kyli wrote: ↑Wed Jan 22, 2020 5:51 am
The longer this goes on without anything happening to confirm the dragon dream is the FMS, the more it looks like we might be wrong about it. A few chapters ago, it could have made sense but it feels the story has moved on a bit and revisiting that part any longer then it takes Jason to drop the hammer on those involved in the outbreak would be a bit cliché to me.
I theorized in Chapter 10, and still hold to the general idea that the Dragon is the retrovirus at this point. In chapter 10, I theorized her jump was in regards to efforts to contain the virus. In light of chapter 11, it might be her efforts to assist with the new telepaths that goes badly instead. Until they decide how they're going to approach the Confederation and the rest of the Galaxy about the retrovirus, the dream may not change.
As the Dreamers have previously explained, they can only see up to the point where a choice is
likely to go a certain way. But when they're confronted with a "Crossroads Prophecy" event where a choice
has to be made but the choice is uncertain, they'll only be able to see up to the point where the crossroad occurs.
Which still points very solidly at "Dahnai's jump" having been her effort to contain the virus outbreak to within the borders of the Imperium. Which we know failed. The moment the chain of events for the virus to be released started(Kevin Ball's fight) would have been the moment that the effort to contain it was likewise a virtual certainty(which seems to match the timeline for when the dreams started). Everything else from beyond that point would be hidden behind "a crossroad," and thus the Dreamers would be blind.
See
viewtopic.php?f=12&t=2668#p36788 for where I went into a lot more depth on this.
I already mentioned this in the CO spoiler section but the same mistake was made again in this chapter. Youtube was founded in 2005, the same year as the Subjugation. We are talking about the time when 3G networks were still going up and the iphone didn't exist yet. Game streaming was non-existent at worst, very fringe at best so Jason's reference to pre-subjugation Youtube game streaming is inconsistent.
Going to disagree slightly, but agree in other respects.
As per book one, they arrived on March 12th, 2005. Fraps existed at the time, and some limited streaming(more like podcasting, as it wasn't real-time) type options existed at the time. But you're correct that virtually nobody was making money off of video streams at that point. WoW released on the 23rd of November, 2004 for example and didn't really hit its stride in pop culture until 2006. Now granted, things were in a quasi-limbo for another year of so after the Faey arrive, and the entertainment sector specifically was left alone. But (game) streaming didn't really start to be "a thing" until the tail end of TBC(so 2008-ish) as I recall and even then that was pretty fringe. More people had computers and bandwidth to be able to do it(and the compression algorithms) by then, but not many.
Of course, in the alternate time-line with the Faey and an entertainment sector that gets to jump from Pentium 4's to moleculartronics and Faey telecommunications tech. It's very possible that streaming had a large and much more significant uptick in use much earlier in that timeline because the technology progression is MUCH more rapid but it would be post-subjugation. Of course, we can also "hand-wave" this by citing an unreliable narrator and just say Jason is speaking off-the-cuff on the matter, as we're 17+ years after the Subjugation began, so he could be getting dates confused on when certain things happened.
"E-Sports" on the other hand, were already very much a thing by 2004/2005, Starcraft had been holding major competitive events in Korea for years by then. Many FPS games also were routinely holding (un)official tournaments with substantial prize pools, and the more official tournaments would have had the resources to live-stream what was going on. So while
professional streamers(non-competitive) were almost unheard of in 2004/2005,
professional gamers(competitive) were definitely out there by then and some were making six figure incomes even then.
Most of the earliest streamers to get appreciable traction were professional (competitive) gamers as they had the name recognition. And I guess that's where things can get annoying for people trying to research that stuff now and trying to figure out exactly what was happening when.