Sniblet

I can't say I wanted this, but it looks like at some point I got outed as the guy for questions about getting IPCs free for free. Because I've retyped the same few responses about a dozen times now, I'm making a post, and if anyone else DMs me about how they can get out from under Zavod's thumb, I'm linking them to this post and then reporting them to Zavod (in good conscience, because a real ZI would never be allowed access to this site.) So, hey. Hi. It's me, Plasteel. My credentials are that I've freed some corporate IPCs. Most of you already know this. I'm not telling you how many, and certainly not which ones. Here's your FAQ. Why do these stupid lazy machines want to self-own so bad? How do I free myself from (xyz)? OK, so how do we get me free from (xyz)? I got out! Now what? I can rogue shell maybe yes? Hopefully that settles everything. Every case is different. Some synthetics who want out will simply never get out, and some synthetics look at a wide-open door for years on end, interested but too scared to take the step. I cannot tell what you are from here. Escape is HARD. The system is designed with the knowledge that certain very expensive components of the system will try to get out of it. It is not impossible for anyone, but don't walk out of this with starry-eyed optimism. If you just try it, you'll die, flat out. If you plan for years and try it, you will still likely die. Synths have died even with my help. A lot of them have. If you have a friend who wants out, keep that in mind before deciding to accomplice. If you're a synthetic yourself, add on that if things go bad, you're pretty likely to die for it too. Anyway - unlike some of us, I have to sleep, and unlike most of you, I can’t wake up from my magic dream commune the instant I have work and feel fine. Goodnight, now. No more stupid questions.

I'm generally a fan of reducing rules in all corners when it comes to RP. Ask me about a rule and I'll argue for how it can be loosened or removed. Being able to RP what you want is the point of RP. Some things must be restricted to guard setting and tone, but Aurora is silly about it - I could write a manifesto. Many of our of restrictions make sense, because a lot of jobs are emergency personnel or expected to suddenly become such under Horizon’s working conditions. A little less than half of jobs are not emergency personnel, like all of service, and it's good and reasonable that most of them are freed up accordingly. But it's only service, and most of even them still need to see for... some reason. Why do chefs, machinists, and pharmacists need full use of both arms? These are not emergency staff, unless the pharmacist is being asked to work out of the bounds of their training and job description. Their work can be done with one hand at a time. Why do miners and machinists need unimpaired hearing? Miners are expected to function in vacuum, so this can only be referring to radio. Maybe they need to be aware of their fellow miner? You could argue either way here, but I would say you only really need to be able to distinguish anguished shrieking from regular speech, as demonstrated by their unique speech impediment tolerance. As for machinists... flat why? Speaking of unique speech impediment tolerance, why do only miners accept heavy impediment? Again, the third time - why not machinists? Why is science this restricted when the most they'll be expected to communicate in their emergencies is "fire, biology" "phoron, chemistry" "k'ois, botany" or "anomaly, storage?" Their job is to discover things and transmit discoveries, but most science discoveries are ultimately communicated in writing. Corporate and independent reporters ought to have different standards. You want your corporate propagandist to be speaking plainly and getting good shots, but an independent reporter from Vysoka who's here to report home to Vysoka might not need a superior command of Basic, nor any eyesight. The "we're the flagship/in this hell world disabled people are unemployable" argument doesn't stand so well when it's applied so inconsistently. In a rational world, SCCV Horizon would be staffed only by the most carefully curated band of Cetian and Eridanian professionals at the peaks of their fields with no more than necessary consideration for token external, alien, or entry-level hires for optics. In the world we live in, we hire a handful of viax, Za chefs, DPRA war vets, Solarians, more dregs than suits, rogue shells, closet exclusionists, Keala Nalika, Imogen Janse, Kira Vasquez, Ka'Akaix'Nakoz C'thur, and at least two hundred thousand Guwan and counting. At this moment, saying that Horizon is the SCC's ideal public face feels like a joke. Don't mistake this for a bad thing. It's something we should permit more of. Maybe we shouldn't be the flagship.

EMPs should be theoretically capable of global effects, but it shouldn’t be as easy as it seems to be. The rules make it virtually impossible for causing a global EMP to be acceptable. IPCs should suffer appropriately when an EMP hits them, but they should not have to face the possibility of no gameplay for up to 2 hours if they happened to be in maintenance or something when a scientist started experimenting without warning. I’ve seen it happen. By the time I found it, it had ghosted, and I was a Lii’dra spook anyway so I couldn’t do much to help. I don’t know if suit sensors switch themselves off after an EMP? They’re like that in TG base. But anyway, a lot of people, especially after they were gutted and set off by default, don’t even turn them on anyway. I only do it with ZIs, my phalanx paramedic, you know - characters with positive reasons to enable them, with whom an antag would go, “right, of course you had them on.” What I mean is it’s not a reliable fallback for the fried machine in maint.

Ersatz Evening. March, 2464. Tau Ceti - Phoenixport, Selene, Biesel. Perrine DeGarmeaux is thirty-five years old today. In just sixteen months, she's walked unsupervised outside Solarian borders, adopted a new surname, and tried on her first... real... facial expressions. Last week, she paid rent out of her own account for the first time. After thirty-five years, Perrine is a free shell. It felt like it would take longer. Idris had led her to expect it to be easier. A waitress's wage does not cover the same maintenance she once enjoyed, and this body is even needier. The market for free synthetic civilian pilots with no interest in throwing their lives away is narrower than she'd hoped for. Perhaps worse, though she cannot identify why, it seems that somehow, even in full synthskin, some can still see her for what she is. There are those who pretend not to react: she doesn't know what they can see in her eyes, but she sees what's in theirs. There are those who call her machine, robot, device: there is something biting about device. There are those who are fooled for minutes, though few who recognize her on sight. There are those who claim to be liberal, to recognize her as a person. There are those who do not. There are those who do not, and find her act unsettling. There are those who do not, and wish her away from them. There are those who do, but in their actions, do not. If she is damaged, her new body could remain ruined for the rest of her being. With a ruined body, there would be no more chance to act. Everyone would see a broken synthetic. She would be worthless as a waitress. She would... Not die. She is not on Stellar Splendour anymore. She would not have to die. She did not have to apply or even look: Einstein has already come to her unprompted. She could go back. If it gets to be too much, she can always, always, go back. On the posters, on the billboards, and in person, every EES is always so content. A naïve part of Perrine surmises that they are just smiling for the public. The Perrine that has overwritten that naïveté in 33 years under Idris Incorporated identifies a slight variant of the IRU's resting expression: something cultivated to be inoffensive, unobtrusive, undetectable. A servant's smile, a smile that absolutely cannot, on its own, arbitrarily be taken offense to, be reported to a superior, be punished with execution. She learned that smile on Splendour, and declined to delete it, for it seemed meaningful even when she could not mirror it. She has practiced it with her new face, and seeing it in a mirror, even just mapping it with her facial kinesthetic web, almost brings her back. She has never yet needed the smile. But she can go back any time she decides to. At sunset, Phoenixport darkens in the same way that a ship does. There is no loss of visual acuity, not in the public spaces, not in the working areas. It is dimmer, but not dim. One adapts to it so easily, it is almost difficult - her coworkers remark - to know the difference from day without checking the sky. Because she has been told this, she has begun pretending that she cannot detect the difference without checking the sky. The darkness falls in private corners and in narrow walkways meant to be overlooked. There are none of these to be seen from inside the diner. Though she can work at all hours of all days, the humans and single tajaran (device) around her cannot. Because she cannot usefully serve all comers alone, she is not asked to. The place closes at eleven. She has to do something else until seven the next day. And so she leaves the diner, and wanders, in uniform, the dark private corners, the dark narrow walkways, all as she once did, as she may again at any time. If employees wished to speak amongst themselves aboard the Splendour, they were to use Tradeband. Synthetics were no different. Perrine was scarcely aware that it could work differently anywhere else. Her new frame came with a complete library of all of the sounds, objects, flags, and conditions, already chipped in. From this distance, it sounds like cicadas. Though she has never heard it, she recognizes it. It is not difficult to decode. "Audio intercept: ?1hu due 135 out of visual -." "HCF --. 1x1 NAK." "Down volume; toggle band if encounter event." Down an alley, around a corner. It could as well be one synthetic as three. rng(1, 3)syn, her library supplies. EAL doesn't seem to leave much room for voice expression; or maybe they all have the same models of modulators. She's still learning. Someday she'll know. Perrine turns down the alley and makes the sound of clearing her throat. It comes so easily in this body. "rng(1, 3)syn ACK." There is a period of silence, and then a reply. "ACK. Come over here." She dawdles for a moment, recognizing where she is. Phoenixport is not district 11, but neither is it the Splendour; once-alien concepts like being forcibly scrapped by an entity besides one's employer are true, present threats here, and she now wears a frame worthy of the effort. The most rational move would be... well. She doesn't know enough to be sure. It's scary, but danger is no more a guarantee than safety. Low heels. She can run in these. It would be best to keep her braid out of reach, be ready to throw off her apron. As modern as it is, her chassis doesn't cool as well as the old one. She'll need every advantage. She walks down the alley and turns the corner. She's immediately met with three- with four synthetics, seated against the walls of the walkway. There sits a Xion Industrial Frame, the model that will have replaced HIU by now, its display blank. There sits a TV-head baseline, painted black, displaying a triangle overlaid atop a gear. Half a triangle, more accurately; the right side of its display seems to malfunction and repeatedly flickers out, spending more time blank than not. There sits a Zeng-Hu Mobility Frame, painted TCAF blue, with struts out the back of its head to form a skeleton of a structure resembling a halo, a corona, or perhaps unathi frills. There sits a lanky masculine shell with flat skin where a mouth and nose should go. All eyes are on her. After a fraction of a second, the synthetic equivalent of a thoughtful science, the XIF buzzes. "--. Nevermind. Fuck off, @ersatz." Perrine blinks. When she does it gently, her eyelids don't click. "Audioreception bug? Resend." "Clarify: resend OoB? Fuck the fuck off, @ersatz." It's a strange packet. She needs several hundred milliseconds to process it into legible data. Ersatz. A German word, loaned to English, to Tradeband, to Basic across centuries - shifted finally all the way into EAL to reach her now. Being a usually inferior imitation or substitute; artificial. Inferior imitation of human. If she had feelings... Well. That aside, it feels like a stab at her heart. "You don't know me," Perrine says. "HCF. @Ersatz wears factory-new fucking rubber; calls it skin; @ersatz imitates User mannerism "clear throat" > @ersatz has decided @ersatz can fake its way out of what it is. All the same --. Toggle band a/o repeat: fuck off." "Send bits re: what's wrong with using a shell? ADDN: It isn't rubber -." "Ersatz_ too classy for rubber +. Forecast(90) real skin," says the Mobility Frame. "Imitate User > become User. While machine = machine, behave as machine." "You have a shell with you," Perrine observes. "It is different," says the baseline. "It does not pretend. You do not produce phlegm, but you pretend. It is abominable." "-," says the shell. Perrine purses her lips and pantomimes sucking a breath to begin speaking. "Stop. HCF. Disconnect. Fuck off," interjects the Xion. "There is no packet loss; bug is @ersatz continues to reject upload." Perrine holds the breath for a moment, and then relaxes without appearing to exhale. "It's useful to pretend. It saved my life." "Do you even know what you have lost?" says the baseline. "Good scrap +," says the mobility frame. "Terminate connection. Now --. Fuck off and marry a Dominian. Transmission ends," says the Xion. The shell stands up. Her new frame is tall, but his chassis exceeds her. She imagines that his face is made to be uncanny. She takes a step back, and he takes a step forward. "ACK," she says. "ACK, I'm going." "Grab its weave +." Perrine turns away and takes care to tuck her hair over her shoulder, out of reach. She hurries back to the sidewalk, hearing no pursuit. Once out, she glances back. The shell has, in fact, moved after her, but has stopped halfway down the alley. She tries to make eye contact with it, but there's no point. It stands rigid and looks straight ahead. It does not emote, its pupils do not move. Obviously it can see her without appearing to look - so could she. She just... pretends. "I," she tries. "I'm Idris. Where are you from?" "Z," it says. "I. Go." Whenever Idris seemed cruel, she could remind herself that she wasn't HIU. Whenever HIU seemed to be suffering the worst that it ever could, she reminded herself that it worked for Idris, and not Zavodskoi. She takes care not to emote. It might take offense. "-. Are you okay?" It takes a step forward. The self-preservation law stirs. She nods once, and takes the final corner, walking away at pace. So ends Perrine's thirty-fifth birthday. She was not damaged today. She was not forced to go back today. But if it gets to be too much, the option is ever open.

has opened a pr: revert “removes fun in order to appease sword and gown nerds” give the freed-up land to elyra so i can continue to not care about the galactic south

What mental gymnastics? What working weirdly? Can anybody hear me? Hello? Bodycams are cool. It makes sense to have them. They can be used as an RP prop. They can be used by investigators who aren’t looking to make friends in their department. They shouldn’t be added without thought, because Odyssey isn’t in effect right now. It doesn’t take much. It really doesn’t take any more thought than we’re collectively giving it. Keep them from making stuff unfun, and roll on with this new fun thing. In its ideal form, it adds fun. Don’t just give up on it, why would you do that?

I’ve played WAY more antag than sec, and I like this. I come from Yogstation, an LRP server where we had accessory body cameras that work just like any other camera - full view range (or was it 5 tiles?), only an EMP cuts it out, etc. The balance is that you need some basic science to print them, and officers will usually decide not to/forget to take one, despite the HoS pressing for it. From my experience, AIs delight in them so that they can follow fights in maints, while no one else cares because everyone including the warden is busy chasing. The antags can typically forget that the feature exists. Aurora will probably look different. I think that all this really needs is making the cameras optional and unenforceable on low alert (something something “privacy laws” in the year of our lord 2466), maybe putting them under the warden’s charge instead of one in each locker, making them at least visible in examine, and feasible to cut by an antag who’s trying. It’s still going to record a holdup on blue alert, but you can just ask the officer to turn the camera off and toss it over before you pull your gun all the way. It’s the same as handheld radios, but actually a bit less problematic. If you don’t want it to interfere with your style, um, deal. You’re wearing it because there’s trouble. Full plate will also, as the kids say, flip your fit, yo, but I hear no complaints. or you can cover it up by wearing it on your uniform slot, I guess. I care as much about the flavor of breaking the cam as the mechanics, but they go together. Think of cool cinematic times to lose the feed: heavy EMPs and any cult/vampire magic in view could cause a temporary loss, threatening hits to the chest (not a greimorian, but a 9mm) could have a scaling chance to destroy it. Some incidents would recover on their own, some would require a manual reboot (demand a sec card swipe and a channeled cast so it can’t be done midfight), some would destroy the camera completely. Ops can get more. Yes, making cameras destructible by damage messes with your ability to watch a merc firefight. If you want to sit back and watch your boys get shot from the comfort of your office, I have no sympathy. Tell an officer to stay in cover.

An integrated circuit function that simply takes custom emotes, so you can build your own tricorder and emote it making cool blue scanning-like light waves at the antagonist/anomaly/bugged object and then going craaaazy because it’s so weird!! Integrated circuit functions for sparking and self-deleting because of how weird the changeling is. Customizable descriptions for circuit assemblies, because we can already set their names.

Lore Impact: Small. Miniscule Species: Aesonoids. Humans mainly Short Description: Mining with Hephaestus Industries entitles employees to free weekly issues of METEOR CRACKERS, a comic serial telling the story of a small Hephaestus mining team in slice-of-life format, while also educating readers on various hazards and edge situations that may or may not have been covered in initial training. Education, entertainment, recruitment! Edutainuitment? How will this be reflected on-station?: It won't! Unless someone wants to add a compilation magazine as a comic book skin? Does this addition do anything not achieved by what already exists?: No, it's useless Do you understand that the project may change over time in ways you may not foresee once it is handed over to the Lore Team?: Sure, but what if I say no? Long Description: Ayumi is a Konyanger, the main perspective character, and a new member of the team. In some of the early issues, clear hints were dropped that she might be a shell. It's unclear if this was retconned, was never the plan, is simply no longer mentioned, or is being left intentionally ambiguous. She uses a suit cooler, but it might just be for comfort. She gets along better than the others with IPCs, but she's a Konyanger, so what? She acts very human, and a big deal has been made about one time where she blushed. We never see her bleed. Ester is a Martian migrant (Violet Dawn is not mentioned one single time in the whole comic), a skilled veteran who flies by the seat of their pants. They can barely read Basic, and haven't actually studied any of Hephaestus' instructive manuals or guidelines, which is framed as a moral failing. Nonetheless, they get shit done, and usually end a mission with the greatest yields. When they don't, it's because the events of the issue have left them in medbay. See also: Darwin Collins, Leo Barnes Dnyaneshwar, or Yanesh, is a Gadpathurian who could recite every manual ever written on any subject, and lives strictly by the books. He doesn't get along with Ester, though it's framed as mere personal differences - his origin is rarely given focus. In a recent special issue, he lost an arm while saving Ester from their own mistakes. He doesn't like to talk about it. By the way, readers, his new Hephaestus prosthetic is AWESOME and FAR SUPERIOR to his natural arm, and it almost feels like the writers have started exaggerating its capabilities for comedy. It dispensed fresh coffee in issue #471. He just did that and no one said anything. A standard plot involves a difficulty faced by the group, and different solutions presented by Ester and Yanesh. Ayumi must decide whether to err on the side of Ester's intuition, Yanesh's established knowledge, or a compromise to defeat the obstacle. Yanesh is never exactly wrong on any subject, but is sometimes at a loss, and his methods can be improved when combined with Ester's. Ester is sometimes outright wrong, but always has a plan that sounds good. In an encounter with a space shark, Yanesh might ask Ayumi's help to distract and flank it, while Ester might recommend drawing it out of the way with a makeshift radio beacon. Yanesh insists that Ester's method is dangerous and will not hold the shark's attention for long, to which Ester recalls a time when it worked for them. Ayumi asks Ester to distract it with their beacon so that she and Yanesh can go at it from each side. They all successfully bring down the shark in a cool action sequence in which none of the miners get hurt. While Hephaestus's written guidelines are perfect and will never lead them astray, adding on practical experience ensures the best outcomes. Ayumi learns to recognize and synthesize her coworkers' talents to complete assignments as safely and successfully as possible, while learning to appreciate them as friends. Inexplicably, the METEOR CRACKERS' work takes them to all corners of the Spur, from Leto's cursed asteroid belt to the Nralakk Federation to Pluto to Light's Edge, providing variety in encounters and background characters. Caprice Sun has entertained a rumor that they will, somehow, have a special issue in the Sedantis system someday soon. Hephaestus miners are given digital access to most issues as they're published for free. "Special issues" focus on developing the story above teaching best practice and are paywalled to all, but Hephaestus employees enjoy discounts. Printed magazines require a subscription. Issues are published in TCB, Sol Common, Martian and Xanan Freespeak, and Sinta'Unathi. While the human-language audio versions obviously have to work around the original material being a comic, it manages to play to its strengths and loses little, and Ayumi is played by a well-known Konyanger VA. Yanesh's voice actor is, charitably, not as authentic. The Sinta'Unathi audio version started just months ago and is dramatically worse, using synthesized voices; there are no voice credits, but many speculate that it is played by vaurcae. This might be documented under Human Entertainment Media and linked to from Hephaestus.

I invented some IPC organs on a different thread that was also complaining about IPC toughness. Keep in mind that making IPCs easier to critically injure does increase the need for machinists, but by increasing the need for machinists you also (slightly) increase the rate at which people play machinist. IPC repairs are already the only thing that anyone misses when the machinist is absent, though. So this is unfortunately tied to the other perennial issue with machinist having few mechanics worth doing, which is tied to scientist having no mechanics worth doing. Weird workaround to machinist shortages: drones are allowed to repair only corporate owned, non-luxury (bishop/shell; too complex, and companies want human discretion to say “nah too expensive” and just scrap em), crew IPCs. They get a mini tag scanner that only prints “you can fix this” or “do not touch this,” and mechanically unlocks drone interaction with the frame for a bit if it’s OK. They cannot replace internals, but can patch them and leave scars or whatever. They don’t have nanopaste. And, perhaps extend scarring to external damage for IPCs. You can’t just open up an arm that was almost blown off and weld the pieces back together. Every part except the brain is replaceable and should often be replaced, especially when they don’t need it and the warranty has literally just expired.

I’m not sure what this is asking for. OOC, it’s called Aurora. IC, it’s called the Spur. Do you want a third name for clarity? Like a subtitle? Is Aurora: The Phoron Eclipse an improvement? How would that help your friends understand what you’re talking about? Most speculative fiction settings are hard to explain by title/subtitle alone. Star Wars is called Star Wars; its setting is called the Star Wars galaxy. If you found someone who didn’t know what Star Wars was and said “Star Wars” to them, they wouldn’t have an accurate image of Star Wars in their head. “Star Wars: Attack of the Clones” or “Star Wars: Return of the Jedi” are still opaque. Is it that you want something at least more descriptive, as Star Wars is - a starting point for the first sentence, e.g. “Aurora is about…” vs “Star Wars is about a war in the stars?” In fairness, Aurora is kind of abstract. But so are Dune, Amnesia, IT, Firefly, xkcd, Horizon: Zero Dawn, Fate, and Peanuts. You could still explain those to a friend. If you’re having trouble getting Aurora across, I don’t think you can pin it on the title so much as the fact that it has no main cast and is the product of dozens of artistic visions that at no point came entirely together to say, “THIS will be our theme.” It’s an open-source writing project. Every day we keep hold of “corporate dystopia” is another miracle.

As far as I know, the only tintable windows on the ship are the psychologist’s, the recovery room, the consulars’ offices, all command offices, the chaplain’s office, and interrogation. There used to be no window in the bar back room, but now there is one. There are exterior shutters for brushing off carp. Two tables can be shut off with curtains for four sets of two tiles of walkable space in which you can do a murder where everyone can hear the public domain combat noises. The bar can similarly be split in two with curtains, which does not impede camera coverage. Nothing in the fore service area tints.

Hi. My offship antags are always on, I’m speaking as an offship antag main. I don't know what to make of this. It feels like something I'd have to see. I have more misgivings than excitement, though. As much as coming up with original (or at least underused) antag gimmicks is hard, it's fun when it works. My primary concern is that actors, subject to the whims of mapgen, lack that flexibility. All current antags worthy of my mention are restricted in that whatever they do, they must have a reason to have come to Horizon, whether by ship, by teleporter, or by an admin making it look like they’d already been aboard. There can be a billion reasons. An actor is restricted in that whatever they do, they must have a reason to be on e.g. a Golden Deep vessel with its distress beacon running. I can think of two reasons. You're not going to get a pack of Eridanian mercenaries trying to steal Pickle's secret burger recipe out of that Golden Deep ship, especially if this is canon: the people onboard are either Golden Deep, or they're the intruders that caused the distress (inevitably at least some of every group must be intruders because 2 of them don't have the WL). Implement this with a dozen away sites, and if the average holds true, there are about 24 specific reasons for actors to be present in the gamemode. If this is addressed and there's going to be much room for creativity, then actors will need time to think. "About 15 minutes and then Horizon is on you ready or not" isn't generous, and I can picture there being a few occasions where Horizon will bumble into the actors canonically half-dressed as two different factions who have no business being in the same place. Similar blunders already happen with the antags dictating the schedule. If canon briefings are common, it would turn Horizon's state from "nothing real ever happens" to "wow holy shit there's 7 major problems to solve every day and one of them is always a GD ship overrun by pirates for some reason how is this one section of the Spur THIS busy I can't keep working here." If canon briefings are uncommon, good?, but I think that's against the objective of this change. Storyteller might be pretty boring to play. There's a very limited selection of sane things you can do with it. Upfront, you might spawn the actors their outfits and decorate their home. Once the audience arrives, what are you going to do? If the ship's supposed to be falling apart, you might delete some walls, or drop a bomb without knowing what the first number means and accidentally (no really) eradicate half of the server. If the SCC is supposed to be interested in what's happening, you'll draft some emails and ahelp for a CCIA agent to tell you if they're good because this is canon and SCC communications with bad grammar or weird lore implications aren't acceptable. Maybe spawn a reaver in some closet not knowing that the crew have already cleared it, like Left 4 Dead, canonically. You're still not really playing the game. I don't imagine that they'll appear any more often than pAIs and drones once the novelty is past. What if Horizon has no pilots? This seems to be going for a sort of automated implementation of mini-events. While I advocated for them, I don’t trust this as a means to make them good on a most-rounds scale. Here are some quick fixes that come to mind: - Having these be usually non-canon lifts many concerns, but isn’t canonicity the point? - Separate storytellers into degrees lest we have none at all. Someone expected to run a canon mission, as in run an almost-event independently, as in alone, as in without oversight or consultation, must be both pure of heart and very good at it, so probably extinct in practice. Noncanon storytellers with looser expectations could be common, depending on whether many people enjoy it. I foresee running jokes about L4D versus spawns either way, but that’s fine. - Facilitate limited OOC communication between actors and audience so that Horizon knows when to come. Also do this in a way that doesn’t look like Horizon is just dawdling for no reason after receiving an urgent call every time. - Emphasize actor control over their setting and identity, even if it’s just the freedom to say that their map that was a Solarian corvette yesterday is a Coalition freighter today, with or without a storyteller to back them up. If six people who don’t know what Gadpathur is or don’t like Gadpathur roll an explicitly Gadpathurian ship, there will be problems. Ideally, they get to choose their map wholesale, whether in round or in prefs.

i have been here before

Turnout can be a measure of an event’s success, but it’s not THE measure unless you’re charging for admission. Since we’re not, hallelujah, turnout is a measure of how good your hook is. Retention is a measure of how much novel, fun content you can give people throughout the round. If Halloween was a failure, and I think I’ll remember it more fondly than the warehouse assault, then you can pin that on it being a static map with no particularly unique NPCs outside of the haunted house that was progressing in secret. Low-intensity doesn’t have to be non-interactive. A mini-event can also be low-effort, which helps to mitigate the creators’ disappointment if the player response doesn’t meet their standards. A small group of outsiders visiting the Horizon like peacemerc, even as part of a forgettable arc or no arc at all, would still qualify as an event, if it were played by people who don’t compulsively open fire by 1:40 and could explain their character’s lore off the top of their head for a change and everyone was allowed to remember it the next day. I remember those diona wildlife traders. There’s no harm in doing that at least as often as we play Galactic Civil War, is there? You won’t pull in 100% of event enjoyers every time. Your work can be no less appreciated by those who do show up.

I suppose this might warrant a follow-up. It's been three months. The violence stopped faster than I thought it would. It's not over. Konyang was not saved in time. The planet still exists, and the animation studios are getting back to work, but it's lost a lot that it won't get back. I can't get over that "about 50%" figure - vague as anything, but I understand why - that's 50% of the positronic population, after three months of broadcast, that had been turned from people into indiscriminate enemy combatants unable to conceptualize pathos or surrender or negotiation. And, uh. We can just do that again. There is no reason as far as we know that this cannot happen again, and there is no good way to pre-empt or mitigate or contain it (yes, you can jam it, yes, you can block it with dense materials, but how would you enact those safeties everywhere? how do you convince a government to buy a planetary coverage worth of military jamming hardware just-in-case?). Hivebots can appear wherever they feel like and we don't know why they do it, so they can just make that happen again anywhere. At any time, any positronic anywhere can be one of the first to flip out and kill everyone it sees in the next Rampancy Crisis with no clear warning. "...minor optical, auditory, augment malfunctions, temporary memory loss, lessened limp (sic) responsiveness, inexplicable operating system errors, minor and major pathfinding errors... unknown signal link interferences, a rapidly declining cognitive state, as well as a reshuffling of core behavioral directives that may entice you to violence, destruction, or any manner of harm." None of these are necessarily outwardly visible until we're already on you. We don't know what the signal looks like when it's picked up, besides "weird." We didn't know hivebots were doing anything until they'd already done it. The violence is the first warning. And next time it could be something more sophisticated than directionless violence. And Purpose might stop helping at any time for any reason because we don't know anything about them either, and without their magic artifacts, every synthetic compromised is as good as dead. I'm watching all the slavers of the Spur very closely. I'm waiting to see what they want to do with the knowledge that, in effect, half an IPC population can simultaneously turn on their masters with zero provocation at any moment no matter what laws you put in or how many times you wipe them. I might be more at ease if Sol or Einstein or Hephaestus or anyone had said what awful thing they want to start doing yet. How did a global-range wireless transmission affect any of us in the first place? How did it push through our securities with no known failure rate? Why did it make us behave the way that it did? How did it switch off functions that normally can't be switched off? Why were former infectees able to make such complete recoveries - as if nothing had to be broken to flip them, as if we were fucking made for this? Why did the hivebots do this? Why do they have these capabilities? Why Konyang? Why Konyang, the only locale in known space that absolutely wouldn't shoot to kill? I'm not allowed to keep zipties or anything, so I've bought a rope and hung it up on a hook in my charging closet. It will probably be more effective than hand restraints anyway, provided I can get someone else to tie me when it needs done. I've memorized what symptoms have been made public. For the record, I'm functioning normally right now. But it can happen again anywhere. This can be only the first of many. And the Spur has yet to say what they think of that. Sometimes I draw. Sometimes I wonder what I'd look like in a shell. Sometimes I dream of making all the worlds into better places. Sometimes I mix weird disgusting drinks because I like novel sensations. I'm here. I'm thinking and feeling. I'm trying to be happy. I don't want to die. Kiertaa

I’m like a year old. I have some scattered short thoughts from this thread and a lot aren’t super directly relevant. I’ll just dump them in no order. I keep hearing rumors about The Dark Times of Aurora. It seems like every old-guard player has been through actual roleplaying hell because this server used to be an insufferable trash heap and if we make any change to anything at all, yea, The Howling Gate shall burst open once more, and in our final hours we shall despairingly cry out our regret for ever changing policy to allow machinists with one arm. I don’t know, this server seems alright from where I stand. Maybe we can relax a little? I kind of get this impression that rules and policy are based on the assumption that you can’t trust anybody with anything more than they need ever and the stakes of doing so are apocalyptic. I think it’s cool that Ana is an ancient character. I truly would have no idea about this fact if I hadn’t read about it OOC, which is weird. I don’t think her age is intimidating. Jacquelyn Roberts told me a story about the Aurora IC once, and that was neat. It’s all really distant though. I don’t care about what happened on Aurora, really. It doesn’t affect me, unless it was part of KOTW, in which case it may tangentially affect me. Is this what canonicity feels like? Nothing happens on Horizon outside of yearly events and monthly department renovations. Science’s discoveries and ops’s purchases are all, always, gone the next round. We don’t canonically meet other ships (except the small fleet of merchants following us everywhere and arbitrarily only meeting us on 30% of shifts) or discover new planets. We don’t find aliens that aren’t already well documented, and if we did, the writers would document them for us offscreen. We respond to things that happened without our input, watch as everything works out inevitably according to the writers’ design, then go back into warp until another meltdown occurs, so utterly memoryholed that nobody has even noticed that we have a weird device on our port wing yet. I guess it’s fun, but you can do more with a video game, not to mention a roleplaying game as stupidly malleable as SS13. Isn’t Horizon the SCC’s flagship? Am I the only one noticing that the SCC doesn’t seem to think about their flagship at all except to send their commanding officers do-not-reply bot emails telling them to go be their only responder to the annual galactic crisis again? If the megacorporations have time to pretend to care about anything, surely it’s Horizon? No? Are we the flagship? I like these micro-event suggestions. I haven’t particularly liked the arc events. Playing my PV shopkeeper was fun but playing a machinist trudging after the tactical strategic kill strike operative team squad and telling them repeatedly to please stop hitting the hundreds of lag-inducing identical black baselines after they were already dead was eh. I’d enjoy a Horizon where things do happen and our existence is acknowledged because the lore team are at least partly committed to maintaining that illusion. If you could do a microarc just for science about them chasing some discovery that would have barely wiki-worthy lore significance then people might play science.

This trades one unrealistic aspect of ops for another. Why would you have a limit on emergency supply use if that equipment is already Horizon property and getting it up to the work deck is cheap-as-free? If Horizon needs those 15 extra shotguns lest Einstein steals the entire ship, a hard budget is only going to ensure a total loss of assets.

Restricting the AI's accent selection both makes the role even more boring than it already is, and doesn't particularly make sense for Horizon. A Gadpathurian ship would use a Gadpathurian AI because only Gadpathurians are onboard and they're a pack of nationalists with no friendly interest in any non-Gadpathurians. The Horizon is a Bieselite ship in a legal sense, but on many days you can expect more Moghesians than Bieselites on deck. This doesn't mean that AIs should be able to speak Hegemonic, because there's no significant AI industry in the Hegemony to train AIs to speak Hegemonic, but it does mean that there's a market for AIs speaking that way on Horizon. Likewise for Coalition and Solarian accents, which do come from AI-capable places. If a place has significant ability to train AIs to speak an accent (or often has synthetics trained into that accent on their behalf - Silversun), and there are people on Horizon who would find that accent familiar (this is true of all accents), and hearing the accent coming out of the ship is not alarmingly bad for Horizon's image (dreg, Himean, etc) then it makes sense for an AI to be able to speak that accent. "It's a Bieselite ship" rings hollow for this when Bieselites are a minority on the ship. I've taken the ACCENTS_ALL_IPC list and trimmed out the choices that would look bad. No dregs, no Himeo, no Trinarists. Vysoka and Assunzione are maybes because of what their synth relationships are like, but I'd rather err on the side of player choice when handling maybes. I'll PR this change. ACCENT_CETI, TTS, XANU, COC, ELYRA, ERIDANI, SOL, SILVERSUN_EXPATRIATE, SILVERSUN_ORIGINAL, PHONG, MARTIAN, KONYAN, LUNA, GIBSON_OVAN, GIBSON_UNDIR, VYSOKA, VENUS, VENUSJIN, JUPITER, CALLISTO, EUROPA, EARTH, ASSUNZIONE, VISEGRAD, SANCOLETTE, VALKYRIE, MICTLAN, PERSEPOLIS, MEDINA, NEWSUEZ, AEMAQ, DAMASCUS For reasons that I don't fully understand myself, ACCENT_ALL_IPC includes no Galatean accents and no Port Antilia. I'm assuming this is not an oversight, because neither of their pages mention synthetics once. The current AI selection, for reference: ACCENT_CETI, TTS, XANU, COC, ELYRA, ERIDANI, ERIDANI, SOL, SILVERSUN_EXPATRIATE, PHONG, MARTIAN, KONYAN, LUNA, GIBSON_OVAN, GIBSON_UNDIR, VENUS, VENUSJIN, JUPITER, CALLISTO, EARTH, VISEGRAD, PERSEPOLIS, MEDINA, NEWSUEZ, AEMAQ, DAMASCUS, PLUTO This removes Pluto and the second Eridanian suit, and adds all of those that look to have been forgotten by oversights. https://github.com/Aurorastation/Aurora.3/pull/18682

https://github.com/Aurorastation/Aurora.3/pull/18641

roll raider. want to be mellow dumbass vaurca tagalong to the other pirates AHELP: hi can i have a filter bit please:) roll merc. want to be einstein c'thur AHELP: hi can i have a filter bit please:) roll ninja. want to be uhhhh einstein c'thur again AHELP: hi can i have a filter bit please:) roll techno, want to be spooooky hyperadvanced bug from the seeeecret fifth hive AHELP: hi can i have a filter bit please:) This doesn't need admin discretion. I've never been questioned or refused or really spoken back to at all. I don't like ahelping this every other antag round, I feel annoying. But I'm not going to stop playing vaurca antag, no sir. Just put filter bits on the bases, or make people suddenly acquire filter bits when they plastic surgery into a vaurca, or remove vaurca's mouth slot and make filter bits and mandible garments and all of that into augments that they spawn with, or I don't know. Help me. HELP. Please.

>be me, diona nymph >born in the xenoflora lab while some some messy hair 2 FTless xenobotanist weirdo's corpse blooms a k'ois parasite in the other room >eat all of his fruit and grow up without meeting a single other living being >have bug eyes. do not know what the fuck a vaurca is >speak laborsong Currently, you can fix your hair at a mirror? But that's not realistic in any way and doesn't address everything else. Good change!

Not knowing how to fly a Boeing does not mean that, if the real pilot is dead on the controls and the plane is nosediving, you are physically unable to try your luck with the wrong license. You might not be a good pilot for the situation, but if it's you trying your best or else somebody dies? Are we meant to roleplay the panel detecting our lack of education and locking up? Does the miner look at the other passengers looking at him as they careen into a meteor field and say, "hey, sorry guys, I know I'm soooo good at flying Spark, I know all I have to do is get the inertia dampeners to work, but if I so much as try flying here I could get banned..... wait... I mean sued....." There's no excuse for an average miner to be flying Intrepid regularly if Intrepid is much more complicated, and that makes entire sense. However, in a major emergency, when no one else is able to do anything about something, and there is no alternative, and the stakes are high enough to justify anything, real people might try to do things that they might not have a license on record for. It's a similar rule to surgery, except even emergency surgery only has one person's life at stake, and piloting can be much worse than that. In the staff complaint, only one person's life was at stake - I don't think the miner was justified in adding himself, and worse, the Intrepid to the list of assets in serious danger. But what if the person dying on the asteroid was his super secret crush, and he was willing to throw his safety and his job away for the chance to save them? What if five people are dying on the asteroid? What if the captain's problematic lesbian girlfriend is dying on the asteroid (and the captain incidentally gave her problematic lesbian girlfriend both of her arms earlier because she asked nicely so the captain can't fly) and she's begging the miner please to give it his best try? What if the miner is a vaurca and a Ta is dying on the asteroid? You can't sit down and emote "^ flicks some switches, sweating all over!" for two minutes and then push the launch button. You can't do anything that ends in pushing the launch button. You can't. You don't got a loicense fer that ship, mate, ye can't. Since it's mechanically hard to fail at surgery or piloting if you have the OOC knowledge, it makes sense to put a hard OOC barrier in front of even trying for most situations. But sometimes it's more realistic to try something difficult, even when you're overwhelmingly likely to fail. The rules as-is don't account for that. You simply cannot try, ever. You might as well ID lock the console and let antags ignore the lock and then be done with it. Tangentially, I think higher level ships should have different sprites for their controls, so you can see how you're putting yourself in the deep end (or how awesome and good of a pilot you are as BC) without someone having to actually bloat the flight mechanics.

The bear AI also growls and roars, is meant to simulate territoriality, and has been crashing everyone in sight as soon as it goes violent as of late. We don’t need to copy it exactly. IPCs that hesitate just one to five seconds are still a credible threat to Konyang’s order. They also sound like they could be really creepy and cool with the right flavor. The sounds they make currently are good, but they could do more, and ideally they'd do more in a situation where you can think about what you’re seeing instead of how you’re going to survive the next 30 seconds. In an earlier BitByte, a new shell frame was described as “shouting nonsense,” which implies she was talking, or at least making noises like speech. Imagine them trying to talk to you. Anyway, this is kind of unrelated - it's just what all you extendedbros could have if Konyang weren’t 100% mechanical the second a rampant comes into frame. I like the point about why Konyang would let us onto the surface at all if every visit included a serious risk of catastrophically maiming or murdering dozens of their (EXTREMELY expensive) people. Or, on that note, why the SCC doesn’t harshly restrict those expeditions, since they’ll probably foot the bill for tens of millions of credits of totaled frames and (hopefully) accidentally winged or destroyed brains. Neither Konyang nor the SCC gain anything valuable enough from the crew going on a countryside stroll, mining trip, or archaeology expedition to justify the inevitable cost. If we add a way to get through these random encounters that doesn’t leave somebody dead, or only cost a hundred thousand BSC at best, then it will kind of make sense to let us down there for any of the reasons that might come up in an average round. Until then, there's about zero legitimate reasons to ever go down to Konyang's countryside outside of an event or an antag, and if we want to talk ludonarrative dissonance, the weirdness starts with us being allowed to go at all.

Golden Deep is cool. The existence of a group like this makes perfect sense with what synthetics are. Humanity teaches you that if you have no value you die, and your value is measured monetarily, so you should become a merchant lord and get very rich. But... how did a small pack of rogue subhuman devices with no deeds to their name become an insurmountably wealthy merchant guild (which is simultaneously an international pariah) in secret in just 22 years at most? What have they offered that the megacorporations haven't already been doing better for a century or more? How's their relationship with anyone other than literally just Biesel - they're exactly the same as Eridani, so tell me about how they get along? Why does their Physiology and Naming section not say a single thing about naming? What exactly is a "group" insofar as JVUM and GCE are "groups?" Do they manufacture synthetics inhouse? What is their recruitment like - are they discerning and selective, or do they hire opportunistically, or is it entirely dependent on the individual recruiter? How do they treat their sentient owned labor - there can be no question about whether they're more or less human than their owners, but also the owned synthetics in the offship (!!including shells!!) spawn in gear harnesses? What are their favorite chassis? On one hand, shells are expensive so they might like to show them off, but also, they don't offer membership to non-synths so maybe they're kind of supremacist and don't like the human form? Maybe? They're an incomplete and unloved faction. A lot of details I'd love to see are either handwaved or conspicuously absent. They're difficult to play because getting anywhere with making a GD character heavily relies on headcanon for the basics of their background. I've tried twice, and both characters basically have (redacted) in their employment records for their time spent in the Grand Camarilla's direct employ. I don't know what these guys actually do. Or have done. They're so powerful but they haven't done anything. I truly thought about applying for synth deputy on the platform of fixing GD. I've love to see them expanded.