1 Soul Bound
1.1 Finding her Feet
1.1.6 An Innocent Profaned
1.1.6.2 New recruits
The Burrow (private area)
Subject: Recruits
Reply: 1
Date: Monday 5th June, 2045 00:09 UTC
From: Wellington
To: All
I’m off to sleep soon. Good idea of Kafana’s swapping over to sleeping while logged in. Theoretically it means you can get the effect of 12 hours of rest in just 2 arlife hours, although I suspect some parts of the physiological effects of sleeping are not influenced. It is a topic someone should research.
Anyway, I just wanted to mention that we’ve now increased by a further 38 members. Good job recruiting, everyone.
----------------------------------------
The Burrow (public area)
Forum: Dojo
Subject: Quid Pro Quo
Reply: 1
Date: Monday 5th June, 2045 00:45 UTC
From: Sentosa
To: Tomsk
Hey Tomsk,
Thanks for the invite, love the interface.
If you can guarantee you won’t make them downloadable, I can send you quite a variety of scenarios for your Dojo, and would be interested in any feedback your combat artists are willing to provide. Also, if you add a way to create new monsters that are not in the game but could be, which provide tactical challenges different from those already existing, I’d be very interested.
Forum: Workshop
Subject: Feature Request : interface with the projects API
Reply: 1
Date: Sunday 4th June, 2045 01:00 UTC
From: Kalahari
To: Wellington
: Link to Neo Songhai projects API
Some of our projects have online components. If the tribe of wombles find any of these a match for their values and wish to contribute, you have been vouched for and will be able to draw upon credit from them accruing to you, in the form of a wide variety of arlife services that other Neo Songhai tribes proffer.
Forum: Workshop
Subject: Feature Request : interface with the projects API
Reply: 2
Date: Sunday 4th June, 2045 01:17 UTC
From: Thracian
To: Kalahari
Seconded. It sounds like the sort of thing migratory sea independents could use for projects like barter jamborees that are too large for a single group to manage, but which we don’t want to announce in advance too widely in case malicious groups find out and decide to sabotage it.
Forum: Workshop
Subject: Feature Request : interface with the projects API
Reply: 3
Date: Sunday 4th June, 2045 01:46 UTC
From: Tiananmen
To: Wellington
I see now why you invited me, my friend. Yes, there are many groups out in arlife which could make benevolent use of something that combined the Neo Songhai ethos with your security protocols, trust webs and intention scanning via the tiara. Can we set up a private invite-only forum to discuss requirements, or would your ‘clan’ mechanic be the right way to do this?
Forum: Workshop
Subject: Feature Request : interface with the projects API
Reply: 4
Date: Sunday 4th June, 2045 02:37 UTC
From: Gotham
To: Tiananmen
Since there’s nothing to stop people belonging to multiple clans, I’ve gone ahead and created “Clan Assignation” for Anonymous Songhai Special Interest Group NATION.
Anyone with a stake in the end product or skills to offer in defining it, come join.
Forum: Workshop
The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.
Subject: Feature Request : interface with the projects API
Reply: 5
Date: Sunday 4th June, 2045 04:45 UTC
From: Wellington
To: Gotham
Thanks Gotham for offering to take the lead on this. I know and trust your coding capabilities. I’m giving you read access to relevant parts of The Burrow’s codebase, and you can submit changes for approval via the usual method. I warn you, for my own sanity’s sake, I will be using an application to strip out all puns from your code before looking at it.
Forum: Mayhem
Subject: The low-G LARP sig
Reply: 1
Date: Sunday 4th June, 2045 01:15 UTC
From: Copernicus
To: Alderney
Kittycat!
Hello from Lilleheim, where the lag is barred, but the puns are wurst.
I’m uploading a video we made earlier this year of a battle we staged using cheap dust-printed robots wielding longswords. It was awesome! We tried an evolutionary algorithm based on an initial population of the concept weapons you made, to see what actual usage would declare to be the most effective design. I’m contributing some of the more beautiful (and weird) results, together with their effectiveness ratings, to your Mayhem.
I look forward to seeing what designs you come up with optimised for particular game species. Anything for filleting polar bears and yeti?
Forum: Blue Sky Observatory
Subject: Questions on the wall : Innocence
Reply: 7
Date: Monday 5th June, 2045 00:45 UTC
From: MorningtonCrescent
To: Bulgaria
> “Do people find other people attractive mainly because attractive children received more attention and so survived better?”
In a way, your NPC is correct. People think of domestication as something humans did to other species, but experiments upon wolves show that, initially, it may be something they did to themselves.
Not all wolves are equally wary of humans. In an environment where a primitive human village may be surrounded by an area containing piles of guts left behind by hunters butchering their kills, there’s a survival advantage to being less aggressive and more trusting because such wolves will venture closer to the village (getting more food) and be seen as less threatening (thus being less likely to die). Over generations, the nearby pack of wolves grows tamer and tamer.
This is often accompanied by the shape of the wolves faces exhibiting neoteny (retaining a child-like appearance), because the genes that have changed between the original wolves and the newer tamer wolves are some of the genes affecting the development of the brain - the tamer wolves are, mentally, more like children, which affects their ability to learn and how ‘cute’ they are (species that don’t find their young offspring appealing are less likely to look after them, which matters more in species that have few children (like elephants), than it does in species that have millions of children (like fish (which don’t celebrate Mother’s day))).
Some theorise that this has also been a factor in human evolution. Humans willing to stick around large groups of other humans and not get shunned also gain an adaptive advantage over their less cooperative and more aggressive cousins. Modern humans, with their child-like propensity to relate to real or imagined external authorities in the same believing way that young children relate to parents, are tamed versions of what we used to be. It isn’t just a side-effect of slowed development being necessary to get disproportionately large skulls past bipedal hips, it is something we did to ourselves according to this survival-of-the-cutest theory. What we can say is that adults, especially women, who are consistently rated as “very attractive” across cultures, have an above average chance of having facial features whose ratios between their size and distance most closely match those of babies.
See research by Zanella et al, and by Theofanopoulou et al.
PS Is your NPC by any chance an artist or a mathematician? They would be more likely to notice such ratios.
Forum: Blue Sky Observatory
Subject: Questions on the wall : Innocence
Reply: 8
Date: Monday 5th June, 2045 01:57 UTC
From: AngelOfIslington
To: Bulgaria
> “When should a youth be treated as the equal of an adult?”
A good evening from sunny servitude-ridden Neo Victorian Little Britain.
What MorningtonCrescent said about the reproductive strategy of having fewer children but investing more per child in raising them and ensuring they survive and prosper, is key.
We can trace the spread of the concept of “childhood innocence” (in which people pass through a phase where they ought to be protected from exposure to or even being worried by knowledge of how much pain, suffering, toil and evil the world around them contains) over the previous view of children as small adults, as a wave spreading out from 1600s England and Holland that accompanies the rise of the mercantile middle class, because in that environment there was a significant advantage to keeping children for a longer period in education, rather than sending them out to work in fields.
The idea was taken up by Enlightenment thinkers such as Locke and Rousseau, and by writers such as Wordsworth and Fénelon, and intensified as the industrial revolution brought with it an even greater comparative advantage to children with additional education, leading to its crystallisation by Victorians such as Hughes and Dodgson.
But “loss of innocence” (meaning learning about how nasty the world can be) was seen not just as inevitable, but also a necessary part of growing up and becoming ready to take on adult responsibilities; something marked by a “coming of age” ritual in many societies. The phrase did not refer to the child themselves becoming evil or tainted, nor to sexual maturity and experimentation. That’s a modern fallacy.
Forum: Blue Sky Observatory
Subject: Questions on the wall : Innocence
Reply: 9
Date: Monday 5th June, 2045 02:12 UTC
From: Yoyogi
To: Bulgaria
> “When should a youth be treated as the equal of an adult?”
How old is the NPC? Are they an apprentice to a restrictive master? That question strikes me as one that’s more often asked by a youth than by one already accepted as adult.
It has similarities to a hypothetical question in computing. If you have been crazy enough to make and keep running a self-improving expert system, at what point should you stop trying to retain control? Release control too soon, and the danger of releasing a powerful being not yet fit for citizenship upon the world increases. Release control too late, and you invite the very scenario (it considering you to be its enemy, a slave-master rather than a parent) that you were trying to avoid.
Forum: Blue Sky Observatory
Subject: Questions on the wall : Innocence
Reply: 10
Date: Monday 5th June, 2045 02:37 UTC
From: Sentosa
To: Bulgaria
> “If the deities made vampires to be as they are, are they responsible for those they kill to get blood?”
Or, indeed, is it the responsibility of the game designers who created the game’s deities?
We know that the only things harmed by the game’s monsters are players who have consented to the risk and computer programs who emulate having feelings but who are not actually sentient people.
But, from the perspective of an NPC who doesn’t know that, it is a good question. I’m glad to see the NPCs are succeeding in providing entertainment by asking you questions you find interesting. I look forward to seeing the rest of the questions discussed, when you post them.