Safehold medical practice is actually almost as good as anything Earth had up until the mid-TWENTIETH century.

I only saw the end of that scene, but the presence of antibiotics is incredibly surprising. After nearly a millenia of use, one would expect most bacteria to be resistant to the few antibiotics the Book of Pasquale gives them access to, even if the Pasqualites are incredibly cautious in their use. It's not like you can just leave them instructions on how to identify, cultivate, and apply new antibiotics.

Even the use of something such as engineered phagemids (assuming you engineer some sort of crop Safeholdians can cultivate) would be problematic, both because they're specifically targeted, and because you'd eventually wind up with resistance there as well.

At some point, you'd have a situation where Pasqual's instructions cease to work effectively in the majority of certain types of cases. They might not have the scientific background to understand why, but I can't see the consequences of widespread antibiotic resistance being easily swept under the rug.

WeberFan wrote:The preview I was able to see varied depending on how I accessed it. Without logging in to Amazon (US) I was able to see a pretty basic preview. After logging in, I was able to see a much more extensive preview. In another thread, I saw that one could do a google search and find the search result that had a "preview" available (on my results screen from the US it was about the third result down). This gave me a much more extensive preview, with (as others mentioned) occasionally missing pages (sometimes only a page or two, sometimes 10-15 pages). In either case, It was great IMHO. I read the various previews with great interest and will intentionally NOT write anything here that draws from any preview other than what's available at the "official snypphets" that are posted here. I guess it'll be as hard for me to do that as it is for Merlin and Nimue to keep up with their various alter egos...

As of a few minutes ago, the google preview has been pulled down (US). The search result that included the preview link is gone.

Bluestrike2 wrote:

evilauthor wrote:Part of my preview includes the scenes where Iris is giving birth. Hillarious dialogue aside, there's also an eye opening infodump on the state of Safehold medicine.

Yes, Safehold DOES have antibiotics and what not, most from genetically engineered plants and mosses and instructions on how to extract and use them in the Book of Pasquale. Safehold medical practice is actually almost as good as anything Earth had up until the mid-TWENTIETH century.

I only saw the end of that scene, but the presence of antibiotics is incredibly surprising. After nearly a millenia of use, one would expect most bacteria to be resistant to the few antibiotics the Book of Pasquale gives them access to, even if the Pasqualites are incredibly cautious in their use. It's not like you can just leave them instructions on how to identify, cultivate, and apply new antibiotics.

Even the use of something such as engineered phagemids (assuming you engineer some sort of crop Safeholdians can cultivate) would be problematic, both because they're specifically targeted, and because you'd eventually wind up with resistance there as well.

At some point, you'd have a situation where Pasqual's instructions cease to work effectively in the majority of certain types of cases. They might not have the scientific background to understand why, but I can't see the consequences of widespread antibiotic resistance being easily swept under the rug.

I see your point about resistance to the natural antibiotics like 'Fleming's Moss' after the multiple centuries of common use. However, my vision of the 'Cosmic All' (RFC version), gives a little (perhaps a lot) of leeway to technology capable of terraforming a planet. Our real world antibiotics work by creating a toxic chemical environment. Bacteria develop resistance by biological diversity over short generations where adaptation allows survival for some that pass that resistance down the generational line.

Speculate that what such apparent natural antibiotics as the aforementioned 'Fleming Moss' (OAR) might work by an entirely different methodology. Perhaps Shan-wei created natural nanotech to 'mechanically' eat bacteria, thus denying any chance to grow into natural resistance.

Arthur C Clarke: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."