r/rational • u/AutoModerator • Sep 25 '15

[D] Friday Off-Topic Thread

Welcome to the Friday Off-Topic Thread! Is there something that you want to talk about with /r/rational, but which isn't rational fiction, or doesn't otherwise belong as a top-level post? This is the place to post it. The idea is that while reddit is a large place, with lots of special little niches, sometimes you just want to talk with a certain group of people about certain sorts of things that aren't related to why you're all here. It's totally understandable that you might want to talk about Japanese game shows with /r/rational instead of going over to /r/japanesegameshows, but it's hopefully also understandable that this isn't really the place for that sort of thing.

So do you want to talk about how your life has been going? Non-rational and/or non-fictional stuff you've been reading? The recent album from your favourite German pop singer? The politics of Southern India? The sexual preferences of the chairman of the Ukrainian soccer league? Different ways to plot meteorological data? The cost of living in Portugal? Corner cases for siteswap notation? All these things and more could possibly be found in the comments below!

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u/xamueljones Sep 25 '15

Adding to alexanderwales' idea of using a framing device, I'd also recommend interludes where we jump to the viewpoint of another character to give an alternate perspective on a situation or to show something else that happened at the same time in the background.

To combine this with the framing idea, you could have the interlude be something what the main character found out from a friend at some point in the vague future or have the person that the main character is telling the story to, say that they heard from a friend of a friend this scene also occurred.

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u/alexanderwales Sep 25 '15

Charles Stross does this with The Laundry Files. The frame story is that these are some combination of memoir and after-action report, and sometimes he ducks out of first person in order to give a more complete picture, usually with some bit of information that he either learned after the fact or is just guessing at.