https://www.fanfiction.net/s/13563676/1/...ert-forums
Just posted a new chapter of something I have been screwing around with for ideas and had one with doug that I had to write up in him being talked about way. 
Its a worm story about taylor or many different versions of her or him.

https://www.fanfiction.net/s/13563676/1/...ert-forums

I just wrote a chapter of a story that deals with WORM and had to include Doug showing up as teaching a couple of young ladies how to use his power of magic that they show how ended up with a copy of. I have some other stuff with weird powers but I had to Doug show up again in one of my stories. Please leave a comment Bob and have to hear a comment from Doug himself on this step.
I have not done a lot of background, just something tossed together for an idea.

Forged letter warning about wolves on the loose part of Canadian Forces propaganda campaign that went awry

So let me get this straight, the army is running domestic propaganda campaigns against Environment Canada.  Y'all need to stop taking advice from Trump about how to run a government.

I've been holding off on posting about this because things were up in the air for a while, but Peg and I are going to be spending a week in Cape Cod starting on Friday.  We'll be staying at a resort in Dennis Port and making the best of what's likely to be the last of the pleasant fall weather up that way.  As has been usual the last ten or fifteen years, there's wifi so I won't be dropping off the grid just because I've left NJ.

One of the common features in VRMMO novels/anime/etc. is having days pass in-game in just a few real world hours, whether as a standard feature or during special events. The exact method by which this is accomplished is of course hardly ever even touched on, the genre as a whole only uses technological trappings as the excuse to have relatable modern characters in a sword-and-sorcery fantasy setting; the actual hardware might as well be magic itself and sometimes does explicitly verge into "sufficiently analysed magic" territory such as with SAO/Accel World "fluctlights" aka quantified souls, or various fanfics which cross over with Fate/whichever.


However, I feel that a closer look at this provides the opportunity for a few interesting premises all on its own, from a slightly harder sci-fi approach, because human brains already operate at a trade-off point between how much information they can receive and how much they can focus on any one thing to process and make decisions about it. That's why an important part of military training is getting soldiers to keep calm and keep thinking in dangerous situations instead of getting wrapped up in an adrenaline rush using the body's own means of speeding up reaction time to physical threats, evolved in a world without beyond-visual-range threats let alone worldwide political consequences to what may be the most immediately practical solution in the immediate sense.

Relatively recent studies (don't ask me for a cite, it's just something I saw in a few uSpud videos a couple days ago and promptly web-grazed away from, definitely no more than "some guy on the internet said" reliability at this point but it serves to frame my literary argument. Maybe it was Thoughty2? I'm writing this in a text document offline specifically to avoid information-blitz distraction, so...) have also found that the average amount of time people can concentrate on something without a stray thought or glancing away fell from from twelve seconds to eight over the course of several years of research during the rise of smartphones that allowed constant internet access, which as one video brought up makes modern attention spans shorter than a goldfish's.

So, some options:

It could be some kind of literal mind-magic, awakening RL mental acceleration and possibly other ESPer type abilities. RL ensues as tens or hundreds of thousands of gamer geeks and the occasional filthy casual suddenly have superpowers and various government and corporate entities want to cash in. Social misfits are apt to be disproportionately represented among them due to self-selecting for people who think the idea of spending their free time living in a literal fantasy world sounds better than real-life options.

It may instead be some kind of mind read/sim/write technology, copying the minds of of players into digital hardware, running them through the faster virtual world, and then overwriting their original brain-state, which has presumably been in an induced dreamless sleep-state in the meantime. Exactly how many may be hardware-limited, if it has to happen with a central server rather than at the user end, allowing for the common impossibly low for commercial viability user numbers like SAO's 10,000 as a limited participation special event rather than total installed user base.

But what if there's a glitch in the process? With the mind sim locally hosted in user hardware, that still leaves loads of room for nasty mind control possibilities with the explicit ability to overwrite the user's consciousness in play. A little dark for my taste so I'm not giving this the full attention it probably deserves, but there it is.

Still in identity-horror territory ix an obsessed stalker or grieving lover/parent/etc. who creates a mental clone of their target in another person's body, or perhaps in a fast-grown "blank" clone. Less direct trouble results from the general transhumanist angle of being able to create mental forks but that's leading away from the VR-game aspect I'm trying to work around.

Someone switching a pair of users' helmets as a prank while they're playing and somehow avoiding any features designed to prevent it leading to the ever popular body swap incident is a lighter-toned possibility from this kind of scenario as well.

Server-side mirroring has its own questions - what if the connection is lost at the game end, allowing the RL players to wake up while their mind-states continue operating. Will the server side versions just be "killed" by shutting it down to reboot without being written back to their bodies? Will the divergent selves in their original bodies be overwritten by the selves who were in-game?

The former seems more likely than the latter, politically if nothing else, but if the forked mind-states are not considered actual persons what else might be done to or with them? Lots more dark possibilities here, many of which have already been explored from slightly different angles in classic cyberpunk.

From another angle, what about players who suffer some kind of bodily injury while their minds are away, either as a single case or as a result of some mass disaster like an earthquake or bomb attack that affects a significant number at once? This kind of scenario is far more likely to see political considerations treating them as still real persons to cut off a lot of the less palatable options, but still has a wide range of possible paths to take.

What if there's some external event that shuts the game down unexpectedly, but some unknown time later the data is recovered and player mind-states are restored in new bodies, needing to cope with the changes from the world they knew when they logged in? Anything from days to centuries could have passed in the meantime, they could even have been extracted by friendly or simply curious aliens or a post-human civilization of some kind who want to know what these ancient beings were like.

The androids from NIER spring to mind as an example for possible outside actors, or a situation like Mass Effect where the gamers are effectively in the position of Protheans discovered in stasis. Touching back on the more mystical explanations, this could be the justification for an Overlord (LN/anime) type situation rather than the canonical lack-of-explanation for why a player and some characters from VR game being shut down suddenly exist bodily in a new magical world.

A more specific situation I thought about in the early stages of this was that the servers might be in some kind of protected bunker with game development being a budget-recouping measure while developing the technology for RL military training purposes, and the players are now the main survivors of a surprise attack, but that case and more are included above already, and I'm trying to leave the field open rather than adding limitations at this point. I'm sure there are still more than I've laid out here, but my well of inspiration seems to have been exhausted for the moment.

I ended up just posting in new Index threads on SB/SV/QQ since DWF was down and they didn't have anything that wasn't specific to one series, but hadn't had any comments last I checked.

Well.  That was fun.

NetCarrier, the service provider which hosts this site, was smacked in the face with a massive power surge late yesterday morning, so big it apparently blew out all their protective equipment and their power backups, right down, it seems, to the batteries in the support techs' flashlights.  Yes, I know that sounds unlikely, but that's what NetCarrier was reporting in its Twitter feed yesterday:

They recently "upgraded" me from Office 2013 to Office 365 at work.

When I opened an attachment in Outlook 2013, it opened the attachment.

When I opened an attachment in Outlook 2013, it opens the attachment and plays a sound. (And if the attachment is an Excel spreadsheet, it plays a different sound when I change tabs - which doesn't happen when I open an excel file any other way.)

How do I get 365 to STFU? My search-fu has failed me.

I'm embarrassed to ask this, but I hope someone can answer. 

How do I combine MKV files?

I've got three files labelled .mkv.001 to .mkv.003

How do I combine these back into a single file?

Picture a video game that's some combination of KISS dolls and Pokemon, or an all-digital Gundam Build FIghters/Busou Shinki/Angelic Layer. I'll call it Waifu Wars for the moment because I'm bad at names and cute girls (or guys, but Husbando Wars doesn't alliterate) plus explosions sells.

A lot of emphasis is placed on the player creating unique characters to use in it with the parts and animations collections, and aside from a blacklist vocabulary the dialogue is entirely open to the player to rewrite from a few archetype examples - to the point that the character designer and story mode/networked arena are two separate programs, and the output of the character designer is itself a stand-alone mini-game containing just the specific parts, animations, scripting, and so one for that one character, plus a couple of backdrops for a training area, a living area, maybe (depending on complexity) some kind of AR feature for the mobile phone version but that's a whole new rabbit hole to explore another time. Stand-alone mode lets you use all the attacks against dummy targets for testing purposes as well as viewing the model and animations with a free camera and probably changing between a few different outfits and hair styles/etc. but doesn't have any real depth to it beyond what gets put in the dialogue tree.

Anyway, the point is that it's not just a puppet that moves on the screen in time to your controller inputs or picking off a roster of pregens and fighting or following a premade script, you're supposed to make an at least nominally unique character, and can interact directly like with a virtual pet or a Furby, with the stand-alone keeping a record of what you do with it so the character seems to have a real memory, including going back into the character editor to fine tune things after seeing them live. Hopefully in a more believably human, or at least believably anime archetype, way.

(Yes AI is hard, I know, this is still just the background for the hypothetical.)

So, character creator, stand alone virtual companion, impossibly good rhetorical AI scripti-- (oh shut up) you've gone through that and the "get to know each other"/beta test in stand-alone mode to make sure everything looks right and the animations and effects go off properly, it's time to hit the arena! Just one thing, your character must register with the official sever. Players are not tracked, career scores and history are written to each character, even if working as a party in RL solo play, even if characters are traded or given to another player.

(Transfers keep their own history, an officially cloned character resets skills and records to the base but "knows" their "parent" did various things before, in a "Oh, I remember this event a bit! It was pretty hard," sort of way - depending on the result score of the parent's actual run and/or aggregate for repeatable things. Possibly their starting stats would be higher like a reincarnated Disgaea character, though that might end up disincentivizing new characters too much.)

A checksum, some portion of the character data, and the chargen app serial number as recorded in the waffle -- Oh, I forgot that, I've been calling the stand-alone character/app "waffles" in my head -- then get hashed into a unique ID and stored server-side, so if you skipped the chargen part and thought you were just going to use a copy of one downloaded off the internet somewhere (as opposed to being officially transferred through the network play app) they get turned down, and (in the default AI packages/templates at least) angry, upset, or confused about "being a fake." You can still play the story mode, but multiplayer areas are blocked off.

Some kind of explicitly-a-clone copying process would probably be allowed, and probably provided for the never-played-before introduction/tutorial, but isn't relevant here. A "make unique" option would effectively run the character through the clone process, resetting all event flags and skills, again provoking an AI reaction ranging from "Did something happen? Well, it's letting me enter now, so I guess it's fine," to "Whoa! That really took it out of me! You'd better play with me a lot so I can build my strength back up!" depending on whether there actually was a copied history (or I supposed hacked skill levels without history backing them up) to knock down.

So, now at last comes the question: Is this a great piece of game design to incorporate anti-hacking measures and the lore elements of each character being unique into mechanics, or emotional blackmail dickery on a scale that could only be exceeded by having the character turn to the player and use their "Oh, what's that?" "Amazing!" "I like it!" emotes to shill for the cash shop?

... for a scene at the Ministry Battle at the end of DW8 that I simply can't write -- because it won't let anyone else have any fun, and that's not how I'm rolling in this story.  It goes something like this:

Doug walks into an atrium filled with all the Death Eaters, grins, and says, "System.  'Bad Apple'.  Play."  Fast cut to the ministry janitorial staff cleaning up the resulting mess.

(I suspect I don't have to footnote that for anyone here, but just in case I'm wrong, see here for an idea what would happen.  <grin>)