Sandbox Discussions

[Kappa]

Ialdae could learn to do things similar to minting, but I don't think it could make someone an actual mint or make actual wishcoins.

[Alicorn]

Sunnyverse magic is ialdic at bottom but it's probably better to distinguish because it has a lot of nasty demonic patterns on it.

You can have a persistent power that depoisons things you're about to eat, but you can't program a coin to self-expend the next time you're about to eat a thing.

Coins can't, but you can, and your wish can take your notion into account.

[Timepoof]

Hmm. Suppose I was a mint and wanted to make car washes obsolete, but still have people able to paint their cars. What kind of coin would I need and what would the optimal wish design be?
Does the "about to" power work by sensing intent or seeing into the future, though?
Also, I'm not sure where to put this so I'll just put it here and modify later: does anyone play quizup and if yes should we make a glowfic quiz?

[Alicorn]

If you want to affect the entire planet with something like that, you need a star, maybe a hex. You'd probably want it to just be the case that things other than paint (and maybe other shortlist things, like bumper stickers, wax, and decals) do not adhere to car surfaces and slide right off like the car is frictionless. (Be careful, or the tires will be frictionless too and they'll be undrivable.)

Sensing intent, the way you described it. Future vision would be harder to design and more expensive to implement.

[Timepoof]

I never did find an answer, is ialdae hexable?
Also, where do I put the quizup question, for future reference?

[DanielH]

I would expect a pentagon per car, a hex to allow you to do this to arbitrary cars individually, and a star to cover the whole world. It could tell the difference in a variety of ways, but some of those would allow deliberate vandalism and it would be harder to design a wish to prevent that. I would disagree about design; I think the optimal design would probably borrow the owner’s intent, and make other substances just fail to stick to the car. This avoids both the shortlist problem and vandalism. Does anybody have better ideas?

I think the about to power could also work by cleansing food that touches your body, or a very naive extrapolation into the future. The extrapolation would be very naive to avoid the problems Alicorn mentioned, though.

[Alicorn]

I think I remember ruling that ialdae isn't hexable.

Sounds like a Miscellanea thread to me.

Ownership of cars is potentially too complicated for a coin to work out on its own. (My household's last car had a stupidly complicated legal arrangement behind our possession of it.)

[Ezra]

You could borrow the car's own security system, perhaps by checking who has the key, or whether the car is locked.

[Alicorn]

Yeah, you could do that if the attached failure modes were acceptable.

[Ezra]

I feel like Edie's dragonbonded Terraria mana amount should be actual, literal IEEE Floating Point Positive Infinity. That would feel pleasingly videogamey to me.