blackouthart
New Member
Avatar drawn by Shelby Cragg!
Posts: 49
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Post by blackouthart on May 16, 2020 2:08:37 GMT
Feel free to correct me if I’m wrong, but I think Kat has managed to handwave a lot of the magic stuff because while inherently illogical, they are still systems at their core. The ROTD was a system that ran a bit nonsensically, but she saw it as just a vaguely cringey slightly run-down office/library that just wasn’t run efficiently. The Forest stuff she’s always known was there, but that was, as we found, its own system with Coyote at the center - and she’s never really ventured into it anyway. I think there’s a lot of suspension of disbelief because her mother showed her the supercomputer that lets her parents and James do enchantments and that’s how she’s categorized it. The moon fingerprint, we saw her gape in shock and rationalize it as there has to be some kind of scientific explanation and she played it off as a joke.
Nothing on this magnitude has ever happened to her, that’s affected her as directly - and also who knows, this inner resentment as a result of questioning could’ve been built up for a while - and a lot of you seem to also be forgetting they are a bunch of teenagers that just stopped being pre teens not that long ago. Kat is allowed to act irrationally, and also, it was probably easier to dismiss this stuff as she was younger and more full of wonder (in a manner of speaking) but she’s growing up. So is Annie. Her “real” best friend might be missing, anyone would freak out.
Also the Annie’s are being really flippant and dismissive, which is not how to start this conversation after Kat has been so distressed it’s bled over to Paz aggressively confronting her best friend.
Christ this is bad. Always knew Kat and Annie(s) were gonna have a schism, just didn’t expect it to be over this.
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Post by Runningflame on May 16, 2020 2:42:02 GMT
I don't think Kat is stupid. Maybe power is going to her head. More than being "power mad", it's a typical case of Scully Syndrome. Yeah, I probably could've phrased that better. "Power mad" isn't exactly what I was getting at--it's more subtle (and therefore more dangerous): I think "powerful" here means "stuff goes your way most of the time." You become used to thinking of inconvenient facts, not as realities to be accepted, but as obstacles to be overcome. Kat, in her various researches, has had some momentary roadblocks, but she's always gotten past them, usually by the end of the chapter. She's not used to being stumped. So when there's something that she can't solve quickly*, she doesn't know what to do. She's always been able to impose her will on the world before--why is it not working this time? Contrast Zimmy, who is both smart and powerless. She can accept anything that happens, with or without an explanation, because she doesn't carry an expectation of being able to explain it or do anything about it. That's what I mean by "power going to Kat's head." She's a victim of her own success. There is a certain arrogance in her pronouncement that "The universe just doesn't work that way!" (If the Annies and Tony and Jones and Renard and Clippy--and probably Kat's own experiments--all say that it does work that way, is Kat going to insist that they are all wrong and she alone is right?) She has two options from here: She can learn some humility and accept the facts that she doesn't understand--or she can refuse to accept the facts and try instead to gain enough power to change them, which is another way of saying "become a god." (That path in turn has two possibilities: failure, in which case she'll keep grinding her gears indefinitely, or success, in which case Daedalus is going to claim all the cookies.) * For some definition of "quickly." I think there have been difficulties she's had to ponder for a week or two before? She's been worrying over the two-Annies situation for a few weeks now, according to Paz.
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Post by Runningflame on May 16, 2020 3:00:20 GMT
Huh--we've previously seen a time when Kat was the one saying " Haha, weird right?" and Annie was the one not buying it. Annie came up with some pretty far-fetched theories (a textbook case of the Scully Syndrome that Igniz mentioned) and took a lot of convincing before she was willing to update her views to fit the facts.
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Post by davidm on May 17, 2020 3:29:32 GMT
Annie fingerprint on moon thanks to coyote.... Obviously females are crazy irrational, not really good at science for I don't buy it, etc.
And the males, Annie's dad after wife died, headmaster, and court officials interfering with annie-loup a colder sort of crazy.
Fairies... Crazy. Love boat and kat religion robots... Crazy.
Only 2 sparks of sanity... Jones and boxbot, and that is terrible. We have the technology to create bodies. Court creates them for fairies that want to be human, kat makes them for robots. I propose the Omega project... Boxbot and Jones get married and the we mass produce their children.
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caber
Junior Member
Posts: 67
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Post by caber on May 17, 2020 16:13:59 GMT
Kat, sweetie, you Macgyvered together an anti-gravity device to do a protein experiment when you were, what, 12? THEN you turned that same device into a vehicle to save Anna. What I'm trying to say is: pot, meet kettle. The thing is, the anti-grav device is technobabble. We don't know the exact method, but she probably used a flux capacitor to reverse the polarity of the trans-warp drive... et voila! Fair point!
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Post by speedwell on May 17, 2020 22:09:46 GMT
Well, it seems that what happened is that we are inside Schroedinger's Box with both a live cat and a dead cat (Annie and Annie). Neither are "the real Annie" because that went away when the worlds split. The only question is, what is keeping the wave function from collapsing so we know what world we're in?
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Post by davidm on May 18, 2020 2:06:56 GMT
Well, it seems that what happened is that we are inside Schroedinger's Box with both a live cat and a dead cat (Annie and Annie). Neither are "the real Annie" because that went away when the worlds split. The only question is, what is keeping the wave function from collapsing so we know what world we're in? The simplest explanation is the best... is it more logical to believe in a bunch of quantum wave functions, and billions of worlds and galaxies and a coyote who can get fingerprints on moon and split reality, and all the other magic beings... or that simply the world is a simulation inside a single computer that could be much smaller than earths moon and get energy from a single nuclear reactor or bunch of solar panels. If Robots could build robots than obviously a computer could keep building itself bigger till it could manage such a simulation using only 1/1000 if its capacity and if wanted split reality to be multiple simulations. Obviously magic is absurdly easy in a computer simulation, people do all sorts of crazy magic in games like world of warcraft. Perhaps billions of years ago the real world yellow sun burned out and so life logically moved to a nearby red dwarf star like bernard star over a period of a few thousand years using even "modern day" type nuclear reactors and ion drives so that for next trillion years live could continue inside a self replicating computer as a simulation of that long lost real world.
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Post by speedwell on May 18, 2020 2:19:46 GMT
Well, it seems that what happened is that we are inside Schroedinger's Box with both a live cat and a dead cat (Annie and Annie). Neither are "the real Annie" because that went away when the worlds split. The only question is, what is keeping the wave function from collapsing so we know what world we're in? The simplest explanation is the best... is it more logical to believe in a bunch of quantum wave functions, and billions of worlds and galaxies and a coyote who can get fingerprints on moon and split reality, and all the other magic beings... or that simply the world is a simulation inside a single computer that could be much smaller than earths moon and get energy from a single nuclear reactor or bunch of solar panels. If Robots could build robots than obviously a computer could keep building itself bigger till it could manage such a simulation using only 1/1000 if its capacity and if wanted split reality to be multiple simulations. Obviously magic is absurdly easy in a computer simulation, people do all sorts of crazy magic in games like world of warcraft. Perhaps billions of years ago the real world yellow sun burned out and so life logically moved to a nearby red dwarf star like bernard star over a period of a few thousand years using even "modern day" type nuclear reactors and ion drives so that for next trillion years live could continue inside a self replicating computer as a simulation of that long lost real world. Yes, or it could be a webcomic devised by an intelligent and well-read man. I think the nature of the Ether and magic in Gunnerkrigg Court favours the many-worlds interpretation strongly, though. I've already explained how Smitty's power is that of "inevitability in a higher dimension". I don't think the "world computer" explanation is actually the simplest as it assumes - assumes, mind you - some entity that built that computer, and that entity would need to be explained, and whatever entity might have given rise to it must then be explained, and as a clever man once joked, "it's turtles all the way down".
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Post by bicarbonat on May 20, 2020 14:55:19 GMT
It's also worth noting that the psychopomps' entire function is to ferry the living into the ether, so being comprehensible to said beings is kind of...par for the course. And even with that property, they can still hide themselves from people who aren't etherically attuned. They might not bother to hide, but that's not saying much. Then why don't the psychopomps look to Kat just like taxi drivers holding a sign with the deceased's name on it? By the way, when the cruise ship was sucked into Zimmingham, Kat appeared to perceive the same things as all the others as well. 1. Because, as I said before, the psychopomps' function is unique in that is the end of life. Other etheric entities occur in life and somehow must blend in (whether as a subconscious defense mechanism on the part of the viewer's brain or not). Psychopomps are, by nature, a dropping of the veil that no one can avoid. You see what they are (if they want you to see them at all) because they represent the end of the line. 2. The cruise ship was a sentient robot on an insane bid to use ether manipulation and Kat's own power to become flesh. Zimmy's powers alone have the very unique property of gradually warping reality. Of course everyone (especially Kat, who was forced to replicate something she had already done before) could see that.
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