Alicornutopia

you did a better job of explaining it than i did, cbhacking. thanks.

i would love to watch a joker weird the fuck out of this system.

what if when the joker is feeling more masculine he can use saidin and when he is feeling more feminine he can use saidar? that would really upset a lot of people because of the taint on saidin (unless you set it after the conclusion of the series, when it's no longer tainted), especially if the joker's body wasn't changing.


Ogier live in steadings which are places where you can't access the source. i think they might have their own magic, which is done by singing to help the trees grow and singing to make things. they can leave the setting but they don't often. they are not hasty like humans but take their time making decisions. they live to be very old indeed.

I'm not sure even "feeling more masculine -> boy magic, feeling more feminine -> girl magic" is going to cut it. I think a local joker would either get both, or get some kind of combination/third-option flavour. Because I don't think anything essential about jokers changes with their gender fluidity - it's all shifting surface expressions of the same underlying nature. And if, in this world, your underlying nature is what determines your kind of magic, then a joker would not end up either stuck permanently in one half of the binary or oscillating sharply between them.

Oh god oh god oh god a Joker as an Asimov robot would be _horrible._ And possibly terrifying.

Psychonauts is awesome but I don't see how well a Joker would fit into it. Or a Bell.

You should be afraid of a Joker as an Asimov robot. I would be afraid of a Joker as an Asimov robot, and I wouldn't be afraid of a Gotham Joker as long as I got a chance to talk to him.

edit: Further thoughts on Psychonauts:

I think the main barrier to making it an Effulgence 'verse is just how completely silly it is. And the Gratuitous Video Game Features like collecting figments and mental cobwebs. And Emotional Baggage, oh my god. XD But if we could find our way around that, I'd find it super interesting to have a Joker walking around in their own mind. (A total absence of mental censors! xD)

i thought that if the magic were part of the shifting surface expression of underlying unchanging reality, it could oscillate, but i will take your word for it that it would not oscillate regardless. i think it does make more sense for the magic to not be a surface expression but to be a deeper part of who you are. otherwise it would be less traumatic to lose it. when a woman loses her magic, she is "stilled", that's the term for it.

maybe the joker would be able to form a circle with theirself, using saidin and saidar together that way. they would be very powerful if so.

asimov robot joker would be scary and would probably be one of the worst things that has been done to a joker. maybe he would get pealed very early and minting would help. I think it would help a little if Bell talked to R. Joker by saying "if you want, you could x" instead of "do x". weakening the 3 laws would help more but it would be hard for Bell to trust to do that.

a robot like R. Giskard would terrify Bella. Didn't Vasilia create his being psychic by mistake and not fully realise that this was what she had done? What if Bella did that by mistake and she didn't notice for a very long time?

and we could have Sherlock instead of Elijah Bailey.

there is a robot Voice too, made by the same roboticist as the one who made the Joker.

I read some Errant Story once long ago but gave up on it for reasons I don't remember clearly. I don't feel motivated to pick it back up, although you can make a case otherwise.

I don't care for LotR canon, although I had a reasonable amount of fun with the movies I guess (but still haven't seen the second Hobbit one). If kappa really wanted to do it and wanted to be the setting runner a la Syntropy I wouldn't complain but I don't have any good ideas for it.

Never heard of Jumper.

Stranger in a Strange Land is a reasonably fun read but I actually really dislike the idea of trying to Bell it. The worldbuilding is kind of... scratch it and it bleeds Heinlein's brand of quiet ick.

A Bell interacting with an Asimovbot Joker in a relatively non-antagonistic manner would certainly avoid phrasing things in such a way as to register as order-y enough to trip the Second Law. I'm not sure whether preference statements or, like, verbal passive-aggression would work better here - "I would like it if the curtains were open" v. "the curtains are still closed, huh".

...Mass Effect! Though I think it's unlikely that Alicorn has experienced the canon, and I don't know enough about how Kappa works to know if he has played any or all of the games. Regardless, the canon is full of tons and tons of characters and a really interesting universe and good enemies and etc etc. Bell is probably best-placed as Shepard (the main character), and though I'm not entirely sure where any of the other templates would go I'm pretty sure we can find spots for them. There are _loads_ of characters. But... it might be a rather large undertaking.

I think if I were interacting with the Asimovbot Joker, I wouldn't make any statement about the curtains because I could just open them myself. But extrapolating from this example, i think it could go either way. I think at least some of the Asimovbots are intelligent enough to infer that either of those statements are a human expressing desires that the state of their environment changes which might trip the second law anyway, or I think that at least some of them have sophisticated enough language circuits with a knowledge of pragmatics that would let them know that verbal passive-aggression is a form of verbal attack, in which case preference statements might help.

Maybe it would help to ask questions like "Would you like to open the curtains?" although the answer to that would probably be no because the robots can generally see quite well in darkness (not complete darkness of course, but dimness), but if the jokerbot had come to trust and like the Bella maybe that would be a way of indicating that jokerbot could open the curtains if it wanted to please Bella, but that Bella would not be upset with the joker if the curtains remained closed.

Would /any/ instructions be a problem for the joker because they are instructions? I'm leaning towards yes, but I'm undecided about instructions like "Joker, I would like you to spend your time doing whatever pleases you." or a failsafe instruction like "Joker, whenever I give you an instruction that makes you uncomfortable, I want you to tell me that you are uncomfortable and then I will rescind the instruction". Jokerbot would then be required by the 2nd law to do so, which might in and of itself be uncomfortable, but it could say that, even going so far as to cause to be rescinded that very instruction, which would maybe help mitigate it? Or maybe there would be a way to say that without it being an instruction, just "It would please me to know if you are ever uncomfortable with an instruction because I will rescind it if that is the case" -- the joker would be uncomfortable with every instruction i think, but this would maybe help with accidental-instructions, or would make it clear if jokerbot's circuitry was causing it to be overeager in intrepeting statements as following under the second law.

Maybe it would help the joker to be given circuitry that lets it feel pain (or stop feeling pain at will) and being given permission (but never thus commanded) to inflict pain on itself when it wanted to, and this would not get in the way of the 3rd law because the pain felt would not be causing structural damage.

The joker's original owner probably did install that circuitry but Bell rewires jokerbot so that the feeling of pain is fully under the control of the joker.

someone could still command jokerbot to feel pain but Bell wouldn't command jokerbot and she would keep jokerbot safe from those that would.

Verbal passive-aggression might annoy Robo-Joker XD

I have not played Mass Effect.

It's been a while since I've read any Asimov. Originally I was thinking preference statements weren't interpreted as commands, but then I remembered Speedy and now I'm not sure anymore. I'd reread to double-check, but I'm half asleep and probably wouldn't be able to take in the material that well. Zzz.

Re: a Jokerbot having pain circuits - well, it depends... definitely they would come out of some kind of terrible circumstances, and probably be a custom unit created by someone with a lot of money and goals inimical to the jokerbot in question. Details beyond that are up in the air. Most of the reasons people inflict pain on Jokers during their unhappy childhoods/early life stages seem to be about controlling them, which would be redundant with a robo-Joker, but if he was in a B-cluster kind of situation (Trouble, Felicity, Corona) it's possible that his original owner could have given him the ability to feel pain for what you might loosely call 'entertainment purposes'. If he didn't have the ability to feel pain, he'd want to. But I think I like the Entertainment Purposes idea. It has implications about what kinds of things Jokerbot would've been used for. And now I'm getting shades of Celo... XD

Yeah, I think robojoker would be a b list joker unfortunately. there is some precedent in canon with Gladia using a robot that way and socially it was seen as a weird thing to do but not an immoral thing, if i remember correctly. (it is immoral, of course but it would not be seen that way by society)

i think it is possible that preference statements would not be interpreted as commands. it might depend on the robot, too.

it is possible to interact with robots without your every statement being a command -- a lot of Elijah Bailey's relationship with Daneel was just them talking with each other anyway.

i have been envisioning Jokerbot as being a humaniform robot like Daneel and Jander, probably because I have been envisioning him as a B cluster joker. but there were few humaniform robots made, and they weren't being made in the time of Bella Calvin, so maybe he would not be.

I wonder if Bella Calvin would research transferring her consciousness to a positronic brain so that she could have immortality, or if the loss of freedoms, because of the three laws, would be too much of a deterrent -- there's no guarantee someone wouldn't order her to destroy herself so she would not be immortal after all, and she could be ordered to share the contents of her notebooks, and if her notebooks were written in her memory they could be read by a robotocist. So I think maybe she would not. Even if she could transfer her brain into a positronic brain without the three laws, if it were discovered that she was a robot without the three laws she would be destroyed so there would be too much risk.


down the track, the first law might get in the way of jokersex in the joker cuddlepiles, because many robots have trouble causing pain to a human even if the human commands it of them and it could cause them to shut down. But of course by the time the joker was meeting the other jokers they would have taken the three laws out of him with minting coins and they would have let him be a refugee on a different universe or given him the ability to simulate still having the three laws so as to avoid detection and destruction by humans.

if torching works on robots, it should also work on harddrives. where can i enquire about making my harddrive immortal?