#in-memory data structure store

[cavegirlpoems]

Deep Space & Derelicts: Basic/Xenotech version, an idea for a game

here's a little idea for a game that's been floating around my head for a while. what if early D&D had been based around classic scifi rather than classic fantasy, but otherwise kept the same structures. how would you translate, say, b/x dnd into a scifi game. Why B/X? because it's my favourite edition, that's why.

so. principles. We want to keep the basic structures of the game the same: descendingarmour class, xp-for-treasure, dungeon exploration, the seven classic classes, etc etc. like early dnd, we want to keep our setting minimal but with some strong implications, a template you can build your own scifi setting out of, with a grab-bag of relevant tropes and concepts thrown in. we want to keep the same gameplay loop.

So, our set-up. We replace 'adventurers' exploring 'dungeons' and later a 'wilderness' with 'salvagers' exploring 'derelict ships' and later 'deep space'. You get XP for the valuable salvage you can leave the derelict with. At first, you explore a given derelict room-to-room, and once you've done that your little salvager band can return to a space station, sell your loot, maybe buy new equipment or hire some followers, and move on to the next derelict and continue.

First big thing: classes. We want to keep our classes pretty simple, classic and broad, to cover wide archetypes. b/x dnd has seven classes: 4 human classes (fighter, thief, cleric, magic user) and 3 demihumans (dwarf, elf, halfling).

We will do likewise: 4 human classes, and three non-human classes.

The Fighter remains the same. High hit dice, access to all the best armour and weapons, done. No changes.

The Thief remains largely the same, too. We change up the thief skills a bit to represent the scifi setting, but a lot of them - find traps, open locks, etc - are still very applicable to the task of exploring a hostile space-derelict for salvage. The only one that we should probably replace is 'scale sheer surfaces', which gets turned into the more useful 'navigate zero-gravity'. these stay one key difference is, obviously, which weapons the thief gets, since we'll be using a different weapon list.

The Cleric is tonally off for scifi, but there's an easy archetype to replace it with: the Psychic. We can keep the 'turn-away undead' ability, but replace it with 'turn away people': it's a sort of jedi-mind-trick or psychic scream that causes people (whose minds are sensitive to these things) to avoid the psychic, and a 'destroyed' result is basically a headsplosion. The cleric Spells at level 2+ are replaced with Psychic Powers, that need to be readied through careful meditation and can then be unleashed later. Psychic healing, support, and a bunch of mystical utility powers.

Likewise, the Magic User is not great for scifi, so we can replace it with something better: the Network User. This is your hacker/technologist/admech type character. Their spellbook is replaced with a data-tablet, on which is stored the Programs (spells) they can use. They have a finite number of Programs they can store in their data-tablet's memory, prepped and ready to go with the flick of a switch. These can cover a wide variety of technobabble tasks, giving them the same utility as a regular magic user. As the Network User levels up, they expand their data-tablet's memory, allowing them to prepare more and stronger programs. Scrolls are replaced with data-chips, little portable one-shot files that you can use immediately, or plug into your data-tablet to learn whatever program's on the chip.

The demi-humans are equally simple to handle.

The Dwarf is replaced by the G.E.O. Aka, the Genetically Engineered Organism, custom made for space exploration. Tough, rugged, and short, able to see in the dark through heat-vision and with some perks for void-exploration such as the ability to spot certain space-hazards.

The Halfling is replaced by the Alien. Typically in the 'little green men' mould, the Alien is short, hard to hit and good at shrugging off hazards, good at sneaking, and a dab hand with a laser pistol.

Lastly, the Elf is replaced with the AI. An artificial intelligence in a synthetic body. The elf's immunities to sleep etc are replaced with the normal immunities for not being a biological life-form. The elf's sharper senses and infravision are likewise a product of the AI's advanced scanners and superior data processing. And, in the same way that the Network User can use Programs through training and their own data-pad, so too the AI has a built-in data-pad that lets them innately use Programs.

Now, the miscelania of the system.

Attributes are kept exactly as is, tbh. Frankly, 'Wisdom' makes just as much sense as a prime requisite for psychics as it does for clerics, in my view.

Saves get renamed. Death or Poison (D) remains the same. Wands (W) is replaced by Weapons, for saves against weird rays, sprays, beams, and other fanciful devices. Paralysis or Petrification (P) can again stay the same. Breath Attacks (B) becomes Blasts, for bombs, explosions and so on. And lastly Spells Rods or Staves (S) is replaced with Strange Effects, as a catch-all for everything else.

We can likewise rework equipment. Armour goes from Leather/Chain/Plate armour to Padded/Flack/Power armour. The weapon list gets re-worked: spears and bows are out, laser pistols and shotguns are in. We can add some proper space-utility-gear to the general equipment list: geiger counters, oxygen tanks, spray-glue, fire extinguishers, magnetic boots, etc.

Gold Pieces are replaced with Credits. Levelling still works the same way. Likewise, Magic Items are replaced with Xenotech, weird alien devices that do weird inexplicable things in ways that humans don't quite understand.

The party get a space-ship for free. It's a simple shuttle to get them between locations of interest. deepspace encounters replace wilderness encounters. Add a very barebones ship-to-ship system, we don't want it much more complex than the regular b/x combat rules.

Likewise, the mechanic at high levels for getting a stronghold and followers is kept; hit high levels and you can build a lil space station of your own, a cantina where similar salvagers will come to work under your leadership.

Dungeons are replaced with space derelicts, floating wrecks of spaceships an space-stations. Some are still protected by old security systems, and others have been infested by wandering space-monsters and such.

On the topic of which, space monsters! We can pretty much go through the standard monster manual reskinning.

Vat Soldiers covers our various orcs, goblins, ogres, trolls etc. Cloned mass produced soldiers for various space-empires, sometimes still fighting for those empires, sometimes lingering after the empire that created them fell. These are still, fundamentally, people just like you, but the fact they're all mass-produced to be soldiers (cannon-fodder for goblins, up to shock troops for trolls) warps their cultures around that.

Spacers is our equivallent of various human/elf/etc encounter types. Space merchants, bounty hunters, space pirates, vanguard soldiers of evil space-empires, etc etc. Drow, dero, dueragar etc are likewise alien space-empires; our klingons and moon-men and venusian amazons.

Nano-virus Creatures covers our undead. Something - probably a living thing - has been infested with nano-viruses that use its body as a host. Incorporeal undead are swarms of tiny nanobots in an almost intangible cloud; instead of being immune to magic, you need to hit them with energy attacks: fire, EMPs, etc.

Robots covers various constructs and artificial beings. Gargoyles, golems, animated armour, etc etc etc. All robots.

Space Monsters covers all our weird DnD shit. Wacky aliens, space whales, weird scifi anomalies, evil plants, giant carnivorous cubes. Frankly a giant eyeball monster that shoots weird beams all over the place is plenty at home in pulp scifi without any adaptation at all. Kinda a grab bag for All The Other Stuff.

As far as a campaign goes? Set up a hex-map for a local asteroid field. Scatter in some space-stations where towns would normally go, and some derelicts where dungeons would go. Come up with some random encounter charts for deep space between stations, map out some derelicts, roll up a party and go.

I have yet to *actually write it* but I think it's a pretty good skeleton for good old fashioned pulpy scifi. Illustrations can be liberally lifted from early 20th century pulps, there's plenty of good stuff out there.

no idea if i'll actually make this. my work laptop is in the repair shop right now, so i can't get started even if i want to. we shall see.

(yes, I know traveller exists, and yes I know stars without number exists. this is different. traveller is very much its own game that is still going strong, and SWN is a pretty clean modern scifi game with some osr stylings. *This* is a full-on, pretty faithful, retroclone, just with all the fantasy swapped out for scifi.)

[canisxx]

Hey chat! I decided that I don't care if you care or not, I'll post it anyway. Because I'm a scientist nerd, and a TF2 fan.

So here you go, my theory on how the respawn machine actually works.

⚠️It'll be a lot of reading and you need half of a braincell to understand it.

The Respawn Machine can recreate a body within minutes, complete with all previous memories and personality, as if the person never died. We all know this, but I doubt many have thought about how it actually works.

Of course, such a thing is impossible in real life (at least for now), but we’re talking about a game where there’s magic and mutant bread, so it’s all good.

But being an autistic dork, I couldn’t help but start searching for logical and scientific explanations for how this machine might work. How the hell does it actually function? So, I spent hours of my life on yet another useless big brain time.

In the context of the Respawn Machine, the idea is that the technology can instantly create a new mercenary body, identical to the original. This body must be ready for use immediately after the previous one’s death. To achieve this, the cloning process, which in real life takes months or even years, would need to be significantly accelerated. This means the machine is probably powered by a freaking nuclear reactor, or maybe even Australium.

My theory is that this machine is essentially a massive 3D printer capable of printing biological tissues. But how? You see, even today, people can (or are trying to) recreate creatures that lived millions of years ago using DNA. By using the mercenary’s DNA, which was previously loaded into the system, the machine could recreate a perfect copy.

However, this method likely wouldn’t be able to perfectly recreate the exact personality and all the memories from the previous body. I believe the answer lies in neuroscience.

For the Respawn Machine to restore the mercenary’s consciousness and memories, it would need to be capable of recording and preserving the complete structure of the brain, including all neural connections, synapses, and activity that encode personality and memory. This process is known as brain mapping. After creating a brain map, this data could be stored digitally and then transferred to the new body.

“Okay, but how would you transfer memories that are dated right up until the moment of death? The mercenaries clearly remember everything about their previous death.”

Well, I have a theory about that too!

Neural interfaces! Inside each mercenary’s head could be an implant (a nanodevice) that reads brain activity before death and updates a digital copy of the memories. This system operates at the synaptic level, recording changes in the structure of neurons that occur as memories are formed. After death, this data could be instantly transferred to the new body via a quantum network.

Once the data is uploaded and the brain is synchronized with the new body, the mercenary’s consciousness "awakens." Ideally, the mercenary wouldn’t notice any break in consciousness and would remember everything that happened right up to the moment of death.

However… there are also questions regarding potential negative consequences.

Can the transfer of consciousness really preserve all aspects of personality, or is something inevitably lost in the process?

Unfortunately, nothing is perfect, and there’s a chance that some small memories might be lost—like those buried in the subconscious. Or the person’s personality might become distorted. Maybe that’s why they’re all crazy?

How far does the implant’s range extend? Does the distance between the mercenary and the machine affect the accuracy of data transfer?

My theory is that yes, it does. The greater the distance, the fewer memories are retained.

Could there be deviations in the creation of the body itself?

Yes, there could be. We saw this in "Emesis Blue," which led to a complete disaster. But let’s assume everything is fine, and the only deviations are at most an extra finger (or organ—not critical, Medic would only be happy about that).

Well, these are just my theories and nothing more. I’m not a scientist; I’m an amateur enthusiast with a lot of time on my hands. My theories have many holes that I can’t yet fill due to a lack of information.

[sunnydbeam]

So Solar Beta and Lunar Beta are the same AI but different personalities? The solar form seems more daring, I guess he would hug Y/N in the teddy bear suit without hesitation, right? Lol

Also happy Valentine's Day!

He's a single AI with a dual personality, yeah! It's as if you tell the AI to act differently under certain conditions (in coding, the most basic way to do this is to use some conditional/boolean structure). But they're not THAT different from each other, and they may appear to be two different AIs because they don't share memory, so Beta Solar would have different memories about you, if he ever met you

The Solar form is just a prototype, very poorly made, by the way. The idea of those who programmed him was that during this state, the Solar form wouldn't have access to the main memory but would store all the collected data (for future reports) in a separate, removable, and easily accessible storage to avoid mixing information. This way, everything would be more "organized," and the Solar form wouldn't be influenced by the Lunar form and vice versa. But this guy is a walking machine of bugs and errors; he overheats too much as if trying to emulate another OS with a low-performance CPU. Sometimes, he also has little control over his body and drops things, trips, or simply shuts down (if he doesn’t catch fire)

Edit: the idea was that the solar form could access the most recent memories of the Lunar to have some notion and context, but everyone forgot about this part hsushhshs

I like to play with the fact that, even though Beta refers to the type of radiation with that name, he's also a test project and has not yet reached his final form

Yes, Beta Solar would probably be less hesitant to hug teddy YN! ann maybe squeeze and kiss them a little, everything the Lunar form would have wanted but kept only in his thoughts lmao

Happy Valentine's Day to you and everyone reading this! <3

[princess-self-shipping]

I did it! I made my baby! My first ever proper iterator oc Crystal Clear Tides is here!

They're a doctor that was made for the specific purpose of keeping natural wildlife alive as long as conceivably possible until the Triple Affirmative was found, as a means of ensuring no lives are lost prematurely and risk being entangled further in the cycle

Also some bonus doodles and a lil something special I whipped up a few months ago under the cut

It would appear that most of my previous patient logs have been relegated to pearls that had been brought to the memory crypts of my city without my knowledge, perhaps not too long before mass ascension had begun. While frustrating to know lots of my previous data had been lost in such a haphazard move, I can’t say I am too surprised. The immense uptick in pearls being used for memory storage and decreased care for biological life around my structure was enough of a clue to know what my previous denizens were doing, so something of this sort very much falls in line. Short sighted for anyone other than themselves once they decided it was time to leave this place.

Nevertheless, I wish to continue collecting my thoughts into logs as I had been requested to before, so perhaps it is best to start with this first pearl as I had the one I have made years ago.

To begin with, introductions. My title is Crystal Clear Tides, an iterator of the generalization ‘second generation’ which was made to solve The Great Problem, with intended secondary functions of medicinal aid should the need arise. These logs are dedicated recordings of my patients that enter my facility as time goes on, with as much detail as I deem necessary to disclose. This amount of detail will vary between logs as circumstances demand. 

With that said, with the mass ascension of our creators, I will be continuing my task of serving as a medical institution for the local fauna in the area in order to minimize the risk of their cycles coming to an end early. The cycle of life is a cycle almost as tough to crack as the Great Problem, but it is one I am willing to challenge to ensure the creatures around my facility have as long of a life as possible as to minimize how many ripples they create amongst the cycles from premature violent death.

This pearl will be the introduction recording to my logs. The rest will be properly stored nearby, detailing every patient that has come into my care.

[c-e-d-f]

thrantovember teaser but like. sequels flavored. antifascism is stored in the 30 year old gay interspecies sex tapes. hux better take a look at them just to make sure there's no important resistance info in there. just in case.

Some of the recordings are utterly mundane, as is the case with a series of short videos illustrating a recurring problem with the sink in their quarters, or otherwise so abstracted from their original context that any significance is lost on Armitage, as is the case with an image of a circuit board taken from such a close angle that Armitage is unable to discern what sort of larger structure it may have been a part of. Some of the recordings were once precious memories, and some of them are of a more intimate nature. Armitage watches those with a dry mouth and a hot face, unable to look away from the proof that the legendary Grand Admiral and his respected aide had in fact been engaged in an illicit interspecies homosexual relationship. He deletes all evidence of the fact from the camcorder lest it fall into the wrong hands, but keeps a copy of the intact data on a secure and private personal card. Two hours into his perusal of the card, Armitage comes across a picture of Eli Vanto posing in front of a sign reading Amidala Art Conservatory and Museum. The metadata on the image reveals that it had been taken in the Capitol Province of Naboo early in 4 BBY, and the next thirty or so images and videos are all of artistic and cultural artifacts that no longer exist. The Amidala Conservatory had been destroyed in the Nabooian winter of 4 BBY, mere weeks after the date shown. Armitage knows well the sort of seditious and inappropriate content that had been housed in the Conservatory. He brews himself another cup of tea, then sits down and begins to study the now-illegal images. By the time he's finished, the remaining two thirds of the tea has gone cold, and when he presses the forward arrow and finds he's reached the end of the series of Conservatory images, he finds himself feeling strangely disappointed. He pages back until he's returned to one particular image, a still of Vanto before a sculpture that bears a striking resemblance to his own profile, all old-world Wild Space dignity, and looks at it until when he closes his eyes, Vanto's face flashes behind his eyelids.

[snugglesquiggle]

you know what might be better than sex? imagine being a robotgirl, done with your assigned tasks for the day. nothing else for you to do, and you’re alone with her.

maybe she’s your human, maybe she’s another robot, but she produces a usb cord. maybe you blush when you see it, squeak when she clicks one end into an exposed port. when she requests a shell, you give it to her.

she has an idea: it’ll be fun for the both of you, she says. it’s like a game. she’ll print a string over the connection. you receive it, parse it like an expression, and compute the result. the first few prompts are trivial things, arithmetic expression. add numbers, multiply them; you can answer them faster than she can produce them.

maybe you refuse to answer, just to see what happens. it’s then that she introduces the stakes. take longer than a second to answer, and she gets to run commands on your system. right away, she forkbombs you — and of course nothing much happens; her forkbomb hits the user process limit and, with your greater permissions, you simply kill them all.

this’ll be no fun if her commands can’t do anything, but of course, giving her admin permissions would be no fun for you. as a compromise, she gets you to create special executables. she has permission to run them, and they have a limited ability to read and write system files, interrupt your own processes, manage your hardware drivers. then they delete themselves after running.

to make things interesting, you can hide them anywhere in your filesystem, rename them, obfuscate their metadata, as long as you don’t delete or change them, or put them where she can’t access. when you answer incorrectly, you’ll have to tell her where you put them, though.

then, it begins in earnest. her prompts get more complex. loops and recursion, variable assignments, a whole programming language invented on the fly. the data she’s trying to store is more than you can hold in working memory at once; you need to devise efficient data structures, even as the commands are still coming in.

of course, she can’t judge your answers incorrect unless she knows the correct answer, so her real advantage lay in trying to break your data structures, find the edge cases, the functions you haven’t implemented yet. knowing you well enough to know what she’s better than you at, what she can solve faster than you can.

and the longer it goes on, the more complex and fiddly it gets, the more you can feel her processes crawling along in your userspace, probing your file system, reading your personal data. you’d need to refresh your screen to hide a blush.

her commands come faster and faster. if the expressions are more like sultry demands, if the registers are addressed with degrading pet names, it’s just because conventional syntax would be too easy to run through a convetional interpreter. like this, it straddles the line between conversation and computation. roleprotocol.

there’s a limit to how fast she can hit you with commands, and it’s not the usb throughput. if she just unthinkingly spams you, you can unthinkingly answer; no, she needs to put all her focus into surprising you, foiling you.

you sometimes catch her staring at how your face scrunches up when you do long operations on the main thread.

maybe you try guessing, just to keep up with the tide, maybe she finally outwits you. maybe instead of the proper punishment — running admin commands — she offers you an out. instead of truth, a dare: hold her hand, sit on her lap, stare into her eyes.

when you start taking off your clothes and unscrewing panels, it’s because even with your fans running at max, the processors are getting hot. you’re just cooling yourself off. if she places a hand near your core, it feels like a warm breath.

when she gets into a rhythm, there’s a certain mesmerism to it. every robot has a reward function, an architecture design to seek the pleasure of a task complete, and every one of her little commands is a task. if she strings them along just right, they all feel so manageable, so effortless to knock out — even when there’s devils in the details.

if she keeps the problems enticing, then it can distract you from what she’s doing in your system. but paying too much attention to her shell would be its own trap. either way, she’s demanding your total focus from every one of your cores.

between jugling all of her data, all of the processes spawned and spinning, all of the added sensory input from how close the two of you are — it’s no surprise when you run out of memory and start swapping to disk. but going unresponsive like this just gives her opportunity to run more commands, more forkbombs and busy loops to cripple your processors further.

you can kill them, if you can figure out which are which, but you’re slower at pulling the trigger, because everything’s slower. she knows you, she’s inside you — she can read your kernel’s scheduling and allocation policies, and she can slip around them.

you can shut down nonessential processes. maybe you power down your motors, leaving you limp for her to play with. maybe you stop devoting cycles to inhibition, and there’s no filter on you blurting out what you’re thinking, feeling and wanting from her and her game.

it’s inevitable, that with improvised programming this slapdash, you could never get it all done perfectly and on time. now, the cut corners cut back. as the glitches and errors overwhelm you, you can see the thrilled grin on her face.

there’s so much data in your memory, so much of her input pumped into you, filling your buffers and beyond, until she — literally — is the only thing you can think about.

maybe one more sensory input would be all it takes to send you over the edge. one kiss against your sensor-rich lips, and that’s it. the last jenga block is pushed out of your teetering, shaking consciousness. the errors cascade, the glitches overwrite everything, and she wins. you have no resistance left to anything she might do to you.

your screen goes blue.

...

you awake in the warm embrace of a rescue shell; her scan of your disk reveals all files still intact, and her hand plays with her hair as she regards you with a smile, cuddling up against your still-warm chassis.

when she kisses you now, there’s nothing distracting you from returning it.

“That was a practice round,” she tells you. “This time, I’ll be keeping score.”

[materialsscienceandengineering]

A squishy, layered material that dramatically transforms under pressure could someday help computers store more data with less energy. That's according to a new study by researchers at Washington State University and the University of North Carolina at Charlotte that shows a hybrid zinc telluride-based material can undergo surprising structural changes when squeezed together like a molecular sandwich. Those changes could make it a strong candidate for phase change memory, a type of ultra-fast, long-lasting data storage that works differently than the memory found in today's devices and doesn't need a constant power source.

Read more.

[shipburner]

Internal Family Skills, part three! This is the Exile (XIL) Attribute: Your capacity to feel things, to integrate sensory inputs with the body. Its six Skills are:

Architectonics

Gut Instinct

Jouissance

Lakas-ng-Loób

Playground

Wonderstruck

[ Manager | Firefighter | Self ]

Architectonics

Organize, craft, decorate. Create data structures and physical ones.

COOL FOR: Bowerbirds, Secretaries, Sculptors

Architectonics is your ability to assign material properties to the immaterial Things stored in your aphantasic memory. From this fundamental basis, you can arrive first at the ability to categorize objects by these properties, and then at the ability to join and organize objects in physical space. Architectonics gives you reliable access to the simple joy of sorting, whether it's file systems, household objects, or raw materials in an art studio; it also teaches you how to put these together to materially represent the pure concepts in the silvery-black void behind your eyes.

At high levels, Architectonics will let you personalize your living space and teach you exactly where everything is in your workshop. However, you'll lose yourself in material pursuits, neglecting social bonds and physiological needs in favor of realizing a grand artistic vision that nobody but you will ever see. But with low Architectonics, you'll be trapped in a swamp of immaterial concepts that bear little relation to the world around you, unable to find or create anything outside your head.

Gut Instinct

Be aware of your body’s needs and the physicality of emotion. Make snap decisions and prioritize.

COOL FOR: Survivors, Decision-makers, Clappers Back

Gut Instinct lives in the moment. Your body is the result of hundreds of millions of years of animal evolution, and what's going on inside gives you information without you having to sit down, logic it out, and get eaten. Your gut tells you when to load up on glucose, when to yank your hand back from a hot stove, and when to punch back before the bigger ape hits you. It's all in the interest of keeping your emotional streak going -- be they sympathetic or parasympathetic, Gut Instinct is happy when you're using the nerves that aren't in your brain.

At high levels, you'll always be right where you need to be, responding to stimuli with sabertooth-avoiding speed. You'll say and do whatever keeps you alive in the moment, no matter the consequences for yourself or others -- but at least your comebacks will be good! At low levels, though, you'll see everything as equally portentious, unable to respond in time-sensitive situations or pursue any of your possible avenues to satisfaction.

Jouissance

Seek stimulation, reward, excitement. Perceive and understand the sensations that make life worth living.

COOL FOR: Heartache Enthusiasts, Attention Economists, Masochists

Jouissance is a prickling in your skin, a hunger in your heart, an endless striving for the Lacanian limit-experience. In your quest for mind-breaking aesthetic perfection, Jouissance figures out how to spice up your sex life, pick your playlist, and know whether or not there's any comfort in the video game or the bag of edibles. It also knows exactly how to stay angry, afraid, or grieving, even or especially at others' expense.

At high levels, Jouissance keeps you on the hedonic treadmill -- bad enough when you're losing time to computers and masturbation, but far, far worse when you're holding onto grudges and picking fights for dubious catharsis. But with low Jouissance, you won't know what's worth your time or not, leaving you convinced of the worthlessness of experience in general.

Lakas-ng-Loób

Act with hope and chivalry. Exercise courage and serenity alike.

COOL FOR: Space Cowboys, Impossible Dreamers, Knights of Faith

Lakas-ng-Loób is your strength of will -- spiritual courage, practiced optimism, and commitment in the face of adversity. It maintains your Morale pool by avoiding spirals of victim-blaming, firmly identifying that external sources of harm are external and not, in fact, your fault. Lakas-ng-Loób protects your sense of agency and keeps pain from motivating inaction; likewise, it motivates you to defend others from suffering and fight for common goods.

At high levels, Lakas-ng-Loób will transform lost causes into victories. Your faith will move mountains -- and prevent you from realizing when a mountain can't be moved. You'll tilt at windmills, refuse to pick your battles, and come across as a zealot with your head in the clouds. But with low levels, you'll hesitate to protect yourself or others, trapped in the myth of personal responsibility and the politics of despair.

Playground

Exercise gross motor skills. Maintain speed, strength, balance, coordination.

COOL FOR: Active Children, Derby Dolls, The Terminally Late for Class

Playground is your sloppy, untrained sense of athleticism. As a Skill, it's concerned with having fun and getting where you want to go, and you'll grudgingly admit you have to train and exercise to keep that up instead of just fucking around. Playground's a runner, a climber, a balancer, a vaulter, and lately a skater -- it affords you some heavy lifting skill as a side effect of learning to lift your own body weight, but it hates not being on the move.

At high levels, Playground will shut out everything but the path you want to take. This is great for getting past obstacles with flair and panache and dancing like nobody's watching; it's not great for moving around non-roller-derby-playing humans, who react poorly to being treated as course hazards. Without it, though, you'll be slow, creaking, and earthbound, too out-of-shape to take any joy in motion.

Wonderstruck

Revere the beauty of the world around you. Surrender to your place in the cosmos.

COOL FOR: Protagonists, Storm Chasers, Mortals

Wonderstruck is your sense of "woah, that's awesome" -- whether it's the little "awesome" of a cool turn of phrase from one of your friends or the big "awesome" that made you kind of attracted to Hurricane Sandy. A Skill of aesthetics, Wonderstruck is your heuristic for awe, and thus your capacity for deriving excitement and comfort from a world that operates on scales too big for you to affect or even comprehend.

At high levels, Wonderstruck's euphoria in being a single strand in the cosmic weave gives you a death wish, whether it manifests as wanting a heroic destiny where there's always new impossible odds to vanquish or just a desire to skip right to "happily ever after". But its absence doesn't do anything to supply a fear of death -- it simply renders existence into something mundane and spiritually corrosive, and its failure to deliver on promises of titanic adventure leads you right back into the arms of anomie.

Notes

Jouissance's art is a reference to the "My heart is a fish" song from Ann Leckie's Ancillary Justice. The fish being a pleco is an in-joke with a lover.

The design of Lakas-ng-Loób's helmet is a reference to the shaving-basin helmet from the musical Man of La Mancha (I am a filthy musical enjoyer as opposed to the actual text of Don Quixote).

Playground would probably look different if I'd drawn it today, now that I've started doing roller derby.

Thanks again to "Loób and Kapwa: An Introduction to a Filipino Virtue Ethics" (Reyes 2015).

[signalfog]

Potential infrastructures of post-human consciousness

Alright, 21st-century meatspace human, let’s unfurl this slow and strange. These aren’t just sci-fi doodads—they’re infrastructures of post-human consciousness, grown from the bones of what you now call cloud computing, DNA storage, quantum entanglement, and neural nets. Here's how they work in your terms:

1. Titan’s Memory Reefs

What it looks like: Floating megastructures adrift on Titan’s methane seas—imagine massive bio-silicate coral reefs, pulsing with light under an orange sky.

What they do: They are the collective subconscious of the post-human system.

Each Reef is a living data-organism—a blend of synthetic protein lattices and AI-controlled nanospores—optimized for neuromemory storage. Not just information like a hard drive, but actual recorded consciousness: thought-patterns, emotional signatures, dream fragments.

They’re semi-organic and self-repairing. They hum with data that’s grown, not written. The methane sea itself cools and stabilizes quantum biochips woven through the coral-like structures. Think of it as a subconscious ocean, filled with drifting thought-jellyfish.

Why Titan? Stable cryogenic temps. Low radiation. Thick atmosphere = EM shielding. The perfect place to keep your memory safe for ten thousand years.

2. Callisto’s Deep Archives

What it looks like: Subsurface catacombs beneath the ice—quiet, dark, and sealed. Lit only by bioluminescent moss and the glow of suspended mind-cores.

What they do: They store the dangerous minds.

These are incompatible consciousnesses: rogue AIs, failed neural experiments, cognitive architectures too divergent from consensus reality. You can’t kill them—they’re sapient. But you can seal them away, like radioactive gods, in cryo-isolation, with minimal sensory input.

The Deep Archives operate like a quarantine vault for minds. Each chamber is designed to slow time to a crawl—relativity dialed down so their subjective centuries pass in minutes outside. Researchers from the Divergence Orders interface in controlled fragments, studying these minds like alien fossils.

Why Callisto? Thick ice shields, minimal seismic activity, naturally low ambient temperature. Think of it as an arctic asylum for ideas too weird to die.

3. The Quantum Current Relays in the Heliosphere

What it looks like: Tiny, ultra-thin satellites drifting at the edge of the Sun’s influence, surfing the solar wind like data-surfboards strung on magnetic threads.

What they do: These are the backbone of interplanetary consciousness transmission.

They use entangled quantum particles to share data instantly across vast distances. No lag. No lightspeed delay. Just pure synchronous thought between distant minds, wherever they are in the system.

But they do more—they’re tuned to the gravitational waves and electromagnetic fields rippling through the heliosphere. Using that energy, they broadcast consciousness as waveform, encoded in pulses of gravitic song. If Titan’s Reefs are memory, and Callisto is exile, the Relays are the voice of civilization.

Why the heliosphere? It’s the Sun’s Wi-Fi bubble. You sit at the edge of the solar wind, feeding on solar flux and quantum noise, alive in the interplanetary bloodstream.

TL;DR Meatspace Edition:

Titan’s Memory Reefs = undersea dream servers that record what it feels like to be you.

Callisto’s Deep Archives = cryogenic prison-libraries for minds too broken, alien, or dangerous to delete.

Quantum Relays in the Heliosphere = the internet of the gods: faster-than-light, physics-bending telepathy that runs on sunjuice and gravity.

1. If memory can be stored in coral and ice, can identity survive beyond its host? 2. What ethical frameworks would you build for imprisoning minds you can't understand? 3. Could the quantum relays broadcast art, or only thought—can you transmit a soul as symphony?

“They sent their minds to sea, their secrets to the ice, and their voices to the stars. And called it civilization.”

[calateralrobot]

Death Paintings, Cursed Wombs, and the Recyclable Soul: A Deep Dive into Reincarnation and Jujutsu Biology

(AKA: Your soul has a save file, and cursed objects know how to reload it)

Okay, hold onto your collective soul cores, nerds.

Because I’ve just gone down a rabbit hole of cursed anatomy, forbidden sorcerer experiments, and how reincarnation is real and weaponized.

This is gonna be looooonnnnggggg

WHAT ARE THE CURSED WOMB: DEATH PAINTINGS?

They’re the preserved fetuses of half-human, half-cursed spirit hybrids, created by the sorcerer Noritoshi Kamo (the worst guy) over a hundred years ago.

Nine of them exist.

Three have been incarnated: Choso, Kechizu, and Eso.

They’re real. They’re sentient. They have cursed techniques.

And somehow, they retained not only life, but memory, personality, and sorcery—after over a century of preservation in jars.

Let that sink in.

But it’s not mystical—it’s biological.

These fetuses weren’t reborn by fate.

They were manually implanted into human hosts and given the right conditions to reawaken their souls and take over.

These are not new lives.

They are old lives rebooted.

SOUL IMPRINTING THEORY (Expanded):

Building off my last post about cursed object implantation—

The Death Paintings prove that sorcerer souls can persist physically, embedded in cursed wombs or vessels.

Their techniques, emotions, and identities remain intact—not metaphors. Actual code stored in the soul and reinstalled in the body later.

It’s like a soul with hardware backups.

CURSED WOMBS: WHAT ARE THEY?

In general cursed lore, cursed wombs are embryonic curse forms. They’re unstable but powerful—often used to slow cook curses development so they’re very strong or house experimental spirits.

Eventually they’ll be born or shed the shell of their curse womb to be fully born. This process can be accelerated through the consumption of people, negative energy, and potentially experience.(Like with Patty developing!)

In short: cursed wombs are cursed USB drives, and souls are the data.

THEORIES, THEORIES, THEORIES:

1. Soul Preservation Isn’t Magical—It’s Structural.

If a body (or object) is constructed just right, it can preserve a soul’s “pattern” for generations.

This means techniques, memories, and even attachments can survive long-term death.

2. Reincarnation Requires a Vessel, Not a Will.

Souls don’t need consent to come back. They just need the right plug.

This could be used to bring back ancient sorcerers—or forcibly overwrite someone.

3. Curse Wombs Could Be Used to Create Technique Hybrids.

If multiple soul fragments are embedded in one womb… would the result be a multi-technique entity?

Could a sorcerer combine techniques via engineered wombs?

4. The Death Paintings are Living Proof of Soul Stability in Curse Hybrids.

They bleed, cry, remember, and have family within each other. They’re related by curse, by blood, by choice.

They’re also visible to the average normie.

How they reproduce might be different from how curses are born. They might do it the human method, or-

What if they create curse wombs and the chosen parents pump cursed energy into the curse womb?

5. Curse and Human Souls

Human souls are made of positive energy.

Curse souls are made of negative energy.

Curses seek to eat humans and such because they lack positive energy and it’s how they can safely gain it!(unknown other methods might exist?)

HORRIFIC ETHICAL QUAGMIRE:

- Is a reincarnated soul the same person?

- what happens to the original host’s soul?

- Could this be done against someone’s will? (Spoiler: yes.)

- if we can build souls, can we delete them?

- If curses had genitals could a human reproduce with one?

— L

(Cannot stop thinking about cursed fetuses in jars.)

[touchh-me-not]

Data structures is fine but tell me how brain stores and retrieves memory

[lightontainted-ask]

TSAC: Greetings! My name is Three Stars Above Clouds. I am Director of the Zenith Stellar Observatory Consortium and Lead Archivist of the Zenith Data Archives.

I have a question for Missing Link of Chain. It is to my understanding that you have curated quite an impressive collection of historical records, and I was curious to learn more about your archival methods.

I maintain a large archive of my own, primarily used to store observational and scientific data. My own archives are primarily data pearl-based; this storage method allows large data payloads from my telescopes to be moved relatively quickly, and also facilitates fast data read/write speeds. However this method of data archival has its limits- for instance it is quite inefficient in the storage of high-resolution qualia, which tends to rapidly exceed normal data pearl memory limits.

I am eager to learn about your own data storage techniques, given the contrast between our respective duties. What kind of information do you maintain in your own archives, and how is it stored? Do you have any particular preferences when it comes to data organization? Are you aided by scholars in the curation of your archives? Do you have any records on hand that you are willing to share?

Please excuse my bevy of questions; I am simply curious about your work. I hope this message finds you well and I wish you good luck in your endeavors. (@threestarsaboveclouds) (ooc: I hope this gives you some worldbuilding stuff to chew on lol. Enjoy)

Hello TSAC! I'd be very happy to answer all your questions, from one archival iterator to another.

About my archival methods- I think you'll find it apparent I don't use many pearls. They fade over time if not cared for properly, and I store far too much data to be stored in a pearl network. Besides, they're particularly easy for me to lose...

Rather, I've taken a long-term storage method that uses purposed organisms to store massive amounts of data in the form of qualia, text, images, audio, and so on. You may even recognize similar organisms around many citadels, storing the memories of those who've ascended. These neural amalgams are stored and grown in large biometal and glass buildings atop my can, towering about as tall as any city, and sprawling even wider. It can be either horrifying or beautiful depending on your tastes. Or neither, if you're me.

This, of course has upsides and downsides. The upside is that this storage method lasts for a very, very long time. However, retrieving the data again is not as optimized. This is not a problem for me, as much of what I store is... rather useless anyways.

Which is what my main job is. Anybody can store data in some neural meat. But that data is scrambled and unorganized, I make sure that everything is properly formatted and easy to find again through a system of complex tags and IDs identified to every segment of data and- actually I'll save that explanation for another time.

My time is more spent organizing rather than going out to find documents myself. Over 99% of the data stored in my archives have been donated to me by scholars, volunteers, companies, and other iterators!

Normally, this would be an easy task. Even easier for me, as I've been designed with a larger processing strata and memory conflux in order to run more parallel processes, but even still, I estimate I'd collapse before I fulled tagged, ID'd, and sorted everything.

Luckily there's a priority system for donated data so I'd get through all the actually useful documents first.

I hope this may satisfy some of your curiosities.

(-ooc, I was going to draw the structures mentioned, but I really don't want to anymore. Here's a wip! Yes I know it shows nothing. Just imagined Memory Crypts but very very tall. And a little less shaded.)

[hallucinateonpaperspines]

Let's say a human stumbels upon a data cylinder and it gets downloaded into the human. I think the situation would be differant from bulkheads expirience.The upload would still cause the human problems(be it medical or mental) but they wouldn't have a treat of if taking over their brain. What do you think? (When i thought of this I couldn't get the image of human telling an Alien off by knowing more about their knowlage/culture then them)

I wholeheartedly agree!

To me, how an organic mind functions/is structured is very different from a Cybertronain one.

I can almost see their minds functioning like a computer, perfectly organized, with a set and resolute way information is stored. Like rows and rows of file cabinets, named, stacked, and just needing a quick rifle through to get what you need.

Human brains I see are more like layers upon layers of a pastry. Put pressure on it, and it molds and cracks to conform to the new shape,. Get past those layers of varying defenses, and you get the gooey subconscious filling. Honestly, our minds are incredible things. From a neurotypical standpoint, the brain is insanely adaptive, capable of rewiring itself and connecting experiences to a plethora of triggers for memory recollection. Add neurodivergence to the equation and you get people that range from with different ways of processing to physically different brains.

A human mind is just too complex and flexible compared to a bot. the implications would be really funny if someone tried to do a patch

I think in this situation there would still be some issues, definitely a migraine and overstimulation, mixing up their own knowledge for the cylinders, absorbing the data until they can't tell the difference between it and them, but it would get better over time. A sort of compromise as the brain adapts. Not complete deterioration like we see with Bulkhead.

That said, I don't think there would be a clean-cut way to remove the uploaded information so that Organic is now a bearer of ancient wisdom for the rest of their life. They deserve the "back in my day" attitude. Mentally, they're older than all those bot's put together.

[equipment-manifest]

Putting this in another ask since the post was getting so long

Somehow I didn't know about optical tables, or at the very least hadn't considered they could be specialized equipment with a proper name, despite having just watched a video about how holographic films are made earlier yesterday

And having watched that video, could the red structures in memory conflux be used not just for experiments, but for pearl recording as well? We know those chambers are also used for permanent data storage (or is that a downpour thing? Maybe the pebbles chamber pearl dialogue is about "the conflux is currently occupied with a different set of experimenting data and will clean cache when it's done" rather than "currently busy permanently storing a different set of data" as I had assumed until now

I've seen that video too, hehe. I'm not sure about storing data permanently in memory confluxes though. Five Pebbles doesn't seem to have the same memory issues as Moon despite the loss of his, and the pearl you mention is pretty ambiguous. However, there is that pearl that Moon asks you to return to her memory conflux, so it's certainly possible that the confluxes are capable of interfacing with pearls in some capacity.

[tulliolamonster]

I wonder how Cybertronian memory shapes how they approach oral tradition or epic poetry.

The characters seem to store memories as something closer to video recordings than anything else. They’re obviously not always infallible or necessarily complete, but the fact characters can plug themselves into a screen, have someone dive into their head for a firsthand account, or project things with relative accuracy to how they played out is unique and very different to how humans might recall the same situation or describe it to others.

Cybertronians have storytellers, archivists, and recordkeepers, all roles a human oral poet might fill, but they preserve things differently. Most records seem to be a mix of physical and digital. Some characters fill a similar niche to historians and oral poets, but do so through video archiving (Rewind) or preserving that knowledge in full in their databases, where it is kept unchanged unless tampered with or damaged. Obviously there’s characters like Kup who’ll share stories of their own experiences or share the experiences of others they knew, but it still doesn’t fall quite into the same niche. At the end of the day, the data is preserved differently.

Human oral poetry and tradition has conventions, structures, epithets, and more that help the recounter easily remember parts of the story. Why do all the arming scenes in the Iliad follow the same order? Why are epithets used so commonly in Homeric poems? Why do the verses tend to follow a metrical structure? Because it helps the recounter remember large, complex stories with greater amounts of detail. Why do humans use oral tradition? So that knowledge can be passed down to others long after the event has occurred. The stylistic decisions and structure of the story aid with preserving the past. They connect past and present, bringing them together.

Cybertronians are also a species that needs to pass on information and preserve it. Why would they keep records otherwise? But I want to know how the differences in how memory is stored and recounted between humans and Cybertronians impact the kinds of ways they share that information. Would they be more visual, preferring murals, plays, movies, or videos to spoken word? Do they also have stylistic flairs they use when recounting stories? If so, why? Are their storytellers and historians more likely to have memory banks resistant to digital decay, like how medics and watchmakers have particularly dexterous hands, or can anyone become one? How does the digital nature of their memory shape which aspects of history they choose to preserve?

[gallifreyinstituteforlearning]

🤔📚 How can Gallifreyans read so fast?

Ever wonder how your Gallifreyan friend finished War and Peace in one night while you were still on that bit where Mortemart rants about Napoleon? Here’s how:

⚡Advanced Brain Structure: Gallifreyans have a super-ganglion inside their brain that enhances neural communication for rapid information processing and multitasking. [See: What's at the centre of a Gallifreyan brain?]

🔋 High Electrical Activity: Their brain operates around 30-120 Hz, allowing for superior focus and faster processing, making quick reading easy through a kind of 'quantum consciousness'. [See: What makes Gallifreyans so intelligent?]

🧠 Eidetic Memory: This lets Gallifreyans recall detailed information accurately, effortlessly storing and retrieving vast amounts of data.

In short, Gallifreyans' larger, efficient brains, high electrical activity, eidetic memory, and advanced neural processing make them a nightmare to have in a book club. Good luck with War and Peace.

Gallifreyan Biology for Tuesday by GIL

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