She switches to the backstroke after ten laps. Ten more and she rolls over again; breaststroke. She has waterproof headphones and an audiobook going.
"The rules are unclear about this kind of income - potential interpretations range from 'number of posts' through 'number of words' through 'percentage of visitor time' through 'degree of influence over donations and prediction market activity', so I mostly just have to make sure that nobody's out to get me and if any judge looked at the blog it'd just look like an arcball blog and not something else."
"I'd like to be blue too but it'd be an extra handicap I don't need to try it on no assets, which is what I'd get if I tried going through Miolee even if someone from Miolee wanted to be grey in Anitam and also someone blue in Anitam wanted to be casteless in Miolee."
"Uh, I had a good math teacher, when I was two and went to an intercaste school, and at first I tried to get him to stop, er, relating everything to grey interests, but then I got worried about my career prospects and went back when I dropped out later, and he helped me figure out what had already been done and which sport would be good to cover and so on."
"Yeah. I got pushed into teaching swim lessons, which I tried - I could do it if the alternative was going on social services but the blog is better. For a while I went along with an attempt to push me into every obscure non-locomoting sport - I'm tolerable at archery - but I wasn't good enough to compete professionally at any of them. Could have tried to skip all the legwork usual towards a detective sort of position, possibly via nepotism, I followed my dad to work a few times - culture was miserable, I would have hated everyone there except him, I have that problem in a lot of possible grey fields. Could have made book traditionally but there's a lot of competition for that and it's not interesting or creative in the same way."
"Uh - it's not trivial to describe in a way that doesn't sound even more judgmental than I mean to be. You ever read about how oranges get 'compassion burnout' from having to put all their cases through bureaucracy and having lots of them every day? The cops didn't bother having anything to burn out in the first place."
"They're not all terrible, some of them are nice at least some of the time to victims or sympathetic perps, but they're handling it like - they go in and do things because that's what cops do - not because there's any underlying reason for why cops do those things."
"The first year of school my mom was my class's primary teacher. I stuck close to her and got other kids in trouble pretty casually if they bothered me. My mom's school only has one-year-olds, so after that I went to an intercaste school, which only covered through age two. Then I couldn't get into any plausible specialty schools because they all have fitness tests or military service requirements, and I mainstreamed grey and - I mean, the balance thing was typical as a target, and I got tripped and knocked over more than I got anything else in particular, but I didn't get as much crap as the wheelchair sports teams. I think it was an intersection of not having anything visibly wrong with me as an excuse and the lack of culture fit. I marked time till I could drop out and then self-taught from there, my parents worried about my being caste-nonconforming and think it'll bite me later but I just couldn't stick it out another year ahead in all the academics and pathetic in all the gym."
"Mix of old fiction - only Anitami or hand-translated, the thing I like about old fiction doesn't survive machine translation reliably - and sorta popular-level nonfiction, I don't drill deep into most topics to the point where I can go around nibbling on legit research papers but I read the sort of thing nonspecialist greens would read. Like, uh, I liked Mountains, Ilata Imentami, it's cultural geography."
"I like some science fiction, but more for the—exploration of our capabilities, of the ways society would or could be—that aspect. So that's sort of hit-and-miss, when it's miss it misses badly but when it's hit it's pretty good. I like stuff that explores the way society—is, the day-to-day things, the way people live their lives, especially in other castes and other cultures. And I like speculative fiction."
"I mean, there's some cheesiness that's inherent to the medium, you can only break out into song so many times in random situations before it becomes a bit too much, right? But some musicals are good enough, musically and stuff, that you can just straightforwardly enjoy them—Oahk is a particularly moving example, I do recommend—and others embrace the silliness and only sometimes succeed."
"I don't know enough about your taste in movies to be sure but I really like it - it - it passes up obvious boring opportunities and finds good ones instead. It's very sweet. Its fault is that it makes a lot of use of montages, I guess, but if it didn't it'd be sixteen hours long? Don't watch it if you hate montages."
"Like—okay I really like stuff that explores alien societies, especially ones that are actually smart and thoughtful about their castes. I like sci-fi that treats the lightspeed limit like the hard problem it is instead of handwaving it away. I like exploration of alternate presents where some technological changes were or weren't made, and I like speculative future fiction, particularly when it's careful about its societal worldbuilding. Does this paint a picture?"
"It's a good sport as they go. Well, as the ones with enough to write statistics articles about go, I'd probably have had a slightly easier time generating a sincere interest in gymnastics but I think there's less material without the team aspect and the noisy performance information."
"You'll never fit in with your peers if you call in authority figures over every little thing. She says you fell down the stairs, and let's be honest, that sounds like something you'd do. Of course emotions were running high after the big match. I'm sure your little friends were just upset that you didn't qualify for the next grade of team, they want to play with you, don't you want to play with them. Why do you even have encrypted documents."
"To be honest the problem is more that the kids—don't really feel like they can, I think? Or, there's the whole environment set up, if the adults don't do anything or even approve of it, then the kids keep the status quo. And then they grow up into adults who think that's just a normal part of growing up, and the bullied kids won't actually go work at grey schools."
"There's probably room for the occasional teacher to spend their entire career trying to make a difference and playing career politics well enough to keep their job - or just start a weird little grey school with different rules where everyone knows what's up when they enroll - but yeah it's not a good overall pressure."
"I'm not actually sure. Some clients like pillow talk and some of them are enterprising and some pillow talk eventually turns to my having opinions about what an enterprising person should do but I never treated those conversations as anything serious and I don't think my clients did, either. I've gone on more serious dates with a couple of purples but they weren't the enterprising sort."
"She teaches at a grey school. I don't think I'd go as far as to say that she's culturally grey or would have been happier grey, honestly, she loves teaching, but she likes greys and met one she liked, and thinks people who advise against intercaste marriage are being reactionary fuddy-duddies."
"Yes. Our sample size is perfect. My neurological balance disorder that neither of my parents has was obviously spontaneously generated by the wrongness of intercaste marriage. I probably inherited my disinterest in grey work from my mother whose list of top three things she'd do if she were grey rotates through twelve things depending on her mood."
"If my green date were the writer type of green I might recommend him that idea. Goodness knows he's nerdy enough that he'd research everything there is to know about the most obscure ant species ever just to get every detail right. His girlfriend is a physicist and works at the university, too, she'd probably find him a biologist to talk to."
"I'm - wary of - investing heavily without that lined up solidly? An advantage of dating people you could have kids with is that you don't have to separately finesse the two and juggle more compatibilities. But 'grey children' is in fact the objection I had. I mean, plus vague grey culture stuff that you don't seem infected with."
It went great! He's adorable and his wheelchair is really really cool. We did end up going to a racetrack, apparently he knows people there and goes there every now and then to test his stuff. But anyway I told him about you and he was like "Oh wow you met Pelape Milath? That's awesome!" and I was like "Yep, and..." and I explained the thing and he was like "Of course, I don't mind at all. But I also wanna meet her, her blog is great." And I said "Right?" And he said that you have a little fandom at the university but a buncha greens think you don't really write that stuff because greys aren't that smart but he told them about me and I told him you're super smart and also prefer 'readership' over 'fandom' and he said they literally have an email group called milath-fans so.
"That makes sense. I've been good, the property manager redid all our floors so we had to clear out for a couple days - Sofa crashed with a friend, I went to the beach and got a hostel bed and swam in the ocean, my parents stayed with my neighbors. The new floors are really nice but the whole apartment smells like wood stain now."
"I think most things are - boring at some levels of abstraction and interesting at others. I'd find arcball boring too if I hadn't buckled down to learn enough about it, but now where you'll be seeing someone throwing a ball to someone else I'm seeing how his blown-out shoulder from last year is still handicapping him and the other coach's lineup decisions putting these two players together and the weather conditions affecting everybody's traction and stuff."
"To the extent caste aptitude is inherited, one would expect most greys to not care about or want to look into learning for the sake of learning," he explains. "So the greys that are interested in that are the ones that deviate from the norm enough, and this deviation is greater—so there are more of them—the less strong the heritability of caste aptitude is."
"Totally did." And just to demonstrate, he presses a few buttons on the left armrest and it starts moving forward... and accelerating to rather alarming speeds, for a wheelchair. It doesn't seem to have problems with the grassy terrain, though, and Ohan unconcernedly does some sharper turns than it looks like he should be able to before returning to the both of them and decelerating quickly but smoothly.
"It's not that there aren't greys in wheelchairs, but since I can walk at all and in principle my condition would respond to sufficiently aggressive practice, it would have been - signaling some things about my priorities if I opted for a chair instead of practice."
"Things just this side of robotics—'control systems,' which is a fancy name for stuff that manages to stay upright or stable or whatever on its own by reacting in real time to small changes in the environment. It's the sort of thing the Amentan brain does when you manage to catch yourself after being pushed slightly off-balance and then you shift your body weight in a bunch of intuitive ways that get your balance back, you know?"
"—oh, right, you did mention. Yeah, that's just one of the applications, the general thing is figuring out what sorts of things you have to do to mechanical things in the real world in order to have them move and shake and all that the way you want them to even if there's, like, wind or gravity or whatever."
"I've found that academics are surprisingly receptive to being cold-emailed so if there are I've probably already poked them, but feel free to make introductions if any want to talk to me for reasons I might not already be aware of, which probably covers a lot of reasons."
She pulls it up and hands over her everything.
The five visible subject lines are:
you said half orange but that's weird shouldn't your character be half green?
I don't think its legal for grey jobnames to be math things fyi
love your site!!
if I tip you are you going to get in trouble
do you hook on the side
"I don't like getting emails like this but I'm not sure it's as egregious - or at least not as rare - as you're suggesting, my sister's in her winter-three classes and she's dancing track, and apparently publicly known greys get asked if they hook on the side pretty routinely, she's being warned about that in advance. Like, if you want to sleep with Lanik Tis you just kind of have to cross your fingers and show up to fan events, but if you want to sleep with a dancer you have some hope they'll do it for money?"
"Works." He rolls over there and puts his laptop on it and boots it up. "'Kay so I'll load up the program and it'll tell me where you should get the sensors on but I remember a couple of places..." He grabs his rucksack and looks for some of them there. They're a bit bulkier than the ones used in motion capture movies but all wireless.
Then they will soon be applied! More of them once the software's loaded and indicated where the remaining sensors should go.
"Okay, so now I want you to walk at a normal pace from one end to the other of this room. If you fall, try not to do any fancy rolling or whatever, just do whatever comes most intuitively. Unless you're at that point with the rolling, in which case just roll."
Right, so, I'm thinking of two options here.
The problem seems to be mainly located in the timing of your steps, so a set of weights attached to your calves could help with that. They would selectively apply momentum to either leg to compensate for it.
Then there's where and when you lean to compensate for overbalancing, which we might be able to counter by attaching something to your torso which will try to influence that.
Both options will not by themselves fix everything and your balance will probably be worse for a bit with them. After a while you will probably get used to them, though, and then they should become background and mostly fool your brain into thinking you're not actually overbalancing most of the time.
Thoughts?
It isn't necessarily the case but seems plausible to me that we're at a point where all the low hanging economist fruit has been picked. Like, presumably econ greens are crackpots at some rate, and at a certain level of sophistication of an idea it's hard to tell, and also there are some disagreements in the field at sufficient levels of granularity, and then you can't listen to all of the economists all of the time, you have to filter the ideas somehow.
The lecture is delivered by a green historian in his early thirties and it's about the effect on various industries of people ceasing to carry cash, or even if they didn't adopt a policy of not carrying cash, being easily able to forget to do so; the initial startups in the space for handling transactions and what led them to succeed or fail; and the social effects of the economy mostly moving to forms of currency that were tied to the payer's identity (though cash and loose credit persist in most modern countries, including Anitam). It is four hours long with a break in the middle long enough to nip out for lunch.
"It's a purple-oriented website for sorta - continuing or supplemental education, for enrichment without worrying about whether it'll make money. They do the lecture list, and book reviews, and purple interest meetups in things like history and poetry and physics. They have enough purple supremacists working with them to make the website a kind of uncomfortable read but the lecture list is legit."
"It's—sometimes, every few days, I have a few days where it feels really awful to—be in my body? I've read some stuff about people who describe the same sort of thing and it gets better if they get a surgery to change their genitals to the opposite sex but theirs is usually ongoing while mine just sort of comes and goes so I don't know if it's the same sort of thing."
Sahde pokes his tongue out at Ohan then grins at Pelape. "I think for realistic but still fun sci-fi alternate universes I'd go with either some specific point of departure in physics or something like alternate history, depending. And even alternate history doesn't have to be alternate Amentan history, we could go with an alternate history for the formation of the galaxy or something, although I'm not sure if that'd be meaningfully different than just travelling to another planet."
"Incredibly smart, very interesting, gorgeous, knowledgeable, diamond-in-the-dust1, yellow-productive2, and delightfully persuasive."
Translator's Notes:
1 Adjective saying someone has some rare skill or piece of knowledge. Sometimes has caste connotations if said with a caste name and is seen as a bit gauche, but the more progressive people at the time of writing use the casteless version fairly often to compliment someone in a manner that is aware of the fact that within a caste people still vary a lot and statistical averages do not set things in stone.
2 Adjective that means someone is as hardworking and productive as a very overworked yellow. Has somewhat humorous/tongue-in-cheek connotations.
"Uh, sort of? The water carriers are greys so you've got some people arguing that it boils down to an offer of some side cash, people saying the accusations are totally fabricated and the water carriers are plants from opposing teams or just personally out to sabotage players, people saying it's an expected part of the cultural environment of pro arcball and if the water carriers belong there at all they'll understand, people saying the reports aren't made up but are exaggerated and in real life it was a miscommunication that just sounded bad to third parties and is getting blown out of proportion, and of course people who are just basically against harassing water carriers and don't see why this is so complicated, and people who are against harassing water carriers but more against having their team down a good arm for the rest of the season so they propose that instead of being kicked off the offending player just have to carry her own water or something."
The Oddball Blogs panel has a small convention room rented out with seats for seventy-five in the audience. Pelape shoves a chair to the wall for Ohan to slide into its space on their way in and takes her place at the table in front; there's a paper sign in front of her on that table with her name and the subtitle "Statistics (Sports, Crime, Miscellaneous)". The other panelists are the aforementioned Utota Malain, yellow, Vintage Furniture; a purple on quirks of the Anitami language; another purple who blogs about true crime and excerpts the fun parts of the more entertaining subset of trial interviews; a third purple who blogs in character as a plantation boss from 3100 and has come in appropriate cosplay, an orange who renders pop songs in traditional poetic forms and vice versa, and an orange who has two blogs, one with funny dramatized stories from the nursing home where he works and one with creative cardboard box based architecture he makes with his daughter.
The host announces the forty-third Oddball Blogs Panel, takes a picture of the panelists, gives them each one and a half minutes to recite their spiels. Pelape's is full of very subtextual wryness about her topic selection - "this is my day job, so you know I selected crime and sports as my most high-volume topics out of sheer passion" - and then there's a bit where the panelists can ask each other questions. The purple in cosplay wants to know whether they still play cattlerace in her time. She tells him that they do not but that the arcball borrows an obscure rule about inclement weather from a successor game to cattlerace.
Pelape asks a question of the linguist about antagonyms, gets a question from the nursing home orange about whether one of the patients' tales of sporting derring-do is plausible (no), asks the poet if she'll do Basket of Sunshine as a ten-liner. And then the audience can ask things.
Pelape snorts to herself, and Ohan gets a series of answers about serendipitous online finds and classes they took, and in the case of the one in character the assertion that it is perfectly normal to keep a diary and why would that require any particular explanation.
Pelape, of the group, does the most of her own technical end, though she's had to hire out some of it. Many of the bloggers can't monetize much, though the plantation one sells merch and the one with two blogs sells patterns for cardboard box architecture and the yellow sells consultation on where and how to get inexpensive vintage furniture acquired or restored. The plantation boss has a lot of problems with "missives" from "rascals" who try to pretend to knowledge there's no way for anyone to have and "tosses these foolish messages into the fire". The true crime blogger doesn't allow any comments on main posts and has separate open threads to contain everyone's opinions out of the way of the actual blog content. Pop poem orange has a thriving core of readers who like trying to find images that match a song/poem rendering, like this picture of a song's singer moonlighting as an actress in period costume.
"They can't be all that anonymous if they donate. I do the site up one way and put one donation link and do it up another way and put up another donation link and see which link gets more, and people with a lot of fancy doodads that won't let the randomizer run fall back on a default layout which has a third so I arguably have more specific data on my fancy doodad using population."
"I mean, people can be bad fits for any caste, or country, or whatever. And it's - practice at understanding that just because some experience has easily verbalizable features that don't sound objectively very bad doesn't mean that there aren't lots of hard-to-explain other things going on making it much worse."
"There's not nothing? Like, on the Internet I can use my real name and strangers who Citrus "Milath" figure me for green and people who know who I am know what kind of person I am even if they know I'm grey and that's all right. But school was dreadful. There were choices but there weren't enough of them, not that also promised I'd be able to get a job as an adult."
"I mean, I could've kept going to intercaste schools, but they didn't have promising statistics on placement and my parents were worried. I think it was already fairly obvious that I could fall back on swim lessons but they wanted me to have more choices and intercaste schools have less specialized counseling, know fewer niche weird things to line kids up for."
"We had a school newspaper, almost entirely sports with a little gossip and an advice column, and I needed the extra credit so I joined it, and I started desperately doing math to my arcball news. It picked up more readers on the online version than most of the features - I wasn't very good then but enough to occasionally get linked - and I did it while teaching swimming lessons for a while till it was bringing in enough I could drop the swimming lessons for research time."