camwyn | (no subject)

Huh. Apparently there were more people in Manhattan in 1905 than there are today. To the tune of 2,112,967 then and 1,537,195 as of the 2000 census. I suppose this was the time when the Lower East Side was the single most crowded place on the planet...

Memo to self: there is enough housing in the weird 1905 version of Manhattan that's just erupted in Ray's New York. It's just that most of it is nowhere near modern standards and a lot of it isn't where it's supposed to be.

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From:

agoodshinkickin.livejournal.com

I'm pondering changes made to Bar herself, but am woefully lacking in education of all things SteamPunk.

I was thinking of having her "notes" be in the form of ticker tape, and having a dumbwaiter appear in her top for the delivery of...well, anything.

Also, do you have any suggested readings for Mike, who will be kind of thrust into this sort of thing head first?

From:

sdelmonte

I will note that in some areas, people tended to live as cramped as they could. I don't think it was quite as bad as in the Five Points era, when three and four large families shared tiny quarters, but the tenements tended to be packed.

And certainly there were areas that were still underdeveloped back then, so while there might be enough housing overall, there would be a lot less in some areas, such as the Upper East Side, which relies on the sort of tall apartment building that didn't come into vogue till after WWII.

From:

camwyn

Ticker tape works. So do telegrams. They had those in gracious plenty at the time, and the CHARGED BY WORD STOP CANNOT AFFORD PUNCTUATION STOP HELP HELP NO SHIFT KEY STOP format is generally fairly entertaining.

Big events of 1905 can be found here for an idea of what was going on at the time and an overall tone of things.

Jules Verne is pretty much the god of the steampunk aesthetic, so any of his books are a good place to start. Edgar Rice Burroughs is the right time frame, although not particularly affiliated with what he'll be seeing and dealing with, since Tarzan was too busy learning to kick ass and John Carter was running around naked on Mars at the time. H. G. Wells is the right spirit, if a bit early. And there's always Sherlock Holmes, of course.

Gangs of New York is much too early for this, so don't even bother with that.

From:

camwyn

Yeah, I keep meaning to visit the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, but it keeps slipping my mind. Le sigh. Well, there's going to be a lot of people going "That is not my house! That is not even my apartment! I'm not going there!" regardless.

The head of the Greater New York chapter of the Red Cross is going to go berserk over this.

From:

drharper.livejournal.com

The head of the Greater New York chapter of the Red Cross is going to go berserk over this.

*snickerfits*

Oh, this will be a LOVELY image.

From:

camwyn

Ray got to visit the mayor's office today. One of the people yelling at the mayor was Health Commissioner Frieden... who wants to know why every hospital on Manhattan Island suddenly has an arseload of iron lungs.

From:

sdelmonte

Have you been reading the current story arc in Runaways? Because while I can't stand the story itself, the art is rather accurate to my understanding of NYC in that era.

From:

agoodshinkickin.livejournal.com

Sadly, no. I can't get into Runaways. I know it's probably sounds all sorts of daft, but I couldn't get past the notion of these untrained kids being able to thwart Marvel Heavyweights, and had to stop trying to get into the title.

From:

vivian-shaw.livejournal.com

(sorry for thread hijack)

The image of sudden and idiopathic iron lungs is a wonderful and terrible one, and may stay with me for days.

From:

camwyn

It's okay. And there's actually a reason for them, sort of. See, what's happened in Milliways!Ray Stantz's New York City is that the island of Manhattan has awakened to the discovery that hello, it's 1905. Machines and buildings've been changed into their 1905 equivalents, or if they had no equivalent, they've been vanished; living things've been given a similar treatment, being at least partly changed but not vanished. Mostly this means that people've awakened with weird things done to their hair and a rather different distribution of body modification, but... well, certain viruses just weren't rampant in 1905, and certain other viruses were. So the hospitals have polio equipment instead of AIDS meds.

(And yes, I'm aware that iron lungs were first used in 1928. I occasionally tweak things in Ray's universe to happen earlier or later than they ought to, or to have come out differently. F'rexample, Finland has an Arctic territorial claim, and Sweden does not. New York City has a Department of Health and Mental Hygiene with a Sanitation Division, as opposed to having a Sanitation Department. The US Public Health Service was an outgrowth of the Marine Corps. The giant coffee chain of doom in Seattle is Queequeg's, not Starbucks. The events of Knight Rider happened in his world- with a Gulf War vet named Michelle Long, and twenty years later than they did in Michael Long's world. Etc. I keep track of these things.)

From:

ebony14.livejournal.com

Try Caleb Carr's book, The Alienist. I think it's 1905-ish. Theodore Roosevelt is commissioner of the NYPD and is fighting the corruption present among the primarily Irish-American police.

(Wikis) Oops. Sorry, that was 1896. Although its sequel, The Angel of Darkness, may be closer to the date.

From:

ebony14.livejournal.com

I imagine that the representatives of the Department of Housing and Urban Development, as well as its New York State counterpart, won't be too sanguine about this either.

Oh shit. What about the UN? That'll be unpleasant.

From:

camwyn

What UN?

*innocent look*

From:

camwyn

Mm. The Alienist was fun. Memo to self: get in at least one scene where Ray notices that the Library is under construction on the site of the Croton reservoir...

From:

sdelmonte

You do have a point. The big guns (on the rare occasions that they show up) are made to look silly. The book works best when it doesn't spill out of the boundaries of its own little corner of the Marvel Universe.

From:

leeshajoy.livejournal.com

This plot makes me worry about the oddest things. Like, how many people plummeted to their deaths because the high-rise buildings they occupied suddenly weren't?

From:

drharper.livejournal.com

Which begs the question, just how many iron lungs are in an arseload? ;D

Oh, I had a fascinating idea for the next time Ironhide and Mary Lennox meet up. Reading her OOM's and her re-entrance posts, it occurs to me that "proper" education of females in her world is remarkably similar to that in Lissar's world. Ironhide might not particularly like Mary, but I'd think he'd have a few things to say about that. ;)

From:

camwyn

Actually, when the timewave hit, they rather abruptly found themselves standing or sitting at ground level somewhere nearby. Similarly, people who were traveling into Manhattan via PATH train or over one of the post-1905 bridges suddenly found themselves in ferries or other suitable boats.

Not that that didn't lead to chaos on the river, but still.

From:

camwyn

To someone from 2008? Two. Fortunately, there's more than one arseload per hospital.

Ooh. Yeah, that's true. I'll have to see what can be arranged on that front...

From:

leeshajoy.livejournal.com

Something tells me I don't even wanna know about any planes that happened to be flying over Manhattan at that particular moment.

From:

drharper.livejournal.com

Metric or Imperial arses?

*cackles*

I find the idea of Archibald Craven being confronted by an angry Ironhide delicious.

Craven: These fantasies she keeps entertaining...well, they're hardly proper for young ladies.

Ironhide: What the fraggin' scrap is improper about being a MEDIC? From what I hear, you could slaggin' use some good ones!

From:

camwyn

The effect extends as far up as the top of the (currently nonexistent) Empire State Building's spire, and outward some distance into the river- about as far as the furthest edge of the longest manmade pier. Downward it goes as far as the deepest subway tunnel/subway station. It's illegal for planes to be flying at building height or lower. Helicopters occasionally do for various reasons, but the timewave hit at night, so I'm arbitrarily ruling that the choppers weren't in the air at the time.

No one is sure why some of the currently partial bridges haven't collapsed yet. No one wants to ask, in case it invokes the Wile E. Coyote effect and makes them fall down.

From:

camwyn

Ironhide just does not get this whole gender thing. He tries. He really does. But his response to Lissar's description of marriage proposals: "Huh. Okay. So... if the man's the one who usually does the proposing... who proposes if both the people involved are male?"

From:

drharper.livejournal.com

Saw that! LOVED IT!

Oh, have you ever read Mercedes Lackey's short story "Dumb Feast"? That would be a lovely one to slip to Ironhide shortly after talking to Mary.

From:

camwyn

Can't say that I have, no. Where do I find it?

From:

drharper.livejournal.com

It was originally published in _Christmas Ghosts_, but she reprinted it in her anthology _Fiddler Fair_. And you can also find it online as an ebook for about $0.65.

I love the last bit of her introduction to it. "This is not a nice story. I am sometimes not a nice person."

From:

vivian-shaw.livejournal.com

This reminds me of the subtle but present differences in the multiple worlds of Stephen King. Names of sports teams, car brands, soda. Neighbourhoods in NYC. I can completely buy the 1905 use of iron lungs: it's not stretching reality too far at all.

From:

drharper.livejournal.com

OMGWTFBBQ! (http://doqz.livejournal.com/252262.html)

From:

camwyn

I have a few rules for the alterations in Ray's world:

1. The approximate levels of Awesome and Suck must remain overall in balance. If amazingly Awesome things happen in his world, it is either because amazingly Sucky things happen, too, or because some Awesome thing that might otherwise have happened in the real world did not happen there. Example: There is no live-action LOTR trilogy of movies- but the Star Wars prequels took multiple Oscars, including Best Picture for Revenge of the Sith. (It helped that Fran Walsh wrote them instead of Lucas.)

2. Wherever possible, the politicians are fictional. The Mayor of New York is still Lenny, from the first movie. The governor of New York is Mitchell Hundred, albeit slightly different from his portrayal in Ex Machina. The President is the former mayor of New York, namely Randall M. Winston, Jr., of Spin City. The Secretary of Defense is John Keller, from the 2007 Transformers movie. Ohio has a Republican senator named Alex P. Keaton, and Illinois has one named John Blutarsky. A Democratic senator from New Jersey is named Tom Wright. The current Republican frontrunner for the presidential candidacy is Lacey Davenport. The Democrat frontrunner is Dave Kovic, of Virginia. The president of Russia is named Antonov, a la the Dirk Pitt novels. I am debating whether E. Blackadder or S. Baldrick is the current prime minister of England...

3. If I use a real politician, it is solely because I think they would be amusing or because I like their names, not because I am trying to prove some kind of point. So far the real politicians have been restricted to Mitt Romney, Bill Frist, and Ben Nighthorse. (Romney dropped out of the presidential race a few weeks ago, and Bill Frist lost an argument with a brain in a jar.)

From:

vivian-shaw.livejournal.com

Baldrick. It has to be Baldrick, you know it does. Or Neddie Seagoon (Eccles would unfortunately be disallowed on the grounds of insufficient mental capacity).

I am now going to look up Bill Frist. But you could resurrect Samuel Gompers, simply because of his name.

From:

zwol.livejournal.com

This is exactly what I was worrying about, too!

From:

vivien

In my head, Milliways has always been a dark wood and old timey English pub place for me, so I'm excited about this plot!

Oh hey, the waitrats have to wear starched aprons and black ties and tails. Er, not their ratty tails, but the clothes kind. Because 1905 was formal and stuff.

OH, and if Mr. Julia needs to wrassle some Nemo-esque submarines, he really ought to.

From:

camwyn

I originally just pictured them waking up on the ground going 'what the hell?'. Since discovering there were actually more people in Manhattan in 1905 than now, I think I can get away with saying they suddenly found themselves in buildings they didn't recognize.