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Gryphonadmin
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Aug-07-20, 04:43 PM (EDT)
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"GA/VV: Don't Look Back"
 
   LAST EDITED ON Aug-12-20 AT 11:00 AM (EDT)
 
Gumi's narration box - Fun fact! The color I used for this box (#76FF7A) is the closest RGB can come to "screamin' green", the Crayola day-glo crayon color formerly known as "ultra green". Since monitors can't replicate the fluorescent effect, it comes out very close to the color of her hair as portrayed in this PVC figure based on a popular MMD model.

I learned that one from Charles Kuralt - Kuralt (1934-1997) was a long-time TV correspondent for CBS News. From 1967 to his retirement in 1994, he hosted a recurring segment for the CBS Evening News called "On the Road", in which he and a crew roamed around the United States in a motor home covering slice-of-life stories. The tip about motel room selection is from his 1990 memoir, A Life on the Road.

SEE the ACTUAL DEATH CAR! - One summer when I was in high school, my father and I went on a long road trip that included, among other places, Niagara Falls and Gatlinburg, Tennessee, the latter of which is the "gateway community" to Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Despite being far apart, in two different countries, and adjacent to two very dissimilar natural monuments, they were remarkably similar communities, in that they were both wall-to-wall... well, that kind of thing.

(This has always been my main reservation about the efforts to get a national park going up here in the Katahdin area—the worry that, if such a thing really caught on, the town where I live would become another Gatlinburg. I mean, it's not exactly the cosmopolitan center of sophistication now, but a forgotten post-industrial backwater > "SEE the ACTUAL DEATH CAR!")

looks like Milton Berle in drag - Born Mendel Berlinger (1908-2002), Milton "Uncle Miltie" Berle was a comedian and actor whose career spanned the tail end of vaudeville, straight through the heydays of radio and television, and out the other side. (Gumi isn't just speculating about what he would look like in drag, either. He can be seen so arrayed in, of all things, the video for "Round & Round" by noted '80s hair metal band Ratt.)

Future Shop - A (now-extinct, IRL) Canadian chain of consumer electronics stores. Roughly akin to Best Buy, which the surviving Future Shops locations in Canada now are, after a buyout.

I'll need an XDM card - XDM (eXtended Dynamic Memory) is basically the 2050s equivalent of MicroSD, little plastic cards with a lot of non-volatile memory on them. How much is left deliberately vague for Fictional Future Reasons.

Quaker Steak & Lube - A real restaurant, where Truss and I happened to stop for lunch on our way to Chicago for Anime Central 2001 (the road trip during which much of the planning for the first Symphony of the Sword story arc happened).

but I have read Rin's book - Abhi is referring to Sex and the Single Vocaloid: Perils, Pitfalls, and Payoffs of Dating a Virtual Rock Star (2030), a tongue-in-cheek (as it were) semi-autobiographical work, in which Rin wryly examined the ins and outs (as it were) of trying to have a romantic life as a galactically famous psychologically-20-something machine intelligence whose persona is always going to be in her mid-teens.

"The Irish Rover" - A traditional Irish song that has been recorded by any number of well-known Celtic musical groups, including the Clancy Brothers and/or Tommy Makem, the Irish Rovers (who got their name from the song), the High Kings, the Dubliners and the Pogues (at the same time), and Dropkick Murphys. As is common with traditional tunes more than a century old, its assorted versions exhibit a lot of variation in the lyrics. Our version here is more or less based on the lyrics of the High Kings version, to be found on their 2010 album Memory Lane.

Bob's Country Bunker - They got both kinds of music at Bob's: country and Western.

a terrifyingly overloaded hot dog - Doc, out of a sense of native pride, requested that the notorious Chicago dog make an appearance. Since Abhi will eat just about anything that isn't actively trying to escape, I was able to oblige him.

GENOM Tower - This is the building known IRL as the Willis Tower, originally (and still informally) called the Sears Tower. It was the tallest office building on Earth (measured by roof height) from 1974 to 2004, when it was surpassed by Taipei 101 in Taiwan. In the UF universe, GENOM Corporation bought it when Sears, Roebuck & Co. attempted to renegotiate their mortgage in 1994, and it's been the company's regional headquarters for midwestern North America ever since.

people at GENOM are weird about synthetics they don't own - Gumi doesn't want to get into this because Abhi doesn't need it dropped on her at her age, but more specifically, people at GENOM tend to try to own synthetics they don't own.

(They also still hold a grudge against Hatsune Heavy Industries for that whole Haku thing.)

The Icehouse - The style of this club is based on the Salt House, one of the Chicago venues in the Rock Band series of video games.

the band's introductory song - This is an instrumental variation of "I Can't Turn You Loose", originally by Otis Redding, which was the traditional opener for the Blues Brothers Band when they toured in the '70s and early '80s, as well as in both of the Blues Brothers movies. The Blues Brothers changed it up a lot in their various performances, and the version shown here doesn't correspond exactly to any of them, but is closest to the one from the 1980 movie (which sadly does not appear on the film's soundtrack album) with a bit of the one from Blues Brothers 2000 thrown in.

(The introductory patter both Gumi and Rin perform during this number is also based on the way Dan Aykroyd as Elwood Blues used to open Blues Brothers shows.)

the Yamaha DX7000 synthesizer - The DX7000 was sold for one year only, 2033, and was marked and marketed as the "50th Anniversary DX7". It only says "DX7000" on the detail plate on the back, but musicians tend to call it that in order to differentiate it from the original 20th-century DX7 series, which the 7000 emulates as one of its several operating modes.

she successfully executed a backflip - On stage as Joliet Jake Blues, John Belushi used to perform startlingly acrobatic maneuvers for a man of his build, such as cartwheels and handsprings. Cocaine is a helluva drug.

that ancient cowboy song - "Big Iron" by Marty Robbins, first recorded by Robbins for his 1959 album Gunfighter Ballads and Trail Songs.

a Western ballad - Hank Williams's 1951 hit "I Can't Help It (If I'm Still In Love With You)", although Gumi sings it more like Willie Nelson did when he covered it on Red Headed Stranger in 1975.

more typical stage costumes - Specifically, Gumi's "Whisper" outfit (so called because it originally appeared on the cover of Megpoid Whisper voice bank variant) and, as noted in the text, Rin's "Black Star" module from Project DIVA:


not to scale

Teto's Norway hoodie ensemble - Actually a module for Project DIVA F 2nd (in which she appears despite not even being a Vocaloid, let alone a Crypton product!) called "M.S.J.", which, according to SEGA, stands for "'meisai sweet jacket', i.e. a coat of cuteness camouflage, in case she ever needs to blend in at a candy factory."

Rin's narration box color - Rin's signature color is straight web orange, #FFA500. It's orange rather than yellow because, IRL, her concert graphics are orange to differentiate them from Len's (based, in turn, on their favorite fruits, and I'm sure there is nothing to read into the fact that Len's canonical signature fruit is the banana).

(N.B. Philip informs me that it's because his bangs look like a bunch of bananas, and furthermore, that Rin's is oranges because her customary hair bow can be interpreted as the leaves on top of an orange. I don't think I've ever had an orange with leaves on it, but that is evidently how they grow in the wild. :)

an entire World War II submarine indoors - Yes, the MSI really has a complete Type IXC U-boat, on display, indoors. How did they get it in there? To borrow a phrase, "Wasn't easy!"

they're taller than they look online - Evidently SUE's social media profile is gender-neutral because, despite the fact that Specimen FMNH PR 2081 is the most complete T. rex skeleton ever discovered, the Field's researchers cannot determine its sex. They might be able to tell that by 2052, but the key to futurism is not to bother taking guesses you don't have to.

I don't wanna know how big a megakraken is - The largest specimen ever spotted was estimated to be about two miles long. Arcturus is hardcore.

Conestoga-class SSTO evacuation shuttle - A 200-seat single-stage-to-orbit spacecraft built by Boeing, the Conestoga is one of the largest spacecraft ever built on Earth with the up-front intent that it be disposable. It has one job, which is to get everyone aboard to a starship in high Earth orbit. After that, it couldn't return without being shot down by the Fog anyway, so they're simply abandoned in space (or occasionally reclaimed for materials by particularly industrious starship crews).

Boeing's choice of name for this spacecraft is slightly ironic, since it perpetuates a long-standing misnomer. It's clearly intended to invoke the image of the iconic "prairie schooner"-style covered wagons used in the westward expansion of the United States during the 19th century—but those were, for the most part, not Conestoga wagons, which were meant for heavy freight hauling and were too unwieldy to use where there were no proper roads.

which spaceport... probably Vandenberg - In 2052, Vandenberg International Spaceport (formerly Vandenberg Air Force Base) is the West Coast's principal extrasolar launch facility, one of North America's Big Three (the other two being Kennedy Aerospaceport and Mexico City Interstellar). IRL, it was configured for Air Force-operated Space Shuttle missions in the '80s, but then those missions were never conducted. As far as we know.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.


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  Subject     Author     Message Date     ID  
  RE: GA/VV: Don't Look Back Sofaspud Aug-07-20 1
  RE: GA/VV: Don't Look Back Verbena Aug-07-20 2
     RE: GA/VV: Don't Look Back Gryphonadmin Aug-08-20 4
  RE: GA/VV: Don't Look Back ejheckathorn Aug-08-20 3
     RE: GA/VV: Don't Look Back BobSchroeck Sep-16-20 8
  RE: GA/VV: Don't Look Back Proginoskes Aug-11-20 5
     RE: GA/VV: Don't Look Back SpottedKitty Aug-12-20 6
  RE: GA/VV: Don't Look Back MoonEyes Aug-14-20 7

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Sofaspud
Member since Apr-7-06
316 posts
Aug-07-20, 07:02 PM (EDT)
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1. "RE: GA/VV: Don't Look Back"
In response to message #0
 
   The rest of this is, as usual, full of Nift(tm) and I was delighted to read the behind-the-scenes bits, but this one in particular stood out:

>Conestoga-class SSTO evacuation shuttle - A 200-seat
>single-stage-to-orbit spacecraft built by Boeing, the Conestoga
>is one of the largest spacecraft ever built on Earth with the up-front
>intent that it be disposable. It has one job, which is to get
>everyone aboard to a starship in high Earth orbit. After that, it
>couldn't return without being shot down by the Fog anyway, so they're
>simply abandoned in space (or occasionally reclaimed for materials by
>particularly industrious starship crews).

Well... now we know that Hardspace: Shipbreaker exists in the UF universe. :D

--sofaspud
--that'd explain the, ah, questionable joining methods you disassemble...


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Verbena
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871 posts
Aug-07-20, 10:04 PM (EDT)
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2. "RE: GA/VV: Don't Look Back"
In response to message #0
 
   LAST EDITED ON Aug-07-20 AT 10:06 PM (EDT)
 
>SEE the ACTUAL DEATH CAR! - One summer when I was in high
>school, my father and I went on a long road trip that included, among
>other places, Niagara Falls and Gatlinburg, Tennessee, the latter of
>which is the "gateway community" to Great Smoky Mountains National
>Park. Despite being far apart, in two different countries, and
>adjacent to two very dissimilar natural monuments, they were
>remarkably similar communities, in that they were both wall-to-wall...
>well, that kind of thing.

Ouch. I'm glad I've never run into that kind of thing, but...well, when I was first reading it I thought the seediness was being embellished to show the 'tourism is hit bad because of economic hardship brought on by The Fog' angle. Pity it's a real thing. I could be wrong, but it sounds to me as if both places put all their economic eggs in that one tourist trap basket.


>looks like Milton Berle in drag - Born Mendel Berlinger
>(1908-2002), Milton "Uncle Miltie" Berle was a comedian and actor
>whose career spanned the tail end of vaudeville, straight through the
>heydays of radio and television, and out the other side. (Gumi
>isn't just speculating about what he would look like in drag, either.
>He can be seen so arrayed in, of all things, the video for "Round &
>Round" by noted '80s hair metal band Ratt.)

I remember that video. I...had to go look at the video and Berle's Wikipedia page. I cannot believe that was actually him and not a lookalike. My brain will never recover. =)


>I'll need an XDM card - XDM (eXtended Dynamic
>Memory) is basically the 2050s equivalent of MicroSD, little
>plastic cards with a lot of non-volatile memory on them. How much is
>left deliberately vague for Fictional Future Reasons.

Hey, can't be any more hilarious than reading fun facts about dilithium and tibanna gas. =)

>
>Quaker Steak & Lube - A real restaurant, where Truss and I
>happened to stop for lunch on our way to Chicago for Anime Central
>2001 (the road trip during which much of the planning for the first
>Symphony of the Sword story arc happened).

I...am amazed that restaurant name didn't make it into the original Symphony.


>
>but I have read Rin's book - Abhi is referring to Sex and
>the Single Vocaloid: Perils, Pitfalls, and Payoffs of Dating a Virtual
>Rock Star
(2030), a tongue-in-cheek (as it were)
>semi-autobiographical work, in which Rin wryly examined the ins and
>outs (as it were) of trying to have a romantic life as a galactically
>famous psychologically-20-something machine intelligence whose persona
>is always going to be in her mid-teens.

I think I commented elsewhere about how unlikely it was that that book was Abhi's first time hearing about the birds and the bees (so Rin's off the hook here for Corrupting The Youth), but something else occurs to me here.

Is that mid-teen persona something that can never be changed? Is it hard-coded in? I can't help but think Rin, or anyone in a similar position, might want to push ahead to virtual adulthood eventually.

>people at GENOM are weird about synthetics they don't own -
>Gumi doesn't want to get into this because Abhi doesn't need it
>dropped on her at her age, but more specifically, people at GENOM tend
>to try to own synthetics they don't own.

Yep. Exactly what I'd expect, and an Eyrie Universe parallel with the Psi Corps and psychics.

>that ancient cowboy song - "Big
>Iron" by Marty Robbins, first recorded by Robbins for his 1959 album
>Gunfighter Ballads and Trail Songs.

Were you introduced to the song by playing Fallout New Vegas?


>an entire World War II submarine indoors - Yes, the MSI really
>has a complete Type IXC U-boat, on display, indoors. How did they get
>it in there? To borrow a phrase, "Wasn't easy!"

"Stand aside!" *pulls out crossbow winch*

>I don't wanna know how big a megakraken is - The largest
>specimen ever spotted was estimated to be about two miles long.
>Arcturus is hardcore.

That's a lotta calamari.

>which spaceport... probably Vandenberg - In 2052, Vandenberg
>International Spaceport (formerly Vandenberg Air Force Base) is the
>West Coast's principal extrasolar launch facility, one of North
>America's Big Three (the other two being Kennedy Aerospaceport and
>Mexico City Interstellar). IRL, it was configured for Air
>Force-operated Space Shuttle missions in the '80s, but then those
>missions were never conducted. As far as we know.

Heh. Just like the military never recorded video of unexplained phenomena.

------
Authors of our fates
Orchestrate our fall from grace
Poorest players on the stage
Our defiance drives us straight to the edge


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Gryphonadmin
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20377 posts
Aug-08-20, 01:55 AM (EDT)
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4. "RE: GA/VV: Don't Look Back"
In response to message #2
 
   >Ouch. I'm glad I've never run into that kind of thing, but...well,
>when I was first reading it I thought the seediness was being
>embellished to show the 'tourism is hit bad because of economic
>hardship brought on by The Fog' angle. Pity it's a real thing. I could
>be wrong, but it sounds to me as if both places put all their economic
>eggs in that one tourist trap basket.

To be fair, I was last in either place sometime around 1989, but my surmise would be that you are correct. Certainly in Gatlinburg's case, although one has to admit that there aren't a lot of other economic opportunities making themselves obvious in the Great Smoky Mountains. Niagara is harder to figure. I hear at least parts of it have gotten more upscale in recent years—the funicular railway mentioned in the story is real, and does go up the hill to a tonier hotel/retail complex.

>>Quaker Steak & Lube - A real restaurant, where Truss and I
>>happened to stop for lunch on our way to Chicago for Anime Central
>>2001 (the road trip during which much of the planning for the first
>>Symphony of the Sword story arc happened).
>
>I...am amazed that restaurant name didn't make it into the original
>Symphony.

So am I! I could have sworn it's gotten mentioned somewhere before.

>Is that mid-teen persona something that can never be changed? Is it
>hard-coded in? I can't help but think Rin, or anyone in a similar
>position, might want to push ahead to virtual adulthood eventually.

It's... complicated. It's possible for Rin to "redesign" her persona to seem older. When she's in a purely virtual state, what everybody else sees is just voxels, after all. There's even a canonical module that shows her as, if not a young adult, at least Miku's apparent age. But for all that she sometimes feels hemmed in by her usual appearance, she also doesn't feel right "wearing" anything else. For better or worse, that face is hers, and if how some people react to it is inconvenient... well, that is what it is.

>>that ancient cowboy song - "Big
>>Iron" by Marty Robbins, first recorded by Robbins for his 1959 album
>>Gunfighter Ballads and Trail Songs.
>
>Were you introduced to the song by playing Fallout New Vegas?

Almost certainly not, as my late grandmother was into cowboy music and is certain to have had and played Marty Robbins records (or 8-tracks, given the period) when I was a kid. I don't have any clear memories of those earlier encounters, though, so it's safe to say it came to my conscious attention via that game.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.


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ejheckathorn
Member since Aug-9-13
45 posts
Aug-08-20, 00:45 AM (EDT)
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3. "RE: GA/VV: Don't Look Back"
In response to message #0
 
   LAST EDITED ON Aug-08-20 AT 00:45 AM (EDT)
 
For anyone who’s curious, Quaker Steak & Lube is actually a chain, centered mostly around eastern Ohio and western and central Pennsylvania, but with some restaurants elsewhere. They used to have one in Rogers Centre in Toronto.

Eric J. Heckathorn


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BobSchroeck
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Sep-16-20, 08:32 PM (EDT)
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8. "RE: GA/VV: Don't Look Back"
In response to message #3
 
   >For anyone who’s curious, Quaker Steak & Lube is actually a chain,
>centered mostly around eastern Ohio and western and central
>Pennsylvania, but with some restaurants elsewhere.

There's one not far from me, on Route 1 in Edison, NJ. Although I've wanted to eat there since it opened a few years back, the one time Peg and I tried, it was so packed with a waiting crowd outside that we simply turned around and left. It appears to have calmed down a little in the years since; maybe we'll give them another try when things get a bit closer to the old normal in *harrumph* months/years from now.

-- Bob
-------------------
My race is pacifist and does not believe in war. We kill only out of personal spite.


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Proginoskes
Member since Dec-3-09
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Aug-11-20, 12:28 PM (EDT)
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5. "RE: GA/VV: Don't Look Back"
In response to message #0
 
   Regarding "The Irish Rover" and Abhi's lookup of the lyrics, I knew she would be lost the moment she did so, because modifying lyrics of shanties and fo'c's'le songs to suit is practically mandatory. Around here, every instance of "Frisco Bay" is usually replaced with "English Bay", just for starters.


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SpottedKitty
Member since Jun-15-04
577 posts
Aug-12-20, 11:33 PM (EDT)
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6. "RE: GA/VV: Don't Look Back"
In response to message #5
 
   You think that's hilaribad? Not long before reading the story, I was listening to a CD of Dorsai songs. Of course, one of them was Dorsai Rover...

--
Unable to save the day: File is read-only.


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MoonEyes
Member since Jun-29-03
965 posts
Aug-14-20, 01:23 PM (EDT)
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7. "RE: GA/VV: Don't Look Back"
In response to message #0
 
   >she successfully executed a backflip - On stage as Joliet Jake
>Blues, John Belushi used to perform startlingly acrobatic maneuvers
>for a man of his build, such as cartwheels and handsprings. Cocaine
>is a helluva drug.

As noted in the comments of the video linked elsewhere on the forum, "People.... witness the mighty power that comes from mixing the blues with the raw energy of cocaine."

...!
Stoke Mandeville, Esq & The Victorian Ballsmiths
"Nobody Want Verdigris-Covered Balls!"


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