45kb of vampires + internet privacy issue :)

[jack]

Vampire fic has reached 45KB = 7k5 words. Apparently the rule of thumb of 'average word is 5 letters' is pretty much spot on for my writing. Measuring writing by the byte seems crude somehow, but it's certainly quick :)

• Chapter 1: Rat PoV. http://www.srcf.ucam.org/~jv233/fic/saldini_chap_1.html
  
• Chapter 2: Maurice PoV. Late night bookshops are a godsend (so to speak) for vampire detectives.
  
• Chapter 3: Random extra PoV. It's not a vampire without evening dress, so it's formal hall time.
  
• Chapter 4: Maurice PoV. Exposition chunks are broken up into conversation, and someone turns up dead, ie. plot.
  
• Chapter 5: Maurice PoV.
  
• Chapter 6: Rat PoV again at last. Some vampires have problems worse than mild depression. But not feeling the cold is good if you live rough. We learn why exactly we're reading a book by a talking rat.
  
• Chapter 7: vampirechat.org transcripts. I liked this. How can come Maurice knows anything when he was abandoned by his sire? There's an anonymous internet message board! DR4CUL4R :)

I do need suggestions:

It's set in cambridge, but I've changed the name of everywhere in it. Virgin Mary College is a bit like trinity, but where Kings is. The university is run in a different way. Borders, Chilli's, etc appear but with different names. Keeping the originals makes it feel more real, but falls down whenever I need to dpeart from reality. Fiddling works almost as well, but seems gratuitous. Which should I do? Should I invent a city name as well?

I seem to rush through it a bit fast, but it'd never make a novel. Probably 15kwords would be optimal, though I probably won't make it that high -- which is probably also the worst possible length of a story :)

The rat is roughly Maurice's familiar. What is his name?

Vampirechat requires sponsorship from two members to join. How anonymously is this possible? If it's set up on a server trusted to be independant and the source code made available, could it be done without a central authority?

Comments

[satanicsocks.livejournal.com]

I take it vampirechat is analogous with the old tradition of masonic society? then the mentors know who the protege is, but don't know each other's identity. Hmm. Interesting..

If the source code's available there's no guarantee it's actually compiled and running... unless the language were interpreted and the script directory world-readable, I suppose.

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

I take it vampirechat is analogous with the old tradition of masonic society? then the mentors know who the protege is, but don't know each other's identity. Hmm. Interesting.

That's the general idea. I wonder how the masons handle it :) You need the two sponsors to give some guarantee people aren't just inventing virtualprotoge@hotmail.com addresses for themselves, but they wouldn't want to trust each other.

If the source code's available there's no guarantee it's actually compiled and running... unless the language were interpreted and the script directory world-readable, I suppose.

That's what I was thinking. If you have a publicly trusted server with the website having global read, and no write access (any changes handled by scripts). And, for instance, provide people with keys they can share with a third party two of which makes it create an account. And the data is all stored encrypted so no-one can read it.

You'd probably need the collusion of the server admins if only to guarantee no-one else has full access, and I don't think there's any way the admins could not be able to peek at the data. Maybe with multiple servers...

[satanicsocks.livejournal.com]

Yeah, data fragmentation across servers and admins needing to work in pairs could work, though it'd be a hell of a system to administrate.

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

At least some of these people are going to be both rich and paranoid.

But two (or more) systems is going to be an awful mess. Is it even possible to start to stop the admins being abel to read the data without without some special protocol? I'm getting a headache.