[2843] "I wonder..."

[arf]

"... is the Court is just an infinite maze of virtual reality holograms?"

[jda]

I see Annie as a Playable Character on a videogame, part Banjo Kazooie, part Majora's Mask,
with Renard as an animal companion
and Kat as the "Hey, Listen!" technofairy, but now giving sage/information from the WalkieTalkie.

[blahzor]

still don't think that's Kat she's talking to

[laaaa]

I don't get how they know for a fact that punting Coyote, amusing as it was, was the correct option?
As I understand it, answering a creature's riddle is the correct choice when said creature has some power over you (e.g. guarding a door, threatening to eat you etc) and is willing to toy with you.
How did they know Coyote's manifestation was powerless/pointless and is not the one currently holding them magically in place?

[mindset]

Sept 29, 2023 10:37:56 GMT laaaa said:

I don't get how they know for a fact that punting Coyote, amusing as it was, was the correct option?
As I understand it, answering a creature's riddle is the correct choice when said creature has some power over you (e.g. guarding a door, threatening to eat you etc) and is willing to toy with you.
How did they know Coyote's manifestation was powerless/pointless and is not the one currently holding them magically in place?

Because it was able to be punted by a teenage girl.

[Corvo]

Remember when Annie's eyes used to be blue? Good times, man! Good times.

[laaaa]

Sept 29, 2023 12:23:53 GMT mindset said:

Sept 29, 2023 10:37:56 GMT laaaa said:

I don't get how they know for a fact that punting Coyote, amusing as it was, was the correct option?
As I understand it, answering a creature's riddle is the correct choice when said creature has some power over you (e.g. guarding a door, threatening to eat you etc) and is willing to toy with you.
How did they know Coyote's manifestation was powerless/pointless and is not the one currently holding them magically in place?

Because it was able to be punted by a teenage girl.

But how did she know that beforehand? Also she smacked its backside once and Coyote decided it was hilarious. However, Coyote has also decided to eat Lana. How did Annie know that, right now, not playing along with Coyote's schemes wouldn't cause any issues. She literally kicked him like a stone, like it was nothing. I doubt she'd do the same to literal Coyote. It's like she knew that, in Zimmiland, Coyote is powerless. But how did she know that?

[ctso74]

What would you even call that, Bose space?

[Phoenix]

Sept 29, 2023 12:32:07 GMT Corvo said:

Remember when Annie's eyes used to be blue? Good times, man! Good times.

Annie's eyes and hairclip are the same color, and they are both often more visibly affected by the scene gradient than her skin or clothes. She has one blue and one purple eye because of the effect in panel 3 on this page, for example. It's pretty typical for scenes like these in Zimmingham/the Ether/ROTD/etc to have such a gradient.

[imaginaryfriend]

Sept 29, 2023 12:47:24 GMT laaaa said:

Sept 29, 2023 12:23:53 GMT mindset said:

Because it was able to be punted by a teenage girl.

But how did she know that beforehand? Also she smacked its backside once and Coyote decided it was hilarious. However, Coyote has also decided to eat Lana. How did Annie know that, right now, not playing along with Coyote's schemes wouldn't cause any issues. She literally kicked him like a stone, like it was nothing. I doubt she'd do the same to literal Coyote. It's like she knew that, in Zimmiland, Coyote is powerless. But how did she know that?

I don't think she did know that. Antimony knew that this prairie-dog/groundhog/whatever is at least some of Coyote* and that it's playing games. Antimony did know that Coyote was a trickster and potentially very dangerous from day one... but she was a child so when he sniffed her trunk like a bad dog she administered a correction as if he was a bad dog... and Coyote probably found that unexpected and hilarious. It also signaled that she was unsophisticated/lacking a sense of the danger and, unlike Surma when Surma was a teenager, ripe for manipulation. However, in his attempt at gloating about how he manipulated Ysengrin/Loup and Antimony into falling in love, Coyote has given the game away. When he ate Lana** Coyote clearly demonstrated that he didn't share Antimony's sensibilities about how people should act.  So, Antimony knew that Coyotedawg would screw them over one way or another even if he seemed helpful at first, and the messed-up disguise suggests that this isn't all of Coyote, or if it is he's not firing on all cylinders. Maybe he forgot some or all of his powers, or maybe this is just an aspect of Coyote deliberately sent here to guide them and speed things along. He may be "lost in his disguise" or something else that might allow her to avoid consequences for punting the little critter. Also, Antimony is likely really mad about Lana. She probably could have come up with an excuse to send Coyotedawg away or ignore his advice but wanted to kick him right in his fuzzy nutz.**** If Antimony and friends will avoid consequences for the punting remains to be seen. She knows Coyote still needs her at present so she'll probably be fine.


*The whole skull and color scheme gives the disguise away... unless it's a visual metaphor for the readers and the characters in the comic aren't actually seeing that.
**I think eating Lana was a blunder on at least two levels. First, Coyote didn't have the entire picture of how his plan was going sideways yet. Jerrek/Loup was eagerly spilling his guts about everything so there was every reason to just wait a bit. Second, it alienated Antimony. Maybe Coyote thought that since Lana was a golem and not a real human the impact wouldn't be the same, or maybe he thought she was as groomed now as she was ever going to be so why not indulge himself. Temper was probably the main driving force here, not strategy, and he couldn't just abuse Jerrek/Loup because that would also alienate Antimony and Coyote still needed them for his plan. "Loup" running around freaking out like a monster that needs to be put down is completely fine, though.
***If Coyote were a human he'd have some sort of disorder or cluster thereof. I think he can be correctly called narcissistic and psychopathic but not clinically so, since he is a genuine god and the same standards just don't apply.
****If Coyotedawg does turn out to have been Zeta thinking she was Coyote thinking he was a prairie dog (or whatever) then I think Antimony may have to apologize for the punting.

[Gemini Jim]

Sept 29, 2023 7:42:16 GMT arf said:

"... is the Court is just an infinite maze of virtual reality holograms?"

I was just thinking that being able to walk a long way without going anywhere, and the way that "Kat" described it sounds a lot like a Star Trek holodeck.

And they already had one of those.

[laaaa]

Sept 29, 2023 15:43:32 GMT imaginaryfriend said:

Also, Antimony is likely really mad about Lana. She probably could have come up with an excuse to send Coyotedawg away or ignore his advice but wanted to kick him right in his fuzzy nutz.

You make a lot of good points. Also I totally forgot Annie must be furious with Coyote.
The more I think of it, the more likely it seems that Annie is simply fed up. Plus Englamore did tell her that she is hanging around with "wild animals" (not gods!!) and Ysegrine told her to start speaking the hostile creatures' language. It seems that she began thinking of Coyote as an animal (and ether might also literally MAKE Coyote an animal, if humans approach Coyote with this perspective) and also began speaking Coyote's "screw you" language.
I like where this is going a lot more now.

[hnau]

When Zimmy messed with space, did she cause a segmentation fault or a compression artifact? And how do you unzip the compressed space now?

[Isildur]

Sept 29, 2023 7:42:16 GMT arf said:

"... is the Court is just an infinite maze of virtual reality holograms?"

This thread is mis-numbered -- it should be [2843], not [2483], so if you could fix that, that could be helpful for future referring back.

While you're at it, could you fix what should be [2832], not [2382], as well?

Edit: And what should be [2756], not [2576], as well?

[Angry Individual]

Renard is making some of my favorite faces this chapter.

[Gemminie]

After saying that they need to think about moving less literally, Annie takes out the radio that Kat sent her (Some Assembly Required) and asks Kat what their location is. Kat's response is that they haven't moved physically at all, at which Renard expresses some dismay. The sun over the Coyote/desert scenario appears to be varying its pattern, in both its rays and its disc, but no one seems to express concern about this.

Annie asks Kat about how she once mentioned that the Court uses some kind of "space compression." Kat explains that the Court expressed a higher volume of space into a smaller volume. The illustration makes it look as if it's almost like a data compression algorithm, where space is segmented, those segments are rearranged into a more efficient configuration, and the result is a seemingly larger amount of space that takes up less actual space. Kat guesses that if Zimmy's distortion has interfered with this compression, it might explain both why Annie & Co. aren't getting anywhere and why her teleporter sent the radio in pieces.

What bends as it straightens, has nothing to prove, but if you find one, you will always find two? How about a space compression/decompression algorithm?

What will Annie and the rest do about this, though? Maybe with Kat's help (telling them when they're really moving and when they aren't) they can figure out how to get somewhere.

[arf]

Sept 29, 2023 18:55:55 GMT Isildur said:

Sept 29, 2023 7:42:16 GMT arf said:

"... is the Court is just an infinite maze of virtual reality holograms?"

This thread is mis-numbered -- it should be [2843], not [2483], so if you could fix that, that could be helpful for future referring back.

While you're at it, could you fix what should be [2832], not [2382], as well?

Edit: And what should be [2756], not [2576], as well?

All fixed... I seem to have been suffering from a bout of dysnomia.

[exquisitecorpus]

Just realized the diagram for compression looks awfully like a particular crystal--could the space compression technology of the Court have sprung from the seed Bismuth? What if Bismuth didn't just grow the buildings of the Court? What if it grew space?

[imaginaryfriend]

Sept 29, 2023 17:54:29 GMT hnau said:

When Zimmy messed with space, did she cause a segmentation fault or a compression artifact? And how do you unzip the compressed space now?

That is an interesting way to put it. I guess they will have to avoid bad locations?

We know a couple of things. First, Kat's (radio?) transmission reaches Antimony and vice versa... and apparently does so without interference or delay. That proves at least energy can get in and out and should mean there isn't a conventional barrier. Second, Kat was able to transport something almost exactly to Antimony's coordinates... and the object arrived disassembled but apparently the components weren't damaged. Assuming that object's final assembly and transport was the same event, the components just arrived scattered instead of where they should be. The beams carrying individual parts arrived without any appreciable delay, they were just shifted in destination a meter or two.* If that's the case then the individual areas within the distortion are in motion, but very slowly so walking out shouldn't be a problem if Antimony can find a path. If that wasn't the case then there's a bigger problem; the assembled transmitter was pulled apart in transit, component by component, without those pieces being too damaged enough to prevent fast repair/reassembly. That's not a conventional SF transporter beam accident where stuff arrives inside-out/melted/distorted to varying degrees. That may mean the individual ideas of those parts came apart from the form of the radio as a whole. The Noobmenz might not have enough ether to exit without some sort of ill effects.




*Of course, that does mean at absolute minimum Kat's beaming tech was 1000x less accurate than normal and probably multiples of that, which is why she doesn't want to use it.

[drmemory]

A thought. Good compression is generally lossy. Meaning, if you compress an image or whatever, then decompress it, there will be differences in the resulting image. The amount of loss generally scales with the amount of compression (loosely). Lossless compression methods exist but tend to be much less effective.

Obviously, we shouldn't be taking things like that at face value or assuming they translate into the Gunnerverse directly, but it still got me thinking a bit.

If there is a lossy compression method being used, how could one tell? If someone left the court and returned repeatedly, would loss artifacts sneak in? With images, you start to lose detail, small things first. Depending on the specific method, you may also start to see other effects; straight lines might start showing staircase effects, that sort of thing.

Sorry, total geek here. I ran the comp.graphics FAQ on Usenet for quite a long time, something like 15 years total, and used to be really into this stuff. So it's pretty interesting to me to try and see how compression artifacts would apply to 3D living creatures. I doubt very much if my wacky ideas have anything to do with Tom's plans though.

The only thing I can see that may actually be relevant is that compressing huge amounts of data, which you'd need to do for any useful representation of the court and its inhabitants, would be an extremely computation- and memory-intensive process, if done using digital computers. Then again, Omega is supposedly able to not only handle processing the data of the court but also predict future states! So maybe that really is what's meant to be going on.

Or maybe they are doing something else entirely. If it's being done by a living being, that being would very much have to be godlike, and I don't think they have Coyote doing it based on their attempts to capture him and steal his power. That would also make it supernatural, and the court seems pretty prejudiced against that sort of thing. So a computer-based solution seems more likely, at least on the surface.

[imaginaryfriend]

I wanna make a joke about the quality of the Court personnel decreasing over time but I've already posted enough about that. More seriously though, if the normal Court space compression causes loss maybe it appears in the travel time required to enter/exit or move around inside. Of course that is predicated on things being real and durable (existing even when not in the comic) but if the Court is a simulation people enter and exit and it uses digital compression that isn't lossless then yeah... I guess people who enter and exit the Court a lot might experience maladies similar to those from penetrating but probably non-ionizing radiation exposure? Might be subtle, could appear right away or be asymptomatic for years even if they stay in or out of the Court the whole time. General inflammation, increased sensitivity to foods, increased chance or severity of arthritic sorts of complaints, increased chances of cancer or birth defects. The only quantifiable symptoms might be GI tract inflammation, rashes or acne with no apparent cause; this would be difficult or impossible to diagnose with real-life med tech but maybe spectroscopic exam of tissue samples could be revealing if sensitive enough and the tech looking at the results doesn't ignore percentages being slightly skewed. If it was bad enough to show in a blood sample that'd probably be fatal to the patient or other organism. The good news is the symptoms could probably be medicated away in all but the worst cases, which would likely be quickly fatal. That said, they've got to be moving some very sensitive equipment in and out from time to time and if the compression was causing losses that would decrease the operating life of the equipment and I'd think they'd notice.

[gpvos]

Even with lossless compression, you can't seek exactly into the data, you can only approximate. Which would maybe explain the disassembled teleported radio.

[drmemory]

Oct 3, 2023 19:16:15 GMT gpvos said:

Even with lossless compression, you can't seek exactly into the data, you can only approximate. Which would maybe explain the disassembled teleported radio.

Yes, agreed.  It also might be an indication of how the compressed data is stored.  Like... if adjacent areas overlay each other, then maybe when Kat sent the radio it was... diffracted, for lack of a better term, into nearby areas, but then the pieces appeared in one place, just no longer assembled.  But not destroyed.  The fact that all the pieces seem to have made it does sort of point at lossless though - if any were lost, nobody commented on it.

I would not be optimistic about what would happen to a living being that tried to do the same.  If Kat tried to send a human, for example, and it was split up into chunks, then the chunks all ended up in a pile, that human wouldn't be very happy about it.  Nor alive.  A bit gross, but we are approaching Halloween. 

[blahzor]

Oct 3, 2023 20:04:24 GMT drmemory said:

Oct 3, 2023 19:16:15 GMT gpvos said:

Even with lossless compression, you can't seek exactly into the data, you can only approximate. Which would maybe explain the disassembled teleported radio.

Yes, agreed.  It also might be an indication of how the compressed data is stored.  Like... if adjacent areas overlay each other, then maybe when Kat sent the radio it was... diffracted, for lack of a better term, into nearby areas, but then the pieces appeared in one place, just no longer assembled.  But not destroyed.  The fact that all the pieces seem to have made it does sort of point at lossless though - if any were lost, nobody commented on it.

I would not be optimistic about what would happen to a living being that tried to do the same.  If Kat tried to send a human, for example, and it was split up into chunks, then the chunks all ended up in a pile, that human wouldn't be very happy about it.  Nor alive.  A bit gross, but we are approaching Halloween. 

or the space isn't literal the human would be sent as their baby self, and teenage self