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When a character starts speaking in unquoted italics and your eyes feel heavy, you might already be screwed. Psychic powers are scary! Every secret revealed, any desire subject to another’s whims. Wait. Every? Any? Aren’t there limits? Given the premise, proper rules are an exercise for the writer. And we’re terribly sedentary, aren’t we?
Note : not originally about chrylurks per se. Thought about hive minds some more today and a model is clicking together in my mind. Basically, this all hinges on the concept of the metamind. Each member of the hivemind has region of the brain dedicated to psychic processing. Obviously, right? But let’s be specific about what it’s processing. As the drone goes about its day, and especially during memory consolidation at night, the metamind’s task is to maintain an accurate index and cache that summarize the drone’s state and pointers to the activation patterns needed to retrieve more detailed information.
Imagine a cloistered monastery. A hundred monks have locked themselves inside a a tight grid of stone cells, barely large enough to to contain one person. Each is blindfolded, ear-muffed, and gagged; thus, a monk’s sole capacity to interact with anything else is by reaching through narrow openings in the walls of the cells. Like this, each can touch those adjacent to them. One can tap, push, squeeze, but that’s about the extend of the communication possible.
The monster had a presence that festered. She wore a cloak (for his sake) but it did him little good. He knew what it concealed: twelve limbs, five segments, and thousands of them . Chitin cool and stiff would be bad enough, but he knew this wasn’t the smooth carapace that clad divinity’s servant pollinators — no, this was pockmarked, honeycombed, arrayed with holes from which maggots and flies crawled and burrowed.
Not done thinking about this, but here’s what I have so far. Suppose I have a bag of money with a dollar sign on it. I put it in my car alongside a few decoy bags and drive to three different warehouses, stashing a bag at each. I do this because I’m being monitored by two evil time travelers, Alice and Beth. I left at 1 PM and returned home at 2 PM. Once there’s no chance of them running into me, the time travelers spring in to motion. Alice doesn’t have a car, but Beth does, which means Beth is able to search a warehouse and return to her time machine faster.
Warning , the script read, if you can read this, you are perceptible. Guard your thoughts. Lay your mind bare and receive piercing judgment. Claws were tracing layered lines and imprints. Not quite silk — secreted thread had been the base, but it had adhered to grains of clay-dust and been cast to something more durable. Not quite rune — the characters would be familiar to one who’d studied the arts, but each had been carefully defanged-disfigured, evoking meaning from resemblance, yet impotently.
Semantic arguments get a terrible reputation. There’s a rhetorical trick I want to discuss today — I call it the definition dismissal — and it happens whenever someone haughtily abstains from ever arguing about the definition of words or wading into nitpicky semantic disagreements. I hate it and would like it to stop. Now, the frustration this gesture is meant to save you from is readily understood. Consider: is a hot dog a sandwich? Well, it’s meat between bread, right? But you don’t hold it like a sandwich, do you? People can have whole debates about things this trivial.
How often do you think about the hivedoms of old? A queen, worshipped by a hundred coalescent drones, is more goddess than flesh: undying, but ever-decaying. No blade can wound an idea, but faults of mortal memory might. If you cannot remember your complete lineage, then I must recount these five.
does impersonation entail continuity of consciousness?
First, the flavor and framing. You go to sleep as normal, but when you awaken, you find yourself transported to a dark, underground lair, all tunnels and chitinous furnishing, ornamented with distended protuberances and segmented geometries. You glance around for any indication of what’s going on, and then… Your abductors reveal themselves as changelings who’ve been surveilling you and those around to you for several years. One of the changelings you can see has already copied your face. After all, they have extensive observational data draw on.
When a character starts speaking in unquoted italics and your eyes feel heavy, you might already be screwed. Psychic powers are scary! Every secret revealed, any desire subject to another’s whims. Wait. Every? Any? Aren’t there limits? Given the premise, proper rules are an exercise for the writer. And we’re terribly sedentary, aren’t we?
Imagine a cloistered monastery. A hundred monks have locked themselves inside a a tight grid of stone cells, barely large enough to to contain one person. Each is blindfolded, ear-muffed, and gagged; thus, a monk’s sole capacity to interact with anything else is by reaching through narrow openings in the walls of the cells. Like this, each can touch those adjacent to them. One can tap, push, squeeze, but that’s about the extend of the communication possible.
Not done thinking about this, but here’s what I have so far. Suppose I have a bag of money with a dollar sign on it. I put it in my car alongside a few decoy bags and drive to three different warehouses, stashing a bag at each. I do this because I’m being monitored by two evil time travelers, Alice and Beth. I left at 1 PM and returned home at 2 PM. Once there’s no chance of them running into me, the time travelers spring in to motion. Alice doesn’t have a car, but Beth does, which means Beth is able to search a warehouse and return to her time machine faster.
Semantic arguments get a terrible reputation. There’s a rhetorical trick I want to discuss today — I call it the definition dismissal — and it happens whenever someone haughtily abstains from ever arguing about the definition of words or wading into nitpicky semantic disagreements. I hate it and would like it to stop. Now, the frustration this gesture is meant to save you from is readily understood. Consider: is a hot dog a sandwich? Well, it’s meat between bread, right? But you don’t hold it like a sandwich, do you? People can have whole debates about things this trivial.
does impersonation entail continuity of consciousness?
First, the flavor and framing. You go to sleep as normal, but when you awaken, you find yourself transported to a dark, underground lair, all tunnels and chitinous furnishing, ornamented with distended protuberances and segmented geometries. You glance around for any indication of what’s going on, and then… Your abductors reveal themselves as changelings who’ve been surveilling you and those around to you for several years. One of the changelings you can see has already copied your face. After all, they have extensive observational data draw on.
Whether it’s Worm or Worth the Candle, thoughtful stories often take power quantity to the logical extreme. Unique abilities are everywhere; the whole setting is lousy with them. But does this hold up to scrutiny? How do you even write such sheer abundance? One good idea requires creativity. A million requires statistics.
When you reblog a post on tumblr, you create a new post. It’s one of the weirder parts of how that hellsite is implemented. In programming terms, this is the difference between passing by reference and passing by value. On other sites, sharing a post is just a fancy way of linking to it. If the original gets deleted, it’s gone. Unless you saved a screenshot.
the unquestioned assumptions of parahuman abilities
A friend mentioned how frustrating it is to try to come up with powers, only to realize “Worm already did that,” and the exercise becomes less fun as a result of that lack of novelty. I can sympathize. I’m not the only one to notice that parahuman powers have a particular flavor or to grapple with it while trying to generate powers . But I don’t find myself worrying about copying Worm. (In part, this is because I have often copied Worm on purpose; the lack of originally doesn’t stop me) but I also don’t feel that I’m recapitulating Worm when I don’t want to. But am I right to think that?
First, let me reintroduce Newcomb’s Problem. For this thought experiment, imagine there is a predictor capable of observing human behavior and correctly deducing how one will behave in the future. Maybe this predictor has psychic powers, or is really good at reading body language. I often see it described as a superintelligent AI system. More on that later.
Note : not originally about chrylurks per se. Thought about hive minds some more today and a model is clicking together in my mind. Basically, this all hinges on the concept of the metamind. Each member of the hivemind has region of the brain dedicated to psychic processing. Obviously, right? But let’s be specific about what it’s processing. As the drone goes about its day, and especially during memory consolidation at night, the metamind’s task is to maintain an accurate index and cache that summarize the drone’s state and pointers to the activation patterns needed to retrieve more detailed information.
The monster had a presence that festered. She wore a cloak (for his sake) but it did him little good. He knew what it concealed: twelve limbs, five segments, and thousands of them . Chitin cool and stiff would be bad enough, but he knew this wasn’t the smooth carapace that clad divinity’s servant pollinators — no, this was pockmarked, honeycombed, arrayed with holes from which maggots and flies crawled and burrowed.
Warning , the script read, if you can read this, you are perceptible. Guard your thoughts. Lay your mind bare and receive piercing judgment. Claws were tracing layered lines and imprints. Not quite silk — secreted thread had been the base, but it had adhered to grains of clay-dust and been cast to something more durable. Not quite rune — the characters would be familiar to one who’d studied the arts, but each had been carefully defanged-disfigured, evoking meaning from resemblance, yet impotently.
How often do you think about the hivedoms of old? A queen, worshipped by a hundred coalescent drones, is more goddess than flesh: undying, but ever-decaying. No blade can wound an idea, but faults of mortal memory might. If you cannot remember your complete lineage, then I must recount these five.
A chrylurk is a swarm within a swarm: each one a mortal’s corpse twisted in metamorphosis then possessed and puppeted by mosquitoes, spiders and slugs; each a thread in the ghostly web woven to ensnare the collective in a grand eusocial symphony. It is nearly as infeasible to describe a chrylurk as to describe a tree. One could gesture vaguely — a trunk with branches with leaves — but the exact arrangement is never repeated, subject to the vagaries of life-history.
The way I usually explain how alchemy works is the existence of two magical substances. Essence is the fundamental basis of alchemy, and it arises from the dreams and desires of a conscious brain. Why this is so is oft-considered one of the great mysteries of the world. But essence is innately unstable and reactive; whenever it comes into contact with physical matter, combustion-subsumption results and together they create limina.
A veil softly clad the swamp, delivering it from desolation. The chrylurk foundress perched centermost of the web she’d woven. Her claws lightly brushed at the silk drawn atop of rotting log, combing away pollen grains and morning dew. Once, wizenblight had befestered this land to its very depths. The rot of all things, turning soul against itself, were no more than an abortive mockery of parascixion, but perhaps it spreads so far and wide for that very simplicity.
Serivane was silk that had evanesced beyond the veil that separates the physical and the ephemeral. At least, that was the theory. This Hive we name Ravaging-With-Downpour was built in the caverns behind a grand waterfall at the very rim of the highlands. Serivane ghosted through stone just fine, but running water? The threads always seemed to fray a little bit faster faster.