localroger dot com

Roger "localroger" Williams' Personal Web Repository

  Updated May 2024
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From 2001 through 2007 my major hobby was writing essays and stories for sadly mostly now-defunct web discussion site kuro5hin under the nom d'Anon "localroger." While kuro5hin still exists, its founder Rusty Foster apparently regarded it as something of a social experiment in web based self-moderation, and when the experiment began to fail he preferred to let the implosion run its course rather than try to save the site from the various forces tearing it apart.

I originally created this site to host the final chapters of Revelation Passage after one of the kuro5hin trolls used a voting bot to make it impossible for me to post them to kuro5hin. Later I took over the hosting of my novel The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect which Rusty had generously provided for about ten years.

As of 2016, the kuro5hin server is offline and as far as the old users know, all the original online content is now lost. Accordingly, I have rehosted some of my better and / or more popular stories here in case the original links go down.

For awhile we tried to maintain an author / fan blog, but that fizzled. Should you have a bookmark to it you can delete it, as we no longer own the URL. Last year I was advised that a cybersquatter had acquired it and mirrored my old content, with spam for sketchy drug companies sprinkled throughout the text. Alas, there's nothing we can do about that.

New Content: The Curators

Several years ago I stumbled upon the subreddit r/HFY dedicated to writing, specifically stories about the awesomeness of humankind as compared to whatever challenges we might find in the Universe. Perhaps surprisingly I had an idea I thought might work there, and it did, becoming a serial of over 100 episodes of about 2,000 words each.

The Curators is about a galactic civilization which was formed by an ancient race which created habitable worlds throughout the Milky Way to encourage carbon-based intelligent life. All those unique and amazing coincidences that make Earth so habitable according to the Rare Earth theory? Not coincidences at all. They were arranged by a power that has been in operation for more than 7 billion years -- and which, for some reason, did not Curate humans.

It's complete so you don't have to worry whether I will ever finish it if you start at The Curators Part 1 or check out the Episode Index.

Note that the print and e-book versions of the Curators available from Amazon are incomplete. We created those before I realized what the overall structure of the story would be, so they end about two thirds of the way through Book I. I always intended to do a proper print version of the entire story once it was finished, but haven't gotten around to it yet.

MOPI

By far the most likely reason you're here is that you heard about my somewhat infamous web novel:

The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect

That link leads to a mirror of the entire original site as it was hosted by kuro5hin during the decade after everyone talked me into putting it online and Rusty offered a place to put it. I have removed a couple of the more blazingly obsolete sections but the original side essays are there.

Also, before I started on The Curators I tested the HFY waters with a little new MOPI sequel, Upgrade.

And yes, I still have plans to finish the sequel The Transmigration of Prime Intellect. But MOPI gears grind slowly, as they did while I was thinking about the first one, and I won't force myself to pound it out if I think it won't be worthy of the original.

Passages in the Void

The reason I created this site was to finish publishing this story, which developed over a period of years as a series of stories published through the normal kuro5hin queue-voting process. It's the epic story of human colonization of the Universe, including other galaxies, without the benefit of faster than light travel or particularly long life spans -- although we do have the help of some awesome machines we created.

Prefer to read it on your Kindle? The first four stories are available here.

Or you can get them printed in paperback.

Other Good Stuff originally on kuro5hin

These stories are presented exactly as they were originally uploaded, with now-broken links and groan-inducing errors as still seen on kuro5hin.

Hacks

Every once in awhile I build something. If it's cool enough I'll put it here.

Email me here.

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