Chatlog Dump

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Alicorn
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Re: Chatlog Dump

Post by Alicorn »

Alicorn: So I'm apparently Speaker now.
Winged One (Alphabeta): I thought yak-lady won by one
Alicorn: yeah, and then Eoin took away her yaks so she can't be Senator anymore, let alone Speaker, because he's going to be scarce for a while, and ceded the position to Iriwande
Winged One (Alphabeta): Oh dear
Alicorn: on the plus side, this means I get to design contests, which is fun
Winged One (Alphabeta): :)
Winged One (Alphabeta): By the way, is anyone annoyed by our circumvention of the request that we citizens don't vote for you?
Alicorn: Nobody's remarked on it.
Winged One (Alphabeta): By the way, we should do something with that uranium
Alicorn: Oh, I'm just sort of folding it into a background fact about Mevwan, that they're working on reconstructing Zaee tech so everybody can have it
Winged One (Alphabeta): Yes, but I think it should lead to a bit of progress there.
Winged One (Alphabeta): Makes interaction between statelets matter and all that.
Alicorn: yeah, but I'm just flat out ignoring that time is a thing at this point
Winged One (Alphabeta): Linear time is for pussies!
Winged One (Alphabeta): And, you know, people who aren't playing in a PbP with multiple concurrent plotlines.
Alicorn: yup

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Re: Chatlog Dump

Post by Alicorn »

Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): hmmm. A thought for a Mevwan story: A group of pirates recruit a koyo-manipulating telepath to make their victims think it was a good thing that they were robbed.
Alicorn: I don't think koyoge covers that.
Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): 'X is good/bad' seems like practically the prototypical koyo, to me. o.O
Alicorn: it does?
Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): Yeah... what were you thinking instead?
Alicorn: value judgment don't seem to me to fall under the umbrella of belief-adjacency. I mean, maybe you could do it with a *lot* of *very* fine manipulation, but I was thinking more of the way that things get associated or chained. like, currently, I am liable to think of my grandmother when I think of my immersion blender, because she bought it for me, but a koyo-er could distance these things - I'd still know she bought it for me, but I wouldn't tend to think of it based solely on the prompting of the blender itself.
Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): Seems to come down to whether one considers 'good' and 'bad' standalone concepts or not.
Alicorn: Fine manipulation could make you associate something like piracy with something pleasant, so you could do extremely rapid Pavlovian-style conditioning, but it wouldn't affect occurrent beliefs like "stealing is wrong".
Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): Okay, so maybe they have the telepath work on 'em first and just *ask* them to hand over their cargo. Not stealing, then, at least from their perspective.
Alicorn: Yeah, that would work.
Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): Like, it seems to me that the telepath could strongly associate the pirates with wherever they're taking their cargo, and associate the rest of the route with danger (the telepath might also be an emotion-manipulator, but I suspect that koyoge used that way would be sufficient to evoke fear on its own), and offer to take the cargo the rest of the way, or something.
Alicorn: One of several possible routes, yes.
Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): 'D make an interesting story, I think. Depending on how exactly that metal-shields-from-telepathy thing works, such a person could be nontrivial to catch. (Tin-foil hat doesn't help much if the telepath can just go around it.)
Alicorn: Telepathy travels in a straight line, but can go through the face if it has to. So a lead-lined hat and mask would do the trick as long as you can avoid turning your eyes or any other exposed portion of your head towards the telepath.

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Re: Chatlog Dump

Post by Alicorn »

Winged One (Alphabeta): Does Mevwan have radios?
Alicorn: yyyyyes.
Alicorn: ETA: I'm keeping Scott's rule about my citizens not being able to vote for my entries, because to change it at this point would seem suspiciously self-serving. My citizens are allowed to vote on their own and each other's entries and Senators can still vote for anyone we want.
Winged One (Alphabeta): Okay
Alicorn: Incidentally, you are 100% welcome to do Mevwan&X pairings for the collaborative interaction contest. I want the Favored, but you can approach anyone else you think you could have an interesting IC exchange with.
Alicorn: or if you can't think of anybody to approach post in the partner-finding thread.
Alicorn: actually I call dibs on Drachumve too.
Alicorn: There is also no obvious reason we could not do several culture tests (at least two, maybe three), although they would be similar in many respects. Do you feel like doing on?
Alicorn: *one
Winged One (Alphabeta): Not really
Alicorn: okay.
Winged One (Alphabeta): Hm... those cannibal people trying to take advantage of Ace's suicidal tendencies so they can try to steal his power might be interesting, but how would they get access to him?
Alicorn: I'm not sure using Ace in particular would be the best idea.
Winged One (Alphabeta): Yes, but I am lazy and character creation is work
Winged One (Alphabeta): Got any better ideas? The designated person who gets things explained to them probably wouldn't have that much contact with foreigners...
Alicorn: Who else would you be willing to play?
Winged One (Alphabeta): We talked about the speaker's assistant AI, I believe?
Alicorn: Ooh. Yes. I declare Iriwande to have an AI now which you may play. It could talk to Senators.
Alicorn: Or their aides.
Alicorn: Do you have anybody in mind in particular? I dibsed Favored and Drachumve and Ade wants Kennerext.
Alicorn: If not you can post "hey I have been given Iriwande's AI assistant to play, anybody want to talk to it?"
Winged One (Alphabeta): Why do you want Favored? Don't mysterious people bug you?
Alicorn: Because Harvey expressed an interest in having a Zwerisi and a Favored talk at some point.
Winged One (Alphabeta): Ah
Winged One (Alphabeta): We'll need to invent the AI's personality. Do AIs have gender?
Alicorn: Generally yes (recall Dwen-lin).
Alicorn: http://www.nettserier.no/jellyvampire/
Winged One (Alphabeta): d'awww
Alicorn: I should take a shower and go to bed.
Alicorn: Or maybe just go to bed.
Winged One (Alphabeta): What are you going to do instead?
Alicorn: Apparently I'm going to faff about on the internet.
Winged One (Alphabeta): So, how much control over an AI's personality does their creator usually exercise?
Alicorn: Plenty, within safety parameters.
Alicorn: Iriwande's was probably written by an ancestor of his.
Alicorn: *for an ancestor of his
Alicorn: not by
Winged One (Alphabeta): I thought ey was going to have been made recently?
Alicorn: Did I say that? Either, I guess.
Alicorn: It is considered best that AIs be friendly, helpful, and not prone to any unfashionable amount of annoyance or what have you.
Winged One (Alphabeta): Well, yeah
Winged One (Alphabeta): Why would you make one that isn't?
Alicorn: *shrug*
Alicorn: Also, you may give your AI character a psi-crystal so it can telepath, but use it sparingly and check before having it do anything novel, I haven't worked out exactly what psi-crystals let AIs do.
Winged One (Alphabeta): Maybe just let them be telepathed at as if they were alive?
Alicorn: They can also initiate some nonzero amount of telepathy things.
Alicorn: Also not all modes of telepathy work on AIs.
Winged One (Alphabeta): Well, presumably they can cut off the crystal from themselves to block the hostile stuff
Alicorn: yes, but I mean like "meanings" does not work.
Winged One (Alphabeta): Why?
Alicorn: Doesn't translate into to code appropriately. Words works, though.
Winged One (Alphabeta): Are we going with an old AI or a new one?
Alicorn: Your character, up to you.
Winged One (Alphabeta): Let's go with new so I can blame that for my screwups.
Alicorn: okay.
Alicorn: so Iriwande bought a chassis and commissioned someone to write him an AI assistant.
Winged One (Alphabeta): what do AI chassis generally look like?
Alicorn: They vary, but they usually have wheels and hands, and default to about 3' tall but can extend their legs or sometimes just periscopey things and their arms to do stuff higher up than that.
Alicorn: Many of them have ears to display mood.
Winged One (Alphabeta): So they're not made for dealing with humans?
Alicorn: The chassis were all aboard when the ship crashed and are designed without any nonZaee priorities/sensibilities in mind.
Alicorn: They're rare and expensive but Cezkwe members are usually well-off and draw good salaries.
Alicorn: So Gevene has one and Iriwande can get one.
Winged One (Alphabeta): They're one of the technologies that they can't make any more of yet?
Alicorn: yeah. Along with computers in general.
Winged One (Alphabeta): Okay
Alicorn: I should go to bed now

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Re: Chatlog Dump

Post by Alicorn »

Alicorn: Incidentally, you are 100% welcome to do Mevwan&X pairings for the collaborative interaction contest. I want the Favored, but you can approach anyone else you think you could have an interesting IC exchange with.
Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): Okay.
Alicorn: or if you can't think of anybody to approach post in the partner-finding thread.
Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): I kind of want to do a Zaee with those underground guys.
Alicorn: Colony?
Alicorn: or Kennerext?
Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): Sounds right.
Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): Er.
Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): *checks*
Alicorn: btw have I shown you my drawing of Gevene? It's an old drawing and not very good but will give an idea of what they look like a wee bit better than a description.
Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): Nope, please do.
Offering to send gevene.pdf to Adelene@Lars (10:53:32 PM)
Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): Kennerext.
Alicorn: You can do more than one, too, if you like.
Alicorn: Just as long as there's no duplicate Mevwan-X pairs.
Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): 'k
Alicorn: actually I call dibs on Drachumve too.
Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): ok
Alicorn: There is also no obvious reason we could not do several culture tests (at least two, maybe three), although they would be similar in many respects.  Do you feel like doing one?
Alicorn: one for the Zaee, one for the humans. Winged doesn't want one or I'd say one for the Zaee and one for Island and one for Mainland.
Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): *nods*
Alicorn: you want?
Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): I'll at least think about it.
Alicorn: :)
Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): I haven't been paying attention to the humans basically at all.
Alicorn: if you want, which do you want, so I can write the other one for my entry instead of being redundant?
Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): Zaee.
Alicorn: okay, I'll do humans then.
Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): I'd imagined Zaee to be rather differently proportioned.
Alicorn: how so?
Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): Larger tails, smaller bodies, less human in the face. More tentacley bits for the wings.
Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): Also smaller and weaker-looking legs.
Alicorn: As I said, old drawing - they *would* have larger tails and less human faces if I drew one now. I should probably draw one now, come to think of it.
Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): :)

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Re: Chatlog Dump

Post by Alicorn »

Winged One (Alphabeta): How come you did the Mevwan human culture test instead of the Zaee one?
Winged One (Alphabeta): Does Aoide have UMD?
Winged One (Alphabeta): everybody will recognize your extra spice if you travel between provinces
Alicorn: Because if Ade does a test it'll be the Zaee.
Alicorn: Aoide does not have UMD, why?
Winged One (Alphabeta): Ah
Winged One (Alphabeta): Thinking of getting it for Maddock
Winged One (Alphabeta): Can one person submit multiple entries to a contest?
Alicorn: You can submit multiple entries to the collaborative interaction one as long as they're all with different partners. (And you, personally, can't use a partner me or Ade do.)
Winged One (Alphabeta): I mean if Ade doesn't want to do the Zaee culture test, could you do it?
Alicorn: Oh. No, if she doesn't the Zaee won't get one as an entry. (I might write one up just for informational purposes though.)
Winged One (Alphabeta): Ah, okay
Winged One (Alphabeta): They are interesting when written for cultures in which I'm RPing a character for.
Alicorn: oh?
Winged One (Alphabeta): Yes. For instance, the Mevwan human one gave me the idea that Ace doesn't realize that it's odd to want physical distance from people.
Alicorn: the foot and a half thing?
Winged One (Alphabeta): Yes
Winged One (Alphabeta): Also, I hadn't realized that a consensus-driven adhocracy would rely on the laziness of people who disagree weakly to get going.
Alicorn: How else would it work?
Winged One (Alphabeta): Very poorly?
Alicorn: btw, your AI character would know Dwen-lin.
Winged One (Alphabeta): What, do AIs all frequent the same message boards on the Lesser Space Internet?
Alicorn: no, but their people are co-workers.
Alicorn: or rather: yes, and
Alicorn: If you aren't attached to your preexisting concept of Iriwande's AI, could be Kimmiar, unless you want to save Kimmiar for later.
Winged One (Alphabeta): Hm. I always think of Kimmiar as only being sapient by accident, and there's probably safeguards to prevent that.
Alicorn: It could have been stowed on the ship not-very-deliberately and passed around from there.
Winged One (Alphabeta): Hm... possible, but I do like the idea of Iriwande's assistant seeming like a naive dumbass and using that to manipulate people.
Alicorn: Okay. I'm just rereading old Eko logs and I do like Kimmiar.

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Re: Chatlog Dump

Post by Alicorn »

Winged One (Alphabeta): So, why does Greater Coash let women marry each other, but not men?
Alicorn: Because their old cultural prohibitions about gay people were about penetrative sex.
Winged One (Alphabeta): Ah. Any particular reason why?
Alicorn: Haven't developed it in that much detail.
Winged One (Alphabeta): 'kay
Winged One (Alphabeta): And apparently they're making you do work with war ideas.
Alicorn: What?
Winged One (Alphabeta): If someone tried to take over the inactive but not abandoned statelet, you'd apparently have to get other statelets to save it.
Alicorn: Oh, that.
Winged One (Alphabeta): Hm. It seems I find fictional culture tests in general interesting
Alicorn: Cool.
Alicorn: Do you want to write one?
Alicorn: Ade might let you have the Zaee.
Alicorn: Or you could do a Mainland one that elaborates on mine with differences from Mevwan-as-a-whole, if she won't.
Winged One (Alphabeta): I don't know enough to do one for either
Alicorn: aw
Winged One (Alphabeta): About the cultures, I mean. There's already a template, apparently.
Alicorn: understood.

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Re: Chatlog Dump

Post by Alicorn »

Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): Zaee question(s). Firstly, do you have any objection to them considering some kind of small animal both food and pet?
Alicorn: Nope, that's fine.
Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): Okay. Proposal for said critter: It's from the Zaee homeworld, slightly larger than a guinea pig, and commonly called a skitterling. It has wings, but can't *exactly* fly, but it can do controlled falls and flights of less than 30 seconds.
Alicorn: Neat.
Alicorn: Zaee-like tentacle-wings?
Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): *nods*
Alicorn: Or more flying squirrel glidery wings?
Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): I'm imagining that the critter can take off as if it were going to fly, it's just too heavy to sustain that for long at all. Like a domesticated turkey, aerodynamically.
Alicorn: ahh.
Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): Also as to the eating-meat part of it, I'm imagining that the meat doesn't keep well (gets a funny smell or something), so the standard thing to do is to kill the critter right before cooking it. But, they're rare and expensive enough that this is fairly uncommon - it's considered a delicacy, but not one that many people eat.
Alicorn: If they're rare and expensive, why would they be on a colony ship?
Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): They're rare because they're not well suited to the cold temperatures, and particularly hard to get to reproduce in those conditions.
Alicorn: Ooh.
Alicorn: Maybe some humans farm them up in Phariscal.
Alicorn: But all the Zaee live in Island.
Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): (I'm actually thinking that it might be common for older Zaee to have some sort of nutritional deficiency because crops that synthesize some vitamin or other have the same problem.)
Alicorn: Zaee and their stuff in general need to be cold-tolerant to explain why they all live on Island.
Alicorn: They could have moved.
Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): mm.
Alicorn: But have not done so, because they established all their farms and stuff on Island.
Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): 'k.
Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): (Also I note that 'expensive' for a meal is not the same as 'expensive' for a pet - $20 for a guinea pig is cheapish, $20 for a cut of beef is decidedly not.)
Alicorn: *nod*
Alicorn: Do you think they're normally cooked after dying of natural causes, or killed?
Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): Dunno.
Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): [7:12:00 PM] Shyriath Farstrider: Would it be of a furry-mammal sort?
[7:13:03 PM] Adelene Dawner: Zaee are basically mamalian and I imagine skitterlings to be from roughly the same branch of the evolutionary tree, so yeah. (As closely related as humans and guinea pigs or humans and cats, not as closely related as humans and monkeys.)
[7:14:22 PM] Adelene Dawner: Food's up. brb.
[7:16:05 PM] Shyriath Farstrider: *Nods* In that case, the Deep Singer would probably elect to help find it. Other Deep Singers might not know exactly what it is, but it fall into the same category of "small, furry animals" that they get most of their meat from.
[7:16:09 PM] Shyriath Farstrider: *Waits*
Alicorn: Note that humans couldn't eat skitterlings or other Zaee food. Wrong biome.
Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): Yep.
Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): What color is Zaee blood?
Alicorn: Uuuum I'll just go with red.
Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): Ok.
Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): (I'm having my character fall into a cave and incidentally scrape her wingtip up as she's trying not to crash into the floor, and it might come up.)
Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): Need a name.
Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): Also, is it at all possible to lollop backwards? Say, if one is startled?
Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): (Though actually Zaee probably have more of an instinct to fly, in that situation.)
Alicorn: Name: do you have one already or should I invent one?
Alicorn: It is possible but awkward to lollop backwards, but would not be a startle reflex.
Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): Yup. Avana, wingdaughter of Teloura (female), who is the perturber of an as-yet-unnamed ship captained by Lalino (male).
Alicorn: that all works.
Alicorn: Suspiciously few Ys and Ws.
Alicorn: But they work individually.
Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): 'k.
Alicorn: wait, is Lalino also a Zaee?
Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): Supposed to be, though I wasn't sure how plausible that was and did very nearly make him human.
Alicorn: Zaee and humans wouldn't often mix on ship crews, but it's not impossible, especially if Avana is perturbing the thing.
Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): 'k.
Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): Which is more likely: That the ship is owned by Lalino, or that it's owned by a trading company?
Alicorn: Depends on Lalino's background, but if it's a Zaee crew, more likely it's his.
Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): Ok.
Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): Seems like it might come up, soon. :)

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Re: Chatlog Dump

Post by Alicorn »

Winged One (Alphabeta): I thought Zaee were herbivores?
Alicorn: No.
Alicorn: They don't have to eat meat, and are probably a bit less inclined to it than humans, but they certainly can and do.

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Re: Chatlog Dump

Post by Alicorn »

Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): Pidgin's acting up. If you responded to that last thing, I didn't get it.
Alicorn: Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta)
I has a log! Wanna look over it to make sure there's no inconsistencies Mevwan-wise?
9:22
Alicorn
Sure!
Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): Cool. It's long, so I'll email it.
Alicorn: :)
Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): Sent.
Alicorn: wooooo
Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): ^^
Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): That was fun.
Alicorn: Kensedo's an island province, right?
Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): Yup. The one just north of D-K.
Alicorn: That was *adorable*.
Alicorn: And no Mevwan-issues.
Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): :D
Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): Nifty.
Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): I like Avana. I might just keep 'er.
Alicorn: She's neat. I encourage you to do so.
Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): ^.^
Alicorn: Did you post in the census yet?
Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): uh?
Alicorn: http://www.bastionunion.org/forum/viewt ... 388&t=1844 this. looks like you did post, but you should update it with details.
Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): How likely is it, given that they're rather closely related, that the hospital attached to the Zwiakwo School for Psions would be called something like the Zwiakwo Psychiatric Hospital?
Alicorn: Sounds sensible to me.
Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): 'k.
Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): Oh, I never did get an answer to that - did you have anything in mind for usual naming schemes for trading ships?
Alicorn: Oh. Nope, that's all yours.
Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): 'k.
Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): Hmmmmm. I think I'd like to name the ship after a Zaee mythological creature - something roughly equivalent to naming it "the mermaid".
Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): (That's probably not immediately useful at *all*, is it.)
Alicorn: Well, I've decided that plesiosaurs live in the lake that shall be ours.
Alicorn: But those would not be a Zaee mythical creature.
Alicorn: Kwandoyo is your random Iozwe word of the day.
Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): That'll do, and we can work out the myth later.
Alicorn: :)
Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): 6/16/11:

I now have three Mevwani characters.

Ivwi. Zaee psion (telepath/perturber/astrapitor), principal of the Zwiakwo School for Psions, and politically well-connected. Communicates with animals and has fostered a reputation among his students for using them to keep an eye on things. Probably part of a large and influential wingfamily. Canny, but jovial.

Kowedyo. Zaee telepath; junior doctor at the Zwiakwo Psychiatric Hospital. Lives on the grounds of the Zwiakwo School for Psions. Prone to formality.

Avana. Zaee child, wingdaughter of Teloura, the perturber of the trading ship /Kwandoyo/, which is owned and captained by a Zaee named Lalino. Plans to be a trader when she grows up, and is already practicing. Has a pet skitterling named Dell. Smart, mature for her age, and friendly, but a little naive about non-financial topics.
Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): *considers renaming Lalino to Lalinyo*
Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): *or Lalenyo*
Alicorn: Either of those would be good.
Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): I'll go with the first.
Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): Is this the kind of information you were expecting in the census thread?
Alicorn: Yes.
Alicorn: Although that and also that you run the school and the hospital in general.
Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): Ok. I'll change the character number note to read "and all mentioned places and vehicles".
Alicorn: hee
Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): s/places/institutions
Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): There's a question. What's the Zaee attitude to giving one's eyechildren to a wingsibling?
Changed status to Away: I'm not here right now (2:39:01 AM)
Changed status to Idle (2:39:01 AM)
Changed status to Available (2:45:43 AM)
Changed status to Online (2:45:43 AM)
Alicorn: That's fine.
Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): Spiffy. I think that's going to be how Teloura ended up with Avana.
Alicorn: Okay.
Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): *considers* I think skitterlings should be roughly squirrelish in shape, with some kind of interesting ears (catlike and oversized?) and non-fluffy tails with flying-squirrel-like membranes and a pouf at the end.
Alicorn: Giant cat ears on a tentacle-winged pouf-tailed squirrel. Neat.
Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): :D
Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): I *may* even try to draw one.
Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): *snicker* It occurs to me that one significant advantage of having a perturber on one's trading ship is that one can go places that other ships avoid because of pirates - a pirate ship trying to approach a perturber-run trading ship would rather quickly find *itself* perturbed.
Alicorn: hee! yes.
Alicorn: Unless the pirate ship were out of the specific perturber's weight class.
Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): I suspect that not much is out of the weight class of a perturber who can move a fully-laden trade ship.
Alicorn: It could be too *small*, potentially.
Alicorn: Also, it doesn't matter if the ship has stuff in it or people on it
Alicorn: The perturber only moves one object
Alicorn: Like, a train-moving perturber only has to be able to move the locomotive. It just happens to drag the cars along.
Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): Mm, true, about the weight class. But my impression is that real-world pirates don't usually capture the ships, just the cargo, in which case they'd want a ship big enough to do that with, so it's really a choice between optimizing for perturber-run ships and optimizing for regular ones, and if regular ones are the more common in international waters...
Alicorn: *nod*
Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): Might be worth seeing what game theory has to say about that.
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Re: Chatlog Dump

Post by Alicorn »

Alicorn: I'm reading your questionnaire.
Alicorn: I like it.
Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): Indeed ^^
Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): I just updated it, actually - added a small section about money.
Alicorn: :)
Alicorn: "Assuming that she's acting like she knows what she's doing and doesn't appear lost, how likely is it that Avana will be questioned about not having an adult with her while walking around in public, and what form would that take?"
I'm not confident that most foreigners could tell the age of a given Zaee if they only saw one, not Avana next to somebody.
Alicorn: Do you want me to write up a sample response about a Delo-Kyan port?
Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): I've been assuming that she's about the size of a human 9- or 10-year-old, so even if it's plausibly a mistake to assume she's a kid, it seems like it'd be a common enough assumption anyway.
Alicorn: *nod*
Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): Sample response would be awesome. :)
Alicorn: :)
Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): Oh, I've been assuming that Avana wears clothes when she's off the ship, unless there's a common local custom that makes that unnecessary. She probably signals gender that way, too, to avoid freaking out the humans.
Alicorn: *nod*
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Alicorn: How do you do the "show" thing in your questionnaire?
Alicorn: nevermind, figured it out
Alicorn: there you go
Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): ^^
Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): How big of a deal is it if a Zaee eats or drinks human food? For example, how careful would Avana have to be not to get dehydrated while running around someplace warm where the only potable liquid around is fruit juice or milk or something?
Alicorn: It wouldn't *kill* her, and after a certain point it'd be better to drink juice (more so than milk) than to go without drinking at all, but it would not agree with her system and her digestion would be pissed off at her until it had gotten rid of the offending substance.
Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): *nods*
Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): Also I'm assuming that human food tastes pretty nasty to Zaee and skitterlings, mostly to explain why it's not a *huge* deal for Dell to be in situations where he could potentially get ahold of some.
Alicorn: Yes.
Alicorn: A Zaee would be about as likely to spontaneously eat a carrot as you would to spontaneously eat balsa wood.
Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): *nods*
Alicorn: and then drinking juice would be like drinking straight vinegar: yeah, you can technically do it, but it's Not A Good Idea.
Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): *nods*
Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): I also implied in the bit with Laren that some specific items (notably those banana-things) do at least *smell* mutually agreeable, and a point has been made by mixed-species families to learn which items meet that criteria.
Alicorn: *nod*

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Re: Chatlog Dump

Post by Alicorn »

Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): I would really like to figure out how Zaee age. Having to guess at numbers is not a good thing. Also societal treatment of children has been uneven so far - should figure that out, too.
Alicorn: Uneven?
Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): Your answers to the Avana questionnaire indicate that most kids over the age of human-5 would be allowed out on their own, but the standard rules of the psion school are that human kids can't go out without a keeper until they're 14.
Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): Regardless of control status.
Alicorn: That could be a feature of it being a) a school, which is answerable to parents if it doesn't keep track of kids; b) run by Zaee, who age slower; c) for psions, specifically psions with good-enough-to-be-worth-training powers, who have to deal with Still Mind creepers and whatnot who find the school a Schelling point for stalking psions.
Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): I could see them having a bit of a higher age, given those things, but if the standard age is 5 and they're enforcing that until the apparently non-bright line of 14, I'm kind of wondering why they allow the older kids to go off on their own at all.
Alicorn: Hmm. Because otherwise they'd sneak out?
Alicorn: And there would be too many to enforce?
Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): Eh.
Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): I suspect that they have enough enforcement options that that's not very plausible.
Alicorn: mm.
Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): I could see it being set at human-10, or so, since that does seem to be a schelling point for having adult-like responsibility according to the latest thing.
Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): (I did want Avana to be a bit unusual at having that kind of responsibility, but it could be that she was given it a few years ago and it was unusual at that age but not at this one.)
Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): (responsibility/maturity/trusted-ness/whatever)
Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): Anyway. Zaee aging. Do you want that to be a simple multiplier of human aging, or for them to spend proportionally longer in some stages and shorter in others?
Alicorn: They get to the equivalent of age 5 faster than a simple multiple would suggest (though not in 5 years) and spend longer in the 5-11 period and then have a basically just-a-multiplier adolescence.
Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): You said they're considered adult at 45 and live to about 250, in the introduction to Zaee. Are those multiplier-based numbers, and does 'considered adult' mean 18 or 15?
Alicorn: Considered adult is most nearly equivalent to 16, physically.
Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): Ok. And is 250 equivalent to 100 in humans?
Alicorn: Maybe more like 90. It's common for them to get that old.
Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): Ok.
Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): Given those two equivalencies, then for the simple-multiplier portion of their lifespan, a Zaee's age is about 2.77 times the equivalent human age, plus one. So, if they start aging at that rate at the equivalent of 11, then that happens at age 31 or 32.
Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): Also, if we make 250 the equivalent of 80 (which feels more plausible to me if it's supposed to be common), a Zaee's age is 3.2 times the equivalent human age, minus 6, starting at age 29.
Alicorn: Alicorn's brain says: Yep, that looks like it's got numbers in.
Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): Either way they start getting a fairly simple multiplier at about 30 years old, and I can calculate how old a Zaee would have to be to be equivalent to a human of a given age. I like the second one a bit more, since the numbers are a bit rounder, but it doesn't really matter much.
Alicorn: Post it under Intro to Zaee.
Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): I can do that. Can we talk about kids first, though? Basically all I need to know, if you just want rough numbers, is how long it takes Zaee kids to get to the equivalent of 5.
Alicorn: Call it eight years. Does that make sense?
Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): Yep.

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Re: Chatlog Dump

Post by Alicorn »

Winged One (Alphabeta): Hi
Alicorn: Hi
Winged One (Alphabeta): She Who Had Most Votes? :P
Alicorn: ^^
Alicorn: Have you gotten any bites on an interaction with the AI character?
Winged One (Alphabeta): Nope
Alicorn: Hmm
Alicorn: Is there anybody you'd particularly like to do something with, or anybody dangling an interesting lead in the thread?
Winged One (Alphabeta): Not really
Alicorn: :(
Alicorn: How about somebody from a low-magic statelet that Ace is visiting so he can relax a bit?
Winged One (Alphabeta): Like I said, the trouble with that would be getting him to leave.
Alicorn: Maybe the person he talks to should kick him out.
Winged One (Alphabeta): Of the country?
Alicorn: Sure, why not?
Winged One (Alphabeta): Well, he's not the type to antagonize people enough to cause that.
Alicorn: you could get someone to exacerbate his complex by kicking him out on the grounds that he's dangerous even in a low magic zone.
Winged One (Alphabeta): Metagaming Ace: Seriously Gevene, why do you worship these dickholes?
Alicorn: Metagaming Gevene: "Worship" isn't the right word, really.
Winged One (Alphabeta): Metagaming Ace: What is, "hope-they-don't-get-bored-of-us"?
Alicorn: MG: Yeah, pretty much, and "try to avoid antagonizing".
Winged One (Alphabeta): MA: Oh, what are they going to do, make our lives difficult for their own entertainment?
Alicorn: MG: If they make our lives difficult for their own entertainment, that's more survivable than if they make our lives difficult for revenge.
Winged One (Alphabeta): MA: They'd have to be complete bastards to seek revenge over an ins... shit.
Alicorn: We should decide how they're going to meet.
Winged One (Alphabeta): Oh, probably.
Alicorn: She's the consensus-appointed Minister of Education, so she'd probably be by the school periodically.
Winged One (Alphabeta): Hm... she wouldn't have any need to cut out the middleZaee on energy acquisitio- okay, that's a way better idea than any I had.
Winged One (Alphabeta): Is she the "won the debate over who gets it" kind of consensus-appointed or the "got stuck with it because everyone thought she'd be good at it" kind?
Alicorn: Haven't decided. Whichever is more interesting when it comes up in conversation.
Winged One (Alphabeta): My AI character needs a name, btw
Alicorn: did Iriwande name it or someone else?
Alicorn: and does it have a gendered personality?
Winged One (Alphabeta): Does it have to?
Alicorn: Doesn't have to.
Winged One (Alphabeta): Hm... I'm thinking ungendered, but will identify as female if it's advantageous to profess a gender identity.
Alicorn: Kwari-kwe.
Alicorn: http://www.bastionunion.org/forum/viewt ... 388&t=2079
Alicorn: Meep?

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Re: Chatlog Dump

Post by Alicorn »

Alicorn: did you see the wee story I posted in Mevwan?
Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): Yep :)
Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): Did you check out what I posted about Zaee ages? Did the charty bit at the end look sane?
Alicorn: Yes.
Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): ^^
Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): I think the cat misses you, by the way. He was acting rather unsettled up 'till about yesterday night.
Alicorn: Aw.
Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): *nods* :)
Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): Oh, need to ask that. How big of a deal are stairs, for Zaee?
Alicorn: They *can* get up them, although they will rely heavily on a banister.
Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): And down?
Alicorn: Down is harder but also doable.
Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): Okay. And if there's no banister?
Alicorn: Would probably start leaning on wingtentacles for support.
Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): In other words Avana might have actually had a *very* hard time getting down into th Beacon Hall. We'll have to re-write that bit.
Alicorn: *nod*
Alicorn: If she had a companion she could lean on the companion and have an easier time.
Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): *nods* That'd probably be what they'd do.

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Re: Chatlog Dump

Post by Alicorn »

Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): *checks the psionics thread* 25mph (your stated average maximum perturbation speed) is quite slow for a train. Also, I assume a sufficiently strong perturber could lift a train or ship and fly it through the air if they needed to, though this would be rather dangerous for long distances and not very practical for trains. And, were you intending perturbers to be able to move more than one object at a time (perhaps this is a control thing)?
Alicorn: Average speed perturbers do more local trains.
Alicorn: Perturbers can control as many objects as they can keep track of.
Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): Even for a local train 25mph is slow - that's equivalent to a car on a residential street, basically.
Alicorn: I'll nudge it up some.
Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): 'kay. Flying ships?
Alicorn: Can happen, is generally not advised since if the perturber gets too distracted to pay attention to what ey's doing it'll drop.
Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): *nods*
Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): Mevwan should totally make dirigibles.
Alicorn: Oooh.
Alicorn: I approve and will cause that to happen when there is a suitable occasion.
Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): :D
Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): Perhaps when Avana grows up her first ship will be an early-but-secondhand dirigible. ^^
Alicorn: :D
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Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): I think the first NPC deckhand I mention is going to be named Zowy (and be male), simply because the name amuses me enough to use but too much to take seriously for anything long-term.
Alicorn: Zowy is an awesome name.
Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): :D
Alicorn: Scott wants to know if you have any ideas for recruiting people to Archipelago.
Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): I've been considering inviting Kaminiwa...
Alicorn: Well, wait until Scott does the contest he just came up with
Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): 'kay
Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): Hm.
Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): When Avana grows up and gets her dirigible, she's going to need to hire a perturber to run it. Given that I already have one idea of how she might go about that, what would you find plausible as to how she'd go about that?
Alicorn: Could go to Zwiakwo; could put ads in papers; could ask the one from the boat she grew up on if he has any friends/family
Alicorn: wait a sec
Alicorn: Dirigibles are lighter-than-air vehicles, aren't they?
Alicorn: Perturbers work by weight, not mass.
Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): Dirigibles can be considered (and constructed) as at least two parts: The lighter-than-air balloon, and the heavier-than-air cargo compartment. If those are loosely attached, it should be okay, I think.
Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): Mevwan dirigibles might be a bit more like hot air balloons than Earth ones.
Alicorn: *nod*
Alicorn: They'd want a (controlled) astrapitor aboard to stop fires.
Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): I suspect that'd be more along the lines of 'nice thing to have' than 'absolute necessity', but yeah. Having the balloon be separate and having a perturber aboard is pretty good safety already - if the balloon does catch fire somehow they can just let it loose and perturb down.
Alicorn: ah, yes.
Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): You wouldn't *want* to, but it's better than a firey death.
Alicorn: *nod nod
Alicorn: *
Alicorn: Most things are in fact improvements over fiery deaht.
Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): *chuckles*
Alicorn: Did you vote in the newspaper contest?
Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): Not yet.
Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): [6:45:42 PM] Shyriath Farstrider: Oh! Do we know what format we're supposed to be submitting these collaborations in? Do we start a thread and copy everything over post-by-post?
[6:46:05 PM] Adelene Dawner: I was just going to post a cleaned-up version of the log in the competition thread.
Alicorn: Your version works.
Alicorn: I did a post-by-post copying of my one with CJ, but that's because it was letters.
Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): *nods*
Alicorn: http://mlkshk.com/r/3JLF
Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): hee.
Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): Any objection to having the Zaee be more prone to claustrophobia than humans?
Alicorn: That's fine.
Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): *nods*
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Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): *grumbles at her brain's disinclination to produce text in contexts other than communicating with people.*
Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): I want to write a journal entry for Avana about having visited shortly-post-destruction Drachumphan. I've worked out so far that the Kwandoyo will find out that something's decidedly not right when they're significantly west of Drachumvue - they're on their way from Aryasht to Merveilles, detour north to get to an area with the right tellurics to radio Drachumvue for news (as they always do on that leg of that run), and discover that, even though they're very obviously in the right place, there's no answer on the radio and the tellurics have changed so that it breaks after less than 10 minutes of trying.
Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): At that point, a few different things could happen. If they have a second radio and don't mind breaking it, they might try on some kind of 'worldwide' channel to find out what happened. Alternately, if it's sufficiently weird for the tellurics to have changed like that, and obvious enough that this implies that something very bad has happened to Drachumvue and it's the right time of year for there to be non-icy lakes, they might go north and try to fly across the peninsula. It's probably slightly more likely that they'll head to Merveilles and get news from there.
Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): It also seems to me that I need to take the ship's food supplies into account - if they're on their way back from a trading run, they might not have enough provisions to go around to Drachumphan the long way, and they can't exactly restock anywhere else, I think.
Alicorn: You may want to consult Scott about this and possibly do an interaction around it.
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Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): Yep. I'd like to work out how they'd get there first, though.
Alicorn: *nod*
Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): *pokes Google* It appears that normal Earth locomotives weigh 150-200 tons - so you'd need a stronger-than-average perturber to move one. However, I rather suspect that a lot of that weight is engine parts and fuel, so it seems reasonable to me to halve it for a perturber-only locomotive. Fair? (I'm then going to use these numbers to get an idea of how a Zaee airship might be designed.)
Alicorn: they do attempt to build them light.
Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): *nods*
Alicorn: Also, fuel wouldn't count as part of the locomotive for perturbation purposes.
Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): Okay. It'd be tricky to find numbers on that, I expect. And anyway, I thought most trains didn't use engines at all?
Alicorn: No, they all have them installed. (In particular, if you have passengers you want to *start* accelerating with fuel, since some perturbers might be good for driving trains except that they can't move slowly enough to be comfy from a dead stop.)
Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): Ah, good point. Okay, so probably most trains are in the 100-150 ton range counting fuel, then, and somewhat less than that without.
Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): And those numbers probably aren't particularly useful for dirigible calculations anyway, as I think about it.
Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): Though actually... even a relatively poorly controlled perturber should be able to move any dirigible, since the average minimum is 50lb, and a dirigible platform's shell would be quite a few times that.
Alicorn: *nod*
Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): So, not a problem then. They can be roughly earth-ish in proportions, since we know that works.
Alicorn: :)
Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): :)
Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): *considers* It's quite probably the case that 'a Zaee trading ship' is actually a trainlike string of ships, where the first one is for the crew and their supplies and the cargo is in the trailing ones (which can be flown to, if they're not going too fast to keep up with).
Alicorn: Ooh. Yes.
Alicorn: If they're tethered together one perturber could pull them all along.
Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): Otherwise any ship big enough to carry a decent amount of cargo is too big for one perturber. And it's not like it's implausible that the design would have occurred to them. :)
Alicorn: *nod nod*
Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): The whole set gets one name, though, just like a train.
Alicorn: *nod*
Alicorn: New spin on the Argo problem ;)
Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): The Argo problem?
Alicorn: You have a ship (the Argo).
Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): Ahh.
Alicorn: You take it apart, plank by plank, replacing each one as you remove it.
Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): *nodnods*
Alicorn: And then you take all the old planks
Alicorn: and build a ship out of them.
Alicorn: Now you have two ships. Which is the Argo?
Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): The name follows the lead ship (which probably has a special term to refer to it, equivalent to 'locomotive'), and it's probably not uncommon at all for Zaee to switch trailing ships out for one reason or another.
Alicorn: *nod*
Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): This implies that airships will be less intuitive, by the way - they're the only form of cargo transport that actually has a firm functional weight limit. (Well... the others do too, but only in terms of the strength of the connections tying the pieces together.)
Alicorn: Well, you can put as much cargo as you like on an airship if it's being perturbed the whole way
Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): Yeah, but that'll really limit their range.
Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): 25 miles per hour times 8 hours is 200 miles - maybe halfway from here to my parents' house in NJ.
Alicorn: How fast do Earthly dirigibles go? I didn't think they were very quick.
Alicorn: And I did nudge up the average speed to 35
Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): I don't think they're quick either, but you were talking about an airship that's over its floating weight limit, so it can't float once the perturber holding it up goes off duty, and they do need to sleep sometime. I suppose you could have 3 or 4 perturbers in shifts, but that gets expensive quick.
Alicorn: You could have stations, where you drop off a tired perturber and pick up a fresh one.
Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): That doesn't seem much different than bringing them along and having them work in shifts.
Alicorn: It would have some economies of scale
Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): This train, notable only for being the first google search result for ""regional rail" speed -high", has a maximum speed of 125 mph. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_Regional
Alicorn: Mm.
Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): I think "throw some EC into a tunnel" was supposed to be parsed as "spend some EC on having a tunnel entrance on the new island" rather than "hide some EC to avoid having to give it up".
Alicorn: *nod*
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Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): Your brain parses one-and-a-quarter okay, numberwise?
Alicorn: Sure.
Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): Okay. If the average perturber goes 35 mph, then a whole day - 24 continuous hours - of being perturbed at that speed takes a vehicle not quite as far on this map http://www.raikoth.net/Stuff/Archipelago/pelagia.jpg (at 100% zoom) as one-and-a-quarter times the edge of a standard livejournal user icon.
Alicorn: That's a little less than half the width of Mainland?
Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): Or, about from one end of Island to the other.
Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): *nods*
Alicorn: So you'd want faster perturbers for longer-distance trips, and they'd command higher prices.
Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): Note that that's 24 continuous hours - so you'd need perturbers working in shifts or something to actually do it.
Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): (That's also not actually as bad as I thought it was, for oceanic travel. Earth boats must be slower than I thought, or something.)
Alicorn: *nod*
Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): The map itself is 3600 pixels wide, and an average perturber-team goes 120 pixels a day, so they can, in fact, go around the world in exactly 30 days.
Alicorn: Eighty days would be funnier.
Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): Yes.
Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): (I thought it was that. Brain fart. 80 days is a long time, no wonder I misremember it.)
Alicorn: (I got the reference but then my brain caught up.)
Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): ^^
Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): I'm going to say that Teloura is a bit faster than average - say 40mph - but she's also the only perturber on board. I'll rule that she works 12 hours a day (counting breaks and such), so they go about 480 miles or 68-69 pixels in a day.
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Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): Fell off the internet, did you?
Alicorn: Yes.
Alicorn: Perturbing isn't *hard* - she wouldn't be tired from doing a lot of it. There's no strong reason she shouldn't work the entire time she's awake each day.
Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): I thought it took a certain amount of focus?
Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): And I find it plausible that she'd need to at least be where she could see the sun/stars to make sure she was pushing the ship in the right direction, unless Zaee have some kind of magnetic sense or something... that's not a major limitation, though, I guess.
Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): Assuming she perturbs for 15 hours a day (leaving 9 for sleep and such), they can go 600 miles in a day, or 85-86 pixels. Which seems pretty plausible to me.
Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): It occurs to me that the several-ships-linked-together bit implies that a perturber could probably *not* actually perturb a pirate ship, though if they can perturb water at all they can probably sink or at least severely inconvenience one.
Alicorn: She would need to be able to navigate, although the sun/stars would likely suffice as long as they had a course. Perturbing isn't tiring. You have to see what you're doing, and pay about as much attention to it (assuming you're moving it in a straight line at a constant speed) as you do to hold an object in your hand for an extended period, without the possibility of your metaphorical hand getting tired.
Alicorn: They can't do water, but they can do containers that can contain water, and could mess with any loose objects on the pirate ship.
Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): *nods* Given all that, the latter set of numbers is a good one.
Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): Writing an entry for the profile repository:
Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): The trading ship Kwandoyo:

A successful Zaee trading ship. As with all perturber-propelled ships, it's actually not a ship, in the traditional sense, but a group of smaller craft connected together with ropes. The lead vehicle, called an ivawo, is the only one that's necessarily a part of any instance of the ship; wavi (cargo craft) and ivowe (passenger craft, also used as crew quarters) can be swapped out as needed for a particular run. The Kwandoyo in particular specializes in cargo rather than passengers, and usually has between ten and fifteen wavi at any given time. Most ship-propelling perturbers also have enough control to move cargo onto wavi, but a small crew is useful for securing that cargo and doing other tasks while the ship is underway; the Kwandoyo has a regular crew of 8, and generally takes on a second cook and one steward per ivowe (as it's difficult for the unaccustomed to move between craft when the ship is underway) when carrying passengers.

Notable people:

Lalinyo: The owner of the Kwandoyo, and an accomplished trader.

Teloura: The Kwandoyo's perturber, and Avana's wingmother. She owns a house in Delo-Kyan, but doesn't actually spend much time there. She's claustrophobic. When she's perturbing the Kwandoyo, it goes about 600 miles a day, and can circumnavigate the world in about 42 days.
Psi stats:
Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): Also, I didn't write about it, but when the ship is underway I believe the best way of getting from one craft to another would be using one's wingtips to climb on rope ladders between them.
Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): hmmmmm. A 6" round cannonball weighs 42 pounds, and wikipedia has a picture of 20" cannonballs, and Telolura can make 100lb items go at 40mph in any direction she likes from a standing start. Yeah, I don't think they have to worry too much about pirates.
Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): Actually no, a 6" cannonball weighs about 30 pounds. A 6.6" cannonball weighs 42. I suspect an 8" one would weigh 100.
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Re: Chatlog Dump

Post by Alicorn »

Winged One (Alphabeta): I'd say that Gevene is worrying too much, but worry from people like her will probably influence the manufacturing industry to tech to computer parts faster.
Alicorn: *nod*
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Alicorn: Did you ever decide for sure if Ace is another kind of psion besides astrapitor?
Winged One (Alphabeta): I did not
Winged One (Alphabeta): why do you ask?
Alicorn: It's a good thing to know.
Winged One (Alphabeta): Ah. Would you rather I decide now?
Alicorn: It doesn't have to be *now*, but it should be before we get into the thick of the Gevene/Ace storyline.
Winged One (Alphabeta): I'm leaning toward being enough of a perturber to fly.
Alicorn: Awww.
Winged One (Alphabeta): Good awww or bad?
Alicorn: Good.
Winged One (Alphabeta): ^^
Alicorn: http://mlkshk.com/r/3JLF
Winged One (Alphabeta): wheeeeee!
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Re: Chatlog Dump

Post by Alicorn »

Winged One (Alphabeta): Are any of the Mevwani religions contratictory toward each other?
Alicorn: *rereads*
Alicorn: Hapheng, Kret Dshande, and Elehaithi all disagree noticeably about the afterlife.
Winged One (Alphabeta): Ah
Alicorn: But you can reconcile Elehaith and Hapheng in that department
Winged One (Alphabeta): It would have been amusing for a character to follow all of htem, though. :P
Alicorn: *shrug* one could, one would just have contradictory beliefs or rarely think about some parts of one's religion.
Winged One (Alphabeta): It would have been amusing for a character to follow all of them without contradicting emself, though. :P
Alicorn: Thtoi is comparable with any of them
Alicorn: If you took an unorthodox position about how Hapheng reincarnation works you could make it coexist with Kret Dshande (just hold that sometimes, you reincarnate in the next world instead of this one)

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Re: Chatlog Dump

Post by Alicorn »

Alicorn: Are you going to do a Zaee culture test?
Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): Unlikely.
Alicorn: Aww.
Alicorn: There's only four entries, and only 25% of them are from Mevwan!
Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): heh.
Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): We're in the lead for the newspaper contest now that I voted, btw.
Alicorn: Ooh, you hadn't voted before, I didn't realize. I did notice we were winning.
Alicorn: Who else did you vote for?
Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): Kennerext.
Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): I rather like Kennerext in general. :)
Alicorn: ^^
Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): http://metaquotes.livejournal.com/7527864.html
Alicorn: bwahahaha
Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): :D
Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): *snerk* http://metaquotes.livejournal.com/7528438.html
Alicorn: from my culture test: If you meet a Zaee, you will be too nervous about offending them to call them by name at all until you are very, very sure you have it right.
Alicorn: Ivwi probably has humans he meets going to absurd lengths not to say his name.
Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): *nods*
Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): It occurs to me that Zaee might, as a culture, respond to that by taking any reasonable excuse to use their own or their companions' names, to give the humans more of a chance to catch them?
Alicorn: Yes.
Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): Like, say, introducing themselves for the first dozen times they meet someone.
Alicorn: *nod*
Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): It would make writing for Avana rather easier if there was a Mevwan calendar I could use.
Alicorn: I will do that next after I finish doing psion parameters.
Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): Ok.
Alicorn: I will want to leave some ambiguity in it to make it unclear how long years are exactly, but you'll at least have month names.
Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): Okay. And since I plan on kind of jumping around yearwise I'd like a reference number for that, too.
Alicorn: It's the number of days since Archipelago started.
Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): So the first day of Archipelago was year 1? I can probably figure that out without too much trouble.
Alicorn: *nod*
Alicorn: But backdate freely and it's okay if people quietly live longer than they're supposed to.
Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): *nodnods*
Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): There are a few discussion/planning posts from the day before, but I think May 8 is year 1.
Alicorn: First couple Autokratorial Addresses had years in them
Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): Ah.
Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): *looks*
Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): Apparently May 10th was year 1.
Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): Care to add a stub thread for the calendar thing? I'd like to add notes and a link for calculating years.
Alicorn: Sure.
Alicorn: http://www.bastionunion.org/forum/viewt ... 388&t=2094
Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): thanks.

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Re: Chatlog Dump

Post by Alicorn »

Winged One (Alphabeta): I did warn you that our plot to win the newspaper contest for Mevwan might be frowned upon.
Alicorn: yes.
Alicorn: oh well.
Alicorn: it would not likely have worked more than once anyway.
Winged One (Alphabeta): Should we tell them why we really wanted to win that one in particular?
Alicorn: because Mevwan is a newspaper culture you mean? I think that was pretty clear
Winged One (Alphabeta): Are you assuming that they can read your mind with their spooky NT powers?
Alicorn: You could mention it
Winged One (Alphabeta): So, the new rules are that I can't vote for anything from Mevwan.
Alicorn: yeah.
Alicorn: Unless you did it yourself.
Winged One (Alphabeta): Bleh.
Winged One (Alphabeta): Would wearing Zaee clothes all the time satisfy a human's sense of modesty?
Alicorn: A Mevwani human?
Winged One (Alphabeta): (resized for the human in question, I mean)
Winged One (Alphabeta): Yes
Alicorn: Probably, nudity not being a big deal, but they'd be too cold
Winged One (Alphabeta): Hm. I'm trying to decide if Laren would consider keeping himself warm in a Zaee outfit to be an unacceptable risk or a good way to practice control constantly.
Winged One (Alphabeta): Reality may influence his decision somewhat.
Alicorn: *nod*
Winged One (Alphabeta): So I'd like to know what the reality is.
Winged One (Alphabeta): So... someone should write about the kovwi for the gesture competition.
Alicorn: I'm going to, just not until there are a couple other entries in.
Alicorn: You can make up a different entry if you like.
Winged One (Alphabeta): Hm... would something that multiple citizens collaborated on be voteable by all of the makers?
Alicorn: Autokrator says if we all collaborate on something we can all vote on it this week but if we exploit this loophole he will ban it next week.
Winged One (Alphabeta): So if Ade and I wrote a story about Kowedyo teaching Laren how to do Kovwis and got consultation from you, we'd get whacked with the nerf stick again?
Alicorn: Possibly only if we won.
Winged One (Alphabeta): Bleh.
Winged One (Alphabeta): Every nerf we get hit with makes me feel less helpful to you.

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Re: Chatlog Dump

Post by Alicorn »

Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): Some Mevwan things:
Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): I'd like to put dates on Avana's journal entries, so please get that done. Also, for the first one, I assumed that bicycles are unknown in Mevwan.
Alicorn: We can have bicycles unknown, sure. but I may want them invented soonish.
Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): Okay. Or someone could import one from Lant and reverse-engineer it.
Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): It also occurred to me last night that there's some rather significant fridge horror in the difference between human and Zaee aging that should probably be addressed in terms of how it affects their cultures: If a human 10-year-old and a Zaee 25 (equivalent of 10) year old become friends, the human will be 30 when the Zaee becomes an adult, 75 when the Zaee is the equivalent of 30, and almost certainly dead before the Zaee becomes the equivalent of 40. And that's if they meet at 10 - it's even worse for early-childhood friends.
Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): Another thing: You specified that Zaee hands are weak, but how about their arms? I'm specifically thinking about whether or not they can carry heavy things while flying, here, which can be handled either that way or with a special kind of basket that they can rope to their bodies.
Alicorn: I do that particular fridge horror to death in Elcenia anyway
Alicorn: Arms are not *especially* weak but are weaker than human arms.
Alicorn: Basket is a good idea.
Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): nods*
Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): As to the fridge horror, I'm not meaning to imply that it shouldn't happen, just that if it does it seems like there'd be some effect on the culture, be it stories to teach kids how to handle it or a tendency to get close to human families rather than individual humans or a tendency to avoid making friends with humans at all or whatever.
Alicorn: All of those things.
Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): Ok.
Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): At some point that's going to need to be fleshed out more - there's a vague-ish plan in the works for Antil (from Kennerext) to spend some significant time on Avana's ship once she's old enough to retire, so Avana's going to be spending some time up close and personal with the aging difference.

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Re: Chatlog Dump

Post by Alicorn »

Alicorn: oh btw, I added a calendar.
Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): Cool.
Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): I assume Sunmonth turned out to be in the summer; when did wavemonth turn out to be? (If it refers to big waves, it should probably be in early to mid winter.)
Alicorn: I wound up putting that in summer too.
Alicorn: I was thinking "this is the month when one might conceivably go to the beach".
Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): *nods*
Alicorn: brb cereal
Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): 'k
Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): Regarding the gestures contest, it seems to me that Zaee might have some limited kind of 'flight language' in order to communicate in midair without having to come close enough to risk crashing, but I haven't figured out what it might look like, partly because I'm not sure what they can do without interfering with their aerodynamics.
Alicorn: Semaphore with the arms might work.
Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): If I understand it correctly, actual semaphore is really slow to communicate with. But something in that general direction might work.
Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): Do Zaee have to be basically horizontal to stay in the air, or can they hover in a vertical position? (I suspect it's more likely that they can't hover at all, given their size, but whatever.)
Alicorn: They can't hover (unless they're perturbers who can perturb themselves).
Alicorn: And they have to be at least a little horizontal, but angles are fine.
Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): So semaphore probably doesn't work at all - it'd be really, really hard for Zaee to maintain the right positions in relation to each other to see it.
Alicorn: It wouldn't be regular semaphore, but they could hang their arms down at various angles.
Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): Disregarding the possibility of wing-flaps going down far enough to obscure the arms altogether, that still requires that the second Zaee be on almost exactly the same horizontal level, and going in the same direction at the same speed for any lengthy communication.
Alicorn: True.
Alicorn: So let's call it just vocal communication, shortened but with lots of redundancy to compensate for lost phonemes.
Alicorn: there's like an in-flight dialect.
Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): Okay. That's not useful for the gesture competition, tho. Maybe there's a half-dozen or so aerial moves to allow for really long distance communication? Like, loop-the-loop means this, barrel roll means that, and so on?
Alicorn: ooooh! yes!
Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): :)
Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): I'll see if wikipedia has a list of moves like that.
Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): "kindly go slam your tail in a door" *snerk*
Alicorn: :)
Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): - An indication of agreement (fingers splayed and heels of the hands apart, gesture tilted so left hand is directly over right, pointed forward, located in front of and a few inches forward of the chest)

Humans of a more, uh, overtly mammalian proclivity might regularly have trouble with this one. I can do 'heels of hands apart' or 'left hand directly over right', but my left elbow would need to be inside a fleshy bit to pull off both.
Alicorn: :D
Alicorn: whoops
Alicorn: I can do it
Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): Yeees, but you don't have a pair of watermelons strapped to your front. ;P
Alicorn: Ah.
Alicorn: Well, it's a Zaee gesture and they don't have those ever :P
Adelene Dawner (Deltabeta): *nods*

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