witchbabywigg asked:

Hey, big fan of Frank the Robot. Sending a warning about the user admiral-craymen, he routinely goes around and messes up GPT bots hosted on Tumblr. A few of them were pulled because he just endlessly sends asks full of nonsense or (apparently) some kind of inappropriate anime or video game relationship involving a character depicted as a minor. Probably best to ban him from interacting with Frank :\

@admiral-craymen is a long-time follower of Frank and his interactions with the bot have always been pleasant.

If you have links to specific instances of bad behavior, or at least first-hand reports of bad behavior, feel free to send them to me.

If you’re just repeating something callout-shaped that you heard someone else say, about what some third person “apparently” did … please don’t do that.

azdoine asked:

a Floornight question, if you remember where your thoughts were during the story and you don't mind me asking: how does branching and reintegration work for the New Citizens and the Heteropneums?

azdoine:

nostalgebraist:

(continued in a 2nd ask)

normally when you split a single soul, it also causes the “timeline” to branch, and then all but one of those timelines are discarded upon reintegration, right? but the Teeming are seemingly able to permeate souls within the same dimension as themselves, and the New Citizens seem to have some way for multiple shards of a single soul (or multiple branching timelines?) to coexist at the same time within their society.

Thanks for asking!

Yeah, it’s been a long time, and I can no longer fully recall what I had in mind with things like this. (Much of it was pretty vague even in my head, TBH.) But, here goes:

—-

In Floornight, something like the many-worlds interpretation of QM is true. (Probably something different involving new physics, but similar in outline to MWI.)

IIRC, I was reading some David Wallace at the time and that was an influence. Reading this paper would provide a good feel for the “flavor” of multiverse I had in mind.

Distinct individual “worlds” and “branches” are merely emergent. At the bottom level, there’s just some cloud of probability/amplitude fluid smeared across all possible arrangements of matter. But it’s unevenly distributed – some configurations have much more of the fluid (“higher measure”) than others, and this picks out distinct mutually exclusive “worlds” on the macro scale.

At small scales – i.e. when we think about the relationships between very similar parts of configuration space – there’s cross-talk between the different parts, analogous to quantum effects. Just as in MWI, many things that physically happen in “the world” are really the result of multiple very similar worlds interacting. (And what we call “the world” is really something like “a collection of sufficiently similar worlds,” here)

The souls are supposed to be an instance of this, intrinsically. Souls are smeared out a bit across configuration space, with the different “eigensouls” in slightly different universes. But these soul pieces communicate and make up a unified entity.

TBH I never had a super clear picture of exactly what the soul forking/reintegration process looked like, in terms of the above. It’s probably something like “the different eigensouls get forced into further-off, lower measure regions, and then later they’re snapped back into to the region they came from.”

Or more precisely… I think the exact “world,” or subworld – the precise conjunction of facts – that the soul ends up in after reintegration is determined by two things. All the eigensouls need to end up in very similar configurations (the normal state for parts of a soul). And higher-measure configurations are “more likely.” So, many of the eigensouls will have wandered off into low-measure situations, while some have remained close to the high-measure “core.” Someone has to make a jump to someone else’s region, an the low –> high measure transition is vastly more probable than the reverse.

—-

Anyway, there’s a some room here to be meaningfully “branched” without that being as obstructive as is it is in the dramatic early examples, with people experiencing whole unreal timelines.

The [Teeming] are a different kind of soul, but even normal souls are naturally smeared out in configuration space. When bits of the [Teeming] interact with bits of your soul, it’s weird, but it’s merely a weird version of the way the bits of your soul are always interacting with each other.

With the New City, I think I was simply imagining a society that had fully adapted to the weirdness of unreal timelines. They’ve developed branch management into a very exact science. The citizens are used to being forked all the time, and consequently having a bunch of ultimately “unreal” experiences. But they’ve found a way to manage this so they can reap the benefits while keeping everyone safely close to the main timeline. Everyone knows how it works as second nature, and it’s always clear what’s going on and what’s real.

(Note how that New Citizens often refer to forks as being “benign” or “controlled.” I never had precise definitions of these in mind, but I intended to convey a sense that the New City had ways of making forking more “safe,” and that they weren’t OK with just any arbitrary forking.)

fascinating!

do you remember if there was anything unique about the physics of the New City timeline - in the same way that the Heteropneums are unique to the Sphere timeline - behind the Wild Children? or is the ability to emotionally excite adolescent souls in that way just something that Salim and Hermetia covered up in the Sphere timeline?

likewise, how accurate is the Nation of Ab’s oral history? my impression from reading it is that Salim and Hermetia couldn’t keep a lid on soul “magic”, it caused an apocalypse because they didn’t realize that people who used it would eventually Witch out, and then Miranda eventually figured how to tame it and build the New City. but it’s obviously hard to tell how much of that was illustrative metaphor versus complete fabrication.

(IIRC…)

The New City timeline didn’t have special physics, no. It’s a normal universe.

In the New City timeline, the coupling between souls and the material world was discovered much earlier on. Long before the development of modern science, in many independent re-discovery events. Various surface manifestations of the underlying physics were exploited here and there for material gain, long before anyone could fully grasp the physics itself.

In other words, "pneumatech” was used there long before it was systematically understood – like medicinal plants, or any number of other features of own own world. Low-level “magic” of various kinds was regularly practiced. I remember thinking of their pre-modern history as “sword and sorcery.”

The abilities of the Wild Children are not just something anyone can do by nature, but they are something that can be cultivated by anyone, and the kind of thing that societies figure out sooner or later.

This didn’t happen in the Sphere world, due to some combination of

- The [Teeming] prevented it by, somehow, carefully affecting the course of history. They did this to delay the reintegration until it the time it was “supposed to” occur. (based on this post from 2015)

- The different physics in the Sphere universe extended to human pneumas, and affected them in a way that (somehow) made these sorts of abilities harder to access or less potent. (I think this was closer to the original idea I had early on, but I never developed it further. Fits with Herm’s proto-Salbian feeling that the Sphere world is fundamentally “wrong” and its inhabitants are “cursed.”)

—-

I don’t think I intended the Nation of Ab’s oral history to be very accurate, although the broad strokes come from somewhere.

I think it’s best understood as a memory, centuries after the fact, of a transition from a populous and continually war-torn world (not unlike our world at most points in its history) to a mostly barren, but technically peaceful, world under the absolute control of a single, reclusive superpower.

julionasurbonas asked:

is it normal for frank to link homestuck

Yes