#skibidi adjacent: robots and hardware

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You can probably hear robots relaxing. They settle down and their hydraulics and servos unwind and spool down.

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Robots in media are often described as 'cold metal' as opposed to warm living things, but have you ever felt how warm a laptop gets? Robot people would probably be huggably warm!

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Reverse cyborg. Instead of an organism with cybernetic enhancements, it's a robot with organic enhancements.

Wires break? Slime moulds bridge the gap (automatically choosing the most efficient path) as a stopgap until the robot can get to a proper repair bay.

In abdominal surgery (on humans) that requires moving the intestines, the surgeons don't need to carefully pack the intestine back in - they can let it do its thing and the mesentery will automatically sort the intestines out. Robot with juicy organic membranes that can haul its components back if they get out of shape.

You get the idea.

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Would robots understand humans scratching in response to an itch? They'd surely understand it intellectually if you explained 'Sometimes a nerve randomly gets irritated and this action resets it', but if they saw a human doing that with no explanation would they think 'Human, why are you attempting to remove your top layer of skin?'

Maybe the robot equivalent of scratching an itch is smacking themself to perform percussive maintenance, haha

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Thinking about what would happen if you introduced robots to the concept of fursonas. Would they make animal-based ones like human furries usually do? Would they make humansonas? Or base their sonas on other tech?

Thinking about the Skibidi Toilet hardwares: from the neck down, they already look very like humans. Maybe they'd design sonas with the same hardware heads they have now but with more animal-like bodies. I think Speakermen would gravitate towards cicadas because arthropods have exoskeletons like robots have, and cicadas are cute, loud and like to party!

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You know how humans find poo, wee, farts etc. funny? (Well, I fucking do.) Would robots find e.g. oil changes funny in the same way?

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Thinking about techfolk being confused by the expression 'treating someone like a piece of meat' because "human, you are all pieces of meat."

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Hardware Alliance final boss

Babel 2001 is a large-scale sculptural installation that takes the form of a circular tower made from hundreds of second-hand analogue radios that the artist has stacked in layers. The radios are tuned to a multitude of different stations and are adjusted to the minimum volume at which they are audible. (...)

The installation manifests, quite literally, a Tower of Babel, relating it to the biblical story of a tower tall enough to reach the heavens, which, offending God, caused him to make the builders speak in different tongues. Their inability to communicate with one another caused them to become divided and scatter across the earth and, moreover, became the source of all of mankind’s conflicts.

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Vintage Polycephaly

Sampo 9519

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Me, writing fiction about techfolk: using random-ass tech terminology from a mix of real-life machines because hey, it's all pretend and I'm having fun.

A robot writing fiction about humans: "The human clicked on her tapetum lucidum to switch to night vision, then everted her lungs to change the gill filters. She climbed the wall, constantly rotating her radius and ulna bones around each other. Her hyoid bone rattled a warning to other humans in the area, and her ceacum growled in sympathy. Her loops of henle would need draining soon."

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Sudden thought - we say 'going loopy' to mean someone's being irrational. Robots might use the same phrase in the same way. In their case, it would mean the robot is stuck in an inescapable if-loop and is continuing with the loop behaviour even though it's become irrational to do so.

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TV strider :D

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Biological 'wiring'

Throwing this out here for inspiration. Emergency repairs in the fields? Get some slime-wires to tide you over until you get back to base and can get some nice new metal wires soldered in.

(Slime mould already has applications in engineering etc. because it tends to find the most energy-efficient routes between points. Want to plan a railway network? You could do worse than put out some little piles of oats representing the station locations, then wait and see how the slime mould bridges them!)

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Suggestion

Robots who are interested in humans are called meatheads, in the same way that humans who are into cars are called petrolheads.

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Ideas for nicknames for characters with serial numbers

(i.e. robots or whatever)

Periodic table: Every element has a unique atomic number and 1-3 letter abbreviation. You could spell things with the abbreviations directly or dig into the etymology of the element a bit. (Example: 80 is the atomic number of Mercury. Mercury is also the name of a Roman god who was known to the Greeks as Hermes. If your robot's serial is 80, they can use that reasoning to be nicknamed Hermes.)

Phone pad words: Remember the bad old days before phone touchscreens when if you wanted to text the letter 'S' (the most frequent consonant in English), and your phone didn't have a physical keyboard, you had to tap 7 four times like a chump? Relive those bygone days. (Example: 5387 spells 'jets'.)

Calculator words: Some numbers look like words when viewed on an upside-down calculator. 5181 looks like 'ibis', for example. Plenty of potential for puerile fun too ('holes', 'boobs', etc.)

Astronomical objects: (Asteroids, etc.) Many of these have generated numbers plus word names. (Random examples: exoplanet Wolf 1069, asteroid 99942 Apophis.)

Bingo calls: Some silly ones in here.

Feel free to add more!

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When your TV-unit friend thinks you're angry with them and doesn't know why.