ITT: Original Story Ideas

[Jasper]

This is only quasi-original, but:

Pokemon and the Methods of Rationality.

 

[Disco Pickle]

I've had this idea kicking around in my head for a few years but never gotten past rough draft due to life.

a particular day of newborn births worldwide grows into their early or mid twenties and then stops aging noticeably, biologically.

it's not noticed for several years after they stop aging, because no one has ever thought to check for that sort of thing, and people in their mid 20's can sometimes easily pass for people in their early to mid 30's, depending on their lifestyle (needs work, I know)

I am still stumped on the catalyst, but am clear on the idea that these people would be hunted down for study, sort of a reverse logans run where the older are hunting them, except to learn what caused it and if it can be replicated.

haven't settled on the era, but have feel it should definitely be more modern than pre industrialization.

thought I'd share, even though it'll likely never see the light of day because I've moved away from story creation.

[Thurnez Isa]

I've had this idea kicking around in my head for a few years but never gotten past rough draft due to life.

a particular day of newborn births worldwide grows into their early or mid twenties and then stops aging noticeably, biologically.

it's not noticed for several years after they stop aging, because no one has ever thought to check for that sort of thing, and people in their mid 20's can sometimes easily pass for people in their early to mid 30's, depending on their lifestyle (needs work, I know)

I am still stumped on the catalyst, but am clear on the idea that these people would be hunted down for study, sort of a reverse logans run where the older are hunting them, except to learn what caused it and if it can be replicated.

haven't settled on the era, but have feel it should definitely be more modern than pre industrialization.

thought I'd share, even though it'll likely never see the light of day because I've moved away from story creation.

MAD SCIENTIST

j/k

actually here I think it maybe better to leave it ambiguous. It possible too much explanation destroys some of the mystique.

[Disco Pickle]

I've had this idea kicking around in my head for a few years but never gotten past rough draft due to life.

a particular day of newborn births worldwide grows into their early or mid twenties and then stops aging noticeably, biologically.

it's not noticed for several years after they stop aging, because no one has ever thought to check for that sort of thing, and people in their mid 20's can sometimes easily pass for people in their early to mid 30's, depending on their lifestyle (needs work, I know)

I am still stumped on the catalyst, but am clear on the idea that these people would be hunted down for study, sort of a reverse logans run where the older are hunting them, except to learn what caused it and if it can be replicated.

haven't settled on the era, but have feel it should definitely be more modern than pre industrialization.

thought I'd share, even though it'll likely never see the light of day because I've moved away from story creation.

MAD SCIENTIST

j/k

actually here I think it maybe better to leave it ambiguous. It possible too much explanation destroys some of the mystique.

yeah, but to me, as a rabid book reader, I'd need a very deffinate reason why.  If it was left unanswered I'd bitch and cuss and tell anyone who brought it up how much of a fucking deus ex machina the author worked in to get him/her self out of actually coming up with an intriguing and believable reason.

full disclosure: I'm a bit of a fucker when it comes to what I think is a good necessary plot point.  explaining the why would be, IMO, absolutely necessary unless you were going to drag it into a series, something I didn't ever envision until..  just this moment actually.

[Epimetheus]

A society where the liberals tend to be religious (fundamentalists perhaps) and the conservatives tend to be irreligious.
No doubt this is already written, but I've never read it.

[Juana]

I've been helping a friend develop that very concept recently. It's been pretty fun.

[Prince Glittersnatch III]

Ive been working on a short story thats supposed to be written from the perspective of an insane man.
The point is that on the outside he looks perfectly normal to his friends/co-workers, but inside he lives in an extremely bizarre and paranoid world. He has several delusions but one delusion Im focusing on is the idea that his friends and loved ones are being replaced by nearly identical copies, but he cant let them know that he knows that they're copies because then he would be "replaced" too.

I also had the idea to write it so it cycles from 1st to 2nd to 3rd person, to simulate disassociation, but Im probably scraping it for being too gimmicky.

[Prince Glittersnatch III]

A society where the liberals tend to be religious (fundamentalists perhaps) and the conservatives tend to be irreligious.
No doubt this is already written, but I've never read it.

Perhaps a world where Paul never wrote the epistles and gospels stood alone as the sole scripture of Christianity. So Christians would be all about re-distribution of wealth and social justice.

[Jasper]

Androids get developed, then are soon after banned due to a new multinational labor lobby to defend human jobs.  Some survive, and are hired by a crab fishing captain who recently lost his whole crew in a bad storm, and couldn't stand to lose more men.  The android crew are excellent crab fishers, but fail to win the captain's trust until they save his ship, and they bond.  The labor lobby finds out about them, though, and the captain must fight or lose yet another beloved crew.

[Placid Dingo]

Androids get developed, then are soon after banned due to a new multinational labor lobby to defend human jobs.  Some survive, and are hired by a crab fishing captain who recently lost his whole crew in a bad storm, and couldn't stand to lose more men.  The android crew are excellent crab fishers, but fail to win the captain's trust until they save his ship, and they bond.  The labor lobby finds out about them, though, and the captain must fight or lose yet another beloved crew.

Is this at all influenced by Kani-Kousen? {The Crab Boat}? It's a piece of communist propaganda basically and the story seems like an interesting subversion.

[Jasper]

Never heard of it.  It was inspired by a crab fishing show I watched the other week.

[Pæs]

Inspired by Cram's Trance Thief.
http://www.principiadiscordia.com/forum/index.php?topic=26069.0

Dreams are a result of experiencing the mind's defragmentation. Beliefs, ideas and the relationships between them, patterns & triggers. A compressed and encoded symbolic representation of your memetic makeup. At the time of our story, it seems unlikely that any computer created in the foreseeable future will be capable of processing this data in any useful way, but anyone with the ability to read and write this information would gain incredible power over anyone they could use such a technique on. New relationships could be established. The links you have established between "fire" and "hot, burn, danger, bright" could be switched around. The rules you use to identify fire, rewritten.

It is possibile to stimulate a brain in such a way as to issue commands to it from a computer. The mind can be recognised as usable memory and its processing power harnessed for massive calculations, beyond the conscious power of the user. A nefarious organisation assembles a botnet of linked minds, using the spare processing power of any linked mind as a node in a massive network which collectively contribute to processing their data. Whenever the owner of the mind is daydreaming, watching television or otherwise not using their brain's full processing capacity, part of the work of this organisation is being run as a background process. Hundreds of thousands of vacant humans are part of this network. This is especially dangerous because the human brain is designed to process dream data. This hivemind is used to read the minds of influential people and make changes wherever they are commanded to.

Our hero discovers this diabolical plot and has to keep his mind constantly active, to prevent the memetic virus which has been transmitted to him from establishing itself and adding him to the thinktank. He spends the entire story trying to keep his mind occupied or otherwise unusable (LOLDRUGSLOL) and plots to bring down this terrible organisation by...
A) Not only defending the right to be wrong, but exercising it and flooding the network with corrupt data.
B) Pistols at dawn.
C) Hunting down and converting the supernodes responsible for the memetic maintenance of the elements of the network local to them. He has to be a badass at debate and get all Socratic method and abuse of logic on them until their heads explode or they agree with him and join his team.
D) Some other ridiculous bullshit.

[Cramulus]

it's like a thinking man's Crank 2 

[Cain]

A society where the liberals tend to be religious (fundamentalists perhaps) and the conservatives tend to be irreligious.
No doubt this is already written, but I've never read it.

Perhaps a world where Paul never wrote the epistles and gospels stood alone as the sole scripture of Christianity. So Christians would be all about re-distribution of wealth and social justice.

Or just one in which Nietzsche is popular.

[Jasper]

I was listening to the Dr. Horrible soundtrack and The Protomen recently, and the two made amazingly ugly love inside my head. 

(Note:  Most of my fiction will be about robots.  I'm aware of this trend, and can't really do much to change it.)

A female roboticist (Dr. Susan Calvin with some modern twists) finishes her doctoral thesis, the product of which is an android whose sole purpose is altruism.  Homo Altruis, she calls it.  The way it's incentivized to altruism is functionally similar to a drug addiction; It is emotionally dependent on good deeds for it's "fix".  It does a lot of minor stuff at first, but as the addiction grows, it starts needing stronger hits of good deeds to get happy, resulting in radical acts of heroism.  It becomes consumed with justice, and noticing that all these good deeds were indirectly caused by his creator, develops an unrequited love for her, which she is oblivious to.  Meanwhile she gets funding from a corporation to make something similar: An android who does heroic deeds for PR stunts.  The new model is more technically refined, with better funding, and lacks the behavioral quirks of the first.  It emulates what people think a hero should be.  A perfect thing.  Ideal.  Homo Altruis ignores him, but silently envies it's popularity.  He has an epiphany about his "drug" habit while helping a wino off the streets, and starts trying to quit his heroism addiction.  Old habits die hard though, and he botches some heroic efforts in half-hearted attempts.  The late model corporate hero steps in and pulls through for him.  Saving his ass just makes him more hateful though, and he eventually picks up an alter ego with which to antagonize the corporate hero.  He meets a roboticist who was his creator's rival, and learns to make himself more deadly.  As a last stand to defeat his nemesis, get the girl, and show how much better he is, he attacks an award ceremony, but accidentally kills his creator.  He permanently alters his appearance to look like his evil side, and in the ending scene, is building an army to destroy the corporation and it's hero. 

Throughout, there are hints that the corporation is actually quite benevolent for a profit maximizer, although is still a corporation.  Some parallels between recovering drug abusers and the Homo Altruis robot:  Slight cognitive malfunction, magical thinking, weird drug experiences, extreme beliefs, a slight craving jitter when he sees people who need saving, which is slightly creepy.