KPS Workplace Guidelines
Posted on March 17, 2022 Posted by John Scalzi 13 Comments
Here’s a fun little thing I did over at Tor.com today, assisted by their able graphic artists: The Kaiju Preservation Society Workplace Guidelines: The Too-Short Version. It’s what you need to know to survive a world that has massive creatures who could step on you like you step on an ant. Not everything you need to know, but perhaps just enough to get you through your first week. But really, you’d be better off reading the manual. Isn’t that always how it is?
— JS
Love it!
Just finished the audibook. LOVED it!
I love the spray bottles!
“Goji’! Get off the roof! Down boy!” Spritz! Spritz! “No! Do not pull the bumper off Mr. Weichart’s truck! Bad boy!” Spritz! Spritz!
“Sounds like he’s a real problem.”
“Oh, no! He’s a delight…except when he decides to be mischievous. The only problem is the semi we need to bring along to carry the pick-up bag when we’re on walks.”
Received KPS pre-order on my phone: March 15th 2022
Finished reading KPS: March 15th 2022
Loved it!!!
I think that my internal visualizations was quite movie-like while I read it so, hypothetically speaking, I was wondering if this KPS Workspace Guidelines would make a great animated “workplace safety” short to show before the main movie or be better interspersed as a slideshow with bone-dry commentary during the end credits to avoid spoilers?
reminds me of the Japanese Tokyo Metropolitan disaster preparedness manuals
https://www.bousai.metro.tokyo.lg.jp/book/pdf/en/02_Lets_Get_Prepared.pdf
LOL. Reminiscent of “Cave Johnson” ‘s safety warnings and tips in Portal 2.
(Damn, that game is BRILLIANT.)
Heh. When I think about it, the “Never walk alone” instruction is also another way of saying “Don’t feed the local wildlife.”
“If you ever meet an old guy who’se peeling an apple with a pocket knife and eating pieces off the blade, if he has any advice for you, listen to him.”
“Don’t feed the local wildlife”
that’s going in my next (if ever written to completion) offworld novel
along with…
“Don’t annoy teammates screaming in futility when local apex predator feeds on your fool arse.”
i’ve begun reading KPS and have intentions to loot it for as many snark tweets as I can squeeze from it (insert visual of an orange intimate with a twenty pound sledgehammer)
= = = = =
“Vengeful Fungi Are Scheming” is the name of my next garage band.
Auctions start Tuesday.
Love KPS with Wil Wheaton narrating.
Just want to also say thank you for including a gender non-conforming character as though it’s no big deal. Means a lot to this mom with a non conforming kid living in Florida.
Dear Heteromeles,
Nobody answered your physics on the previous thread, so I’m putting on my physicist hat and answering you here.
Stars wouldn’t be any different. They run on burning lighter elements. They can’t make anything heavier than iron without consuming energy (which is why some stars go boom). Nothing has to be different in that universe about the stars.
To get a lot more of the transuranics, though, you need a lot more supernovae and/or neutron star collisions (jury is out on which contribute more to heavy element production). Since we have pretty crappy models for early universe evolution/star production and none whatsoever for dark matter, which seems to mediate the whole process, it’s safe just to assume a whole lot more of them. Just happened to be the way the density waves in the primordial medium worked out. Because nobody can prove you wrong!
(Or, Kaiju earth just happened to condense out in a neighborhood with a high concentration of this stuff. The universe is NOT homogeneous.)
Molten cores of planets will be hotter, since most of the heat comes from radioactivity. Fortunately (for authors) our models of planetary heat dynamics are also sufficiently bad. Probably more volcanism, but who knows?!
There would definitely be more natural geological reactors — we’ve had a few in Earth’s early history. That actually works in favor of kaiju evolution. More sources of strong natural radiation. Life just LOVES sources of energy — there are not only microorganisms living in the water at Chernobyl, the experiments seem to indicate that they grow BETTER in the presence of gamma rays! And this is plain old carbon-based life-as-we-know-it! Sorta. WTF?!
Easy to imagine evolution on Kaiju-earth taking advantage of that. I could wax ecstatic about the evolutionary tree associated with that, but that would include too many spoilers. So I won’t.
(Gamma-lovin’ Chernobyl Bacteria could be the name of your next band, though)
pax \ Ctein
[ Please excuse any word-salad. Dragon Dictate in training! ]
—
Ctein’s Online Gallery. http://ctein.com
finally read the Kirkus Review’s lede..
blindly presumed Jamie’s gender was the same as mine.
https://sccl.bibliocommons.com/v2/record/S118C978264
Started the book last night when I went to bed and couldn’t stop reading. Finally had to stop past the halfway point or I’d have been reading till 3 am. Love it.
As a biologist I’m fascinated by the biology explanations. That’s quite a creative idea in taking the ecosystem concept of organisms to a new place.
The KPS cover story (workers are studying Greenland glaciers) would fail miserably with me though. I’d immediately start asking about GRIP and GISP2, asking them about the work of Drs Richard Alley, Lonnie Thompson, Jason Box, the dark snow project, camp Century, problems with glacial flow crushing structures in the ice (Camp Century again, drill cores), if they’ve now gotten around the problem of deformation of ice layers in the deepest cores. And I’d probably want to talk about early explorers like Rasmussen, Nansen, Freuchen, as well as getting their estimation on when they think the remnants of Camp Century will spill the sewage and various pollutants into the ocean as the glaciers carry it east (I’d also wonder the same about Alfred Wegener’s body, whether the melting is enough to expose it or will there be anything recognizable left). I’d also ask about various paleoclimatology reconstruction methodologies, the Little Dryas, Dansgaard-Oescheger events, … by the end of the flight, KPS may have to arrange an “accident” for me (or recruit me). :)
And, lol, Two. Adult. Sons.
Also, figures Dr. Plait would be in on something like that (I’m assuming the name reference in your book is to the Bad Astronomer himself).
Anyway, thoroughly enjoyable read! Sorry for rambling. No one around me is a big reader so I have no one to chat books with, except online.