snowblindrpg | [network] @expostfacto; voice; take two [open] Night 165

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[network] @expostfacto; voice; take two [open] Night 165

Well, some of you may be pleased to know I'm not one of Norfinbury's newest icicles.

[Or not. She's not sure who even remembers that post, with everything that's happened.]

Either way, that's not why I'm here.

I'm writing up a quick section on the SD cards for the Survival Guide after speaking with Alphonse. It hasn't been too hard - this kind of technology is pretty standard when I come from. But I've only been here about a week, so I'm looking for information about them unique to this version of Earth. We're talking basic stuff - how they're used, if there's different types or restrictions, things that would be particularly useful to somebody who just got here. Especially if they're from somewhere that doesn't have this level of technology.

On an unrelated note, if anybody has any information about technology in general from this version of Earth in particular, I'd be happy to hear it myself. Obviously I've gotten the basics of NIMA and Winter by now, but I'm looking for anything, reall. Different kinds of technology, how they might interact, networks and security, whatever we've found. Both from before whatever happened to this place, and what's left here now.

[She's working on a possible theory, but this place has been practically scraped clean of most information that would actually be helpful. Almost unnervingly so. She's not sure if it'll come to anything, but it's at least worth trying to dig through. Especially with some of the recent revelations.

A part of her really, really wants to add - after the debacle of the other day - something along the lines of if any of them start stupid, long-winded and off-topic arguments on her post she will somehow find a way - no matter how small - to make their life difficult in return, but she's not sure the comment would actually do anything besides bring out trolls, and pretty sure it wouldn't be worth it to follow through anyway. And she's not really into the habit of empty threats. So she refrains. Reluctantly.]

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I've got a few notes on the cards. Let's see...

[ She rifles through her Norfinbury notebook. ]

There are red cards, blue cards and black cards. The red ones erase themselves after the data is read, the black ones can be reused, the blue ones can be written on once then are read-only. There are vending machines you can get red and black cards from in buildings 16 and 75. The second floor of the hospital has a machine that will vend and copy blue cards.

Edited 2016-10-06 15:00 (UTC)

Perfect. That's exactly what I'm looking for.

[Definitely jotting that down to add.]

Buildings 16 and 75... which ones would those be?

[She'd go look herself but she's working at this exact second.]

They're on the map. Both in the northwest part of town.

[ Describing their insides is. Kind of pointless in this context. ]

[She was hoping that there was something in common, like they were a supermarket thing, or something to that effect. Ah well.]

I'll make sure to note it down, thanks. Was there anything else?

[ They are both supermarkets, but mun missed that when she wrote that tag... ]

I've had a lot of intel to sift through, so I'm not sure if anyone has looked around in the other parts of town. It seems like other people have covered most of the other high points. If you're familiar with SD card tech you probably know as much about the uploading process as I could tell you.

All right, well this should be enough to work with for now. Might need to fine-tune it a couple times as we find out what people are having the most trouble with.

[Which is another thing that's not really her specialty, but she took this job, so she'll do it right.]

Good. Let me know if you need help with any of it. I'm a total nerd about this kind of stuff.

[There's an amused sort of huff.]

Dunno why I'm the one up here putting together a tech guide, then. Seems like it's more your area of expertise.

[ Steph shrugs. ]

Because you thought of it and I didn't.

*There's a still picture of a black SD card. And nothing else at all to this message.*

[...

... seriously?]

I did say that I was already familiar with this technology, didn't I?

but notall are

[She catches what he means pretty quickly and can't help but sigh to herself. Words, Brian. Words. Communication. She's intelligent but not a mind reader.]

I guess including a picture isn't a bad idea.

*But a picture is worth a thousand words.*

yes,
thatis whati
thought

[And if those thousand words are gibberish, that doesn't mean much.]

I'll make sure to add it then.

Anything else?

Well then, I guess we're done here.

[Sorry Brian, she's not one much for small talk.]

[ He sends a video of Jim Hawkins testing the tablets on one of the school's desks. ]

The desks here act like computers.
Winter has told us that everything is usually automated here.
There might also be a cleaning robot that keeps the snow leveled.

[She makes a small thoughtful noise.]

Yeah, I did see a glimpse of that when I was digging through the info post. So the desks still work... Because for all that everything is supposed to have been automated, that's about the first actual technology I've seen still here, besides the tablets. This place has been seriously stripped down.

[And she pretty much knows why, having gone through the info dump post. That one from the repairs was hard to miss. That being said though, why were the desks left intact then?]

Edited 2016-10-08 05:06 (UTC)

[ If her thoughts are along the lines of things getting scrapped for parts, then that's probably the case. ]

There is a machine that takes apart metal here.
It and whatever hangs in the attic of that one house.

[ Have another thing. ]

Happy to see you're still kicking around, Phi. I've got my eyes back, so look. Good things all around!

[Mostly, that's all he has to say. He has never found an SD card yet, and he's pretty sure he knows nothing of the current technology and how it compares to his own. Steph is better at this than he is, and she's already here, giving out information.]

All we know is that most of everything is automated, and it's probably all being controlled in the server room, under the town hall. I'm not sure how different it might be from what you know; the tablets and all that feel pretty similar to what we have back home but the nano-technology stuff here is more advanced, it feels.

[Biting the inside of his lip, Zach looks away for a moment.]

What I've been wondering is, could the anomalies be actually something engineered, rather than...whatever we think they are? Could they be part of the technology?

[There's a lot to say in response to all of that, but one thing catches her attention immediately.]

Wait, you said the server room is under the town hall?

[She'll come back to the rest of it later, but given her theory and the clues they've been given, this is pretty crucially important.]

I think so? If I recall correctly, anyway, which I might not because my memory likes to play tricks on me.

[He forgets many a thing. Which leads to wrong assumptions.]

I think I remember seeing something about that once. Weren't we told there was something under it we needed to be careful of?

[If the server rooms indeed are underneath the town hall... maybe there really is something to her idea.]

Yeah, definitely. Rhys saw something like, a tentacle monster of some kind, down there. But when we were underground for the repairs, we never saw anything like that. I have no idea where we were exactly, though.

Right, you were down there too, weren't you?

[Her primary focus- besides information gathering- had been Quark down there.]

So you don't think it could have been the same as that... Thing that chased you all after you gave the admin all of the energy you collected?

Yeah, I was.

[Blergh, the memories. Mainly, it's remembering how worried he'd been about Kes, sick as a dog above ground, and his inability to do anything but keep going, underground. And then, keep Charlie alive.

But then, of course Phi has to mention the anomaly. Zach clenches his jaw, his brother's deformed, melting face and his desperately angry words exploding in his head.]

No. It was an anomaly. It took on - familiar shapes, for the lot of us. None of us saw the same thing. It definitely wasn't tentacled. Or that octopus can, I don't know, manifest itself in different ways, but I don't know. I'm pretty sure it wasn't.

Its shape seemed pretty malleable from what I could see, and the anomalies turn up in all different forms, correct? I don't think we can just rule it out without more evidence.

[Sorry, Zach.]

In any case, it may be beside the point. If whatever Rhys found has access to the servers - maybe even is on them - depending what those servers control, it could have access to... everything.

[The restocks. The tablets. The controls for the whole town. NIMA.]

But there's more than one anomaly, and there's only one of this thing. [Hopefully.] Anomalies pop up all over town, so while I'm sure they can be controlled by something, I wouldn't think they all are the same entity.

[Zach tilts his head. To him, that's not even a question.]

This beast horror thing is either the Admin herself, or controlled by her in some way, is what I think. Angel thinks the Admin is just as trapped as us and doesn't have a choice, but I don't believe that.

The technology here doesn't seem especially advanced, outside of the medical aspects. It's really weird?? Some of it outstrips technology that we have several centuries in the future, it's freaking bizarre.
But apparently the things that are going on here techwise are kinda anomalous in general? If you believe Winter, anyway. The revival tech isn't something she'd heard of. Neither is whatever brought us here.

Also a good way to describe SD cards to people who don't have them is via comparing them to books, with the tablet as a bookshelf.
Some books have useful information! And some are complete garbage. Always worth checking out, though.

Not a bad analogy.

[She already had a line saying something similar written out, but it could help. Since most of the societies represented by people here hopefully at least had that much in the way of technological advancement.]

On the town though, if we choose to believe Winter in general, we have to take into consideration what she told us about her own capabilities: that she may not even understand what we're asking or talking to her about, and is only able to respond as programmed. [The Chinese Room.] In any case I don't think I'm going to be trusting any of this Earth's native inhabitants without more information.

The development is a bit strange though. I've never seen or heard about anything like NIMA being developed. Things like the tablets though are already pretty common from my own time, though. The only major difference is how widespread they were being used.

How far away is your own timeline from the one here? I'm from several centuries in the future, and also a different freaking planet, so it's a little hard to compare notes.
But there are only two likely reasons for their medical tech being so much more advanced than anything else, right? Namely: it was needed so they developed it at the expense of everything else, *or* they stumbled across some other civilisation's tech that gave them a headstart on developing it.
Beckett and I have kind of been thinking the latter! Since their AIs and robotics seem to be of a relatively high standard, so developing NIMA doesn't *look* like it came at the cost of other areas of advancement?? And

Um, sorry, rambling.

Don't worry about it. I'd be curious to hear a bit more about that theory later, if you don't mind.

As for me, I am from Earth, and the technology I'm most familiar with is from the United States throughout the 2010s to 2020s. I know some of what's available from as far as 2074.

[It's complicated.]

The development of AIs here seems to pretty closely match the most advanced of what was available in 2074. Medical, meanwhile, is nowhere near as close. I'm hardly what you'd call an expert, though. And it's also worth noting that by 2074 the most advanced technologies likely aren't widely available.

Huh
So what about robotics when you're from? Are nanomachines even close to the level of sophistication that they have here??
Because I know that's linked with NIMA but it's really jarring for me to see how advanced they are
The unpleasantness recently, with us experiencing visual disturbances as they malfunctioned? Really. Freaking. Weird. And not something that can be accomplished back home.

[ unless you have angel's siren powers but shhhhhh ]

Yeah, that's something I'm concerned about. Along with how Winter implied that they could be used to control people. No matter how illegal it is, somebody probably wanted to make use of that.

[If it's possible that the hallucinations and other disturbances that they've been experiencing are NIMA affecting their brains and how they perceive things, then that's a major problem too.]

Unfortunately though, nanomachines fall under the category of "Things I'm not really an expert on." I know a little about the robotics, but only what I've observed firsthand. So far as the 2010s and 2020s though, we've been working on miniaturizing technology. You'll hear things about doctors performing minimally invasive surgeries by cutting small holes into the skin, inserting even smaller cameras, and using that to perform the procedure, as opposed to having to open up the whole area. But all the same we're still nowhere near this level.

What is the technology like where you are from, miss Phi? To me everything here seems very marvellous and strange, but that is because I am not from a very advanced time.

[An assertion that she's made complete peace with very quickly. Of course she's not from an advanced time compared to everything she has seen in Norfinbury. It's nothing but a good reason to learn and learn.]

[That... is a pretty complicated question. But not in ways she's about to just announce to the world. Technology too, is a pretty broad concept.]

Well, there's certain aspects of it that are pretty close to what I'm used to. I could get something like these tablets back home, and they'd be capable of doing most of the same things. They wouldn't be able to last this long without some kind of power source, though. Medical tech, meanwhile, is pretty far behind what I've seen here.

Not sure how it compares to here without more information, but we've developed technology for all kinds of things. Heating or cooling environments, motorized transport, machines that keep track of and compute data faster than a human ever could, among other things. It's a pretty broad topic, really.

[She isn't exactly sure what all Kesara is interested in hearing about, to tell the truth.]

[Kesara is, by definition, interested in hearing about everything. She's heard of some of those already, the motorized cars, the computers. She thinks back for a moment and decides to ask the question that seems most relevant.]

What about AIs? [She pronounces the word with the slow care of one who only learned it recently.] Do you have those? Do they have bodies that can walk around, and look just like me and you?

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[network] @expostfacto; voice; take two [open] Night 165

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