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theamaranthology · 10 days

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Ran Ortner

#Cale Brand

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theamaranthology · 11 days

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we should throw politicians in the ocean

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theamaranthology · 28 days

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Door at Alnwick Garden, Northumberland.

#Kepler

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theamaranthology · 29 days

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#K.'s estate

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theamaranthology · 1 month

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i like eilands winter fit

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theamaranthology · 1 month

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Helvetica Man (my OC) lore:

The titular character is a Dominican trans man named Max [surname to be determined] and a computer scientist and engineer.

Sentient robots have existed in his world for a generation, and Max helped to create a new technology for robot sentience (by copying human neural architecture into said new technology using new particle physics), but the attempt to implement it went wrong, and the directionality of the technology acted in reverse, converting his neural architecture and nervous system into a particle field that replicates much of the same input-and-output functions (this is sort of a simplified description).

What that means in practice is that should he be harmed in a way that he couldn't fully heal from naturally, the field will generate its own energy in place of his physical body, at the normal rate of human cell generation, and when that energy has built up to the required amount, the body part will manifest. Which is to say, he can be harmed and he stays injured until enough time passes, and then he can revert to the state encoded into that field. He has the superpower of continuing to be a human being. It isn't even an advanced healing factor, it's a regular one, and he doesn't even recover during the whole time. So he can be incapacitated as easily as any other human.

This is because Helvetica Man (🚹) is a representation of a quintessential "man". So Helvetica Man's superpower is "the power to be a human without superpowers". What I came up with for that was a power that lets him continue to be human.

One of the few unique benefits though is that inside his skull is like a galaxy instead of a brain, 'cause his whole nervous system is that particle field now, and he can survive a headshot, but like... It'll hurt and maybe knock him out from the pain, but if it doesn't, then yeah his neural functions won't be damaged.

The rest is a more in-depth explanation of his lore.

↓↓↓

Max is a computer scientist and engineer who works at Statuefield, a company that helped to pioneer artificial intelligence over the past decade or two. Conscious robots currently exist in his world, and are relatively new.

A lot of the technology was modeled after human neural architecture. The advent of computer sentience isn't fully understood, in much the same way a programmer may get their code to work but have no idea how they got it to work, but on a much larger and much more complex scale where many people on the team had been working on the technology in parts over years, as well as the fact the technology was emergent in nature (functioning like human brain development). Eventually they got it to work, and that original framework was used to create sentient robots.

Now new technologies are being developed to replicate human neural architecture in much more deliberate ways. Max works on a team developing one of those technologies. The technology in question is a method of engineering complex computational and mathematical processes into new fundamental particles. These particles are named Helvetica Particles, after the particle physicist who originally theorized them. Loosely analogous to mashing atoms together to create new elements, these are new bespoke particles that encode complex laws of physics into new fundamental particles. For example, a Helvetica particle could be created that interacted with different wavelengths of light in different ways that were programmed into it.

The Helvetica Particle that Statuefield was attempting to create was a copy of human neural architecture; all the particles that comprise a human mind, all the input-output behaviours collectively encoded into a particle that could be used as the basis for a new medium of robot consciousness.

It went catastrophically wrong, because when you play with physics at that level, that can happen. It wasn't quite an atom bomb (they weren't splitting atoms), but it went boom. It was called The Helvetica Scenario, and that slowed that research to an effective stop for the time being.

How his power works is complicated, but basically he exists as a Helvetica Field defined by the Helvetica Particle in his skull. The shape of the field encompasses his body. This means that although his muscle and bone are still physically present and are inside that field, the field also acts as his nervous system, allowing him to move his body still. It also uses some complex Banach-Tarsky style mathematics to generate its own energy if any flesh is missing. I described this above. The field acts as both a blueprint for - and in the shape of - his body to generate from while also acting as his nervous system for his physically extant body. It also means he can do a sort of Buggy the Clown with his limbs, within a few inches of where they ought to be relative to wherever they were severed from, but if they're out of the field entirely, then the regeneration thing kicks in eventually.

Now the thing about robot's who are thinking, feeling people being around is that some people hate the thought of there being a new way of existing. "A new way of being a person? Unnatural." (trans allegory). Now, since robots have free will, they aren't used as unpaid labour, but they absolutely are used as labour to fuel the capitalist machine, same as any other person would be. They're largely integrated into society.

The antagonist is a self-proclaimed "humanitarian" who developed robotics for human prosthetics (more with the intent of ''fixing'' people; he doesn't really care about people; the robotics he developed were the expensive kind that's more for optics, compared to assistive devices) that were subsequently used for robots. So this guy, David Sonoran, is pissed at Max for being an advocate of robots, and for being the posterchild of Helvetica, and for being the survivor of the Helvetica Scenario (of those on the team who were physically present), and for becoming sort of unkillable. The fuming ire that Sonoran felt toward Max, and his hatred for robots, once he learned about what the Helvetica Scenario did to Max, Sonoran tried to recreate it, failing several times and becoming increasingly (cruelly) focused on his goal until he succeeded.

And the story is about those two battling it out in various ways, with Sonoran trying to destroy the infrastructure that created and creates robots, and trying to kill robots while doing so, because he sees them as machines instead of people. He feels so entitled and self-righteous about "his technology" being used to "replace people" or whatever.

The story is a lot about themes of personhood and agency.

Also Helvetica Man has a love interest who is a robot. She's cool. She's also trans.

There are other people who get Helvetica powers too, but later on.

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theamaranthology · 2 months

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oh my god. Oh my goodness

#Simon #Corvidae

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theamaranthology · 2 months

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Roses without thorns Wings without horns Skin stained in color Still, I grow duller

I've painted a lot of glass wings, and now I want to explore all the possibilities with stained glass wings. What's your favorite type of stained glass? I love nature so anything botanical or starry would be my fav.

The 3 hours long process videos will be DMed on my Patreon on August 5th