Timeline for answer to How can a Horror from Beyond Reason reliably communicate with mortals? by DLosc
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
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19 events
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| Mar 27, 2019 at 11:00 | comment | added | Ynneadwraith | Judging by our current attempts to teach robots to speak via bulk-learning from internet sites (seems to produce fantastically aggressive racist bigots), teaching an eldritch abomination how humans work by showing it the internet sounds like a fast-track towards species-wide annihilation. | |
| Oct 1, 2018 at 23:52 | comment | added | John Doe | +1 for "...you can't join if you don't have a face". | |
| Apr 13, 2017 at 12:52 | history | edited | CommunityBot |
replaced http://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/ with https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/
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| Mar 20, 2017 at 8:53 | vote | accept | Joe Bloggs | ||
| Mar 12, 2017 at 19:16 | comment | added | Robert Benson | @Yakk Perhaps Jimmy could create an Eldritch device that might superficially look like a computer, but "under the hood" it is minimizing his contact with the bits that connect to the internet. Think in terms of a series of wards/damping fields or what have you. It would probably need to be a very long series, but such things are trivial for Jimmy, I'm sure. Jimmy could play MMORPGs with such a device, since interactions are confined to a specified set and his 'keyboard' would only allow ASCII characters. | |
| Mar 9, 2017 at 5:41 | comment | added | Jason C | Hehe, sort of makes me think of xkcd.com/1530, but infinitely more horrific than a giant spider. | |
| Mar 8, 2017 at 18:41 | comment | added | Yakk | I'm not sure why computers themselves wouldn't go "insane" (operate outside of expected parameters) when exposed to such a horror. Jimmy "interacts" with the computer, changing its behavior, through the way Jimmy is used to; the computer does what Jimmy wants, but not in the way humans would "expect" it to. Computers are just collections of atoms arranged to react in predictable ways to the predictable ways humans interact with them. Jimmy won't act like a human, unless such horrors are really pedestrian. | |
| Mar 7, 2017 at 18:32 | comment | added | Maja Piechotka | Explaining that you are not an English native speaker should cover any spelling/grammar mistakes Jimmy may make. | |
| Mar 7, 2017 at 18:04 | comment | added | nigel222 | Jimmy needs to reach out and find the real "Laundry". They have the expertise to bind eldritch horrors into human form and to teach them to pass as human, although they'll be somewhat surprised that there is one such horror which wants this. There again, given some of the things that some humans want to be done to themselves, maybe not such a very big surprise. I'd love to read this as a Laundryverse fan-fic! | |
| Mar 6, 2017 at 11:56 | comment | added | Jasper | @DLosc (re: artist's impression) Exactly what I was about to say. However, using an artist's impression instead of a real profile picture might again be a solution to that problem. (i.e. have Jimmy go through google images for an artist's impression of an Eldritch Horror that he likes and feels comfortable identifying with and use that as his FB picture). | |
| Mar 6, 2017 at 9:56 | comment | added | jpmc26 | "Keep your default profile picture." I dunno. This in itself is kind of weird. A picture of a red ball (obtained on Google, not a picture of his actual ball) should be fine. =) | |
| Mar 6, 2017 at 6:08 | history | edited | DLosc | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
Response to comment
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| Mar 6, 2017 at 5:37 | comment | added | DLosc | @PavelJanicek That's exactly why we have the rule: No Facebook! | |
| Mar 6, 2017 at 5:36 | comment | added | DLosc | @Memor-X No, you see, those images are clearly just what some artist thinks an eldritch abomination looks like. An actual image would clearly cause insanity. (Either that, or it might be safe because it's not the being's True Form. Or it might be somewhat safe--the OP implies there can be different degrees of danger with different methods.) | |
| Mar 6, 2017 at 5:32 | comment | added | ghosts_in_the_code | By virtual, do you mean like a simple 2D video game, or like a virtual reality kind of game where they see holograms of each other. The former is probably not something the abomination was looking for, nor will it give him happiness. | |
| Mar 6, 2017 at 5:30 | comment | added | ghosts_in_the_code | If he manages to make meaningful communication, he'll just end up starting a cult or something. Nobody who believes will dare go play with his ball, perhaps not even virtually. | |
| Mar 5, 2017 at 22:57 | comment | added | Memor-X | actually Jimmy might be able to use social media or it's real image on websites. consider that google have an un-godly number of images of eldritch abominations of many many types. it's possible that since Google H.Q isn't an insane asylum (as far as we know) and we don't hear cases of people going mad and dying from googling images a digital format of an eldritch abomination's appearance might be safe with the data format acting as a sort of filter for madness | |
| Mar 5, 2017 at 9:05 | comment | added | Pavel Janicek | Someone else tried it and it did not go as expected | |
| Mar 5, 2017 at 8:06 | history | answered | DLosc | CC BY-SA 3.0 |