unreality

So here's the list of programs so far: String[] names = { "hawk", "test1", "test2", "test3", "izzy", "phil", "backatyou", "dnoob", "rand", "allrock", "jarze", "medji" , "mr_apple_pi", "darth1", "izzy1", "izzy2", "darth2", "darth3", "mrapple1", "medji1", "medji2", "patternSeeker", "phil1" }; I assume that "test2" will be in T2 as just a sample program, and so far Mr. Apple has two programs he wants to use: * mr_apple_pi (the one he used in T1) * mrapple1 izzy has two programs she wants to use: * izzy1 * izzy2 I don't know if she wants to use her original "izzy" one, invent another one, or just have two. DarthNoob has three all new ones: * darth1 * darth2 * darth3 Medji has two new programs: * medji1 * medji2 And I don't know if he wants to use his original "medji" as the third, come up with a new one, or just have two. dawh has submitted one so far: * patternSeeker so has phillip1882: * phil1 Phil do you want to use your "phil" algo from T1 in addition to "phil1"? I think JarZe wants to reuse his from T1 but I don't know for sure

oh and Medji for now let's just say aquamancy is just up to you. If we decide to keep the DM/Player format, it might get more rigorous, but we'll see

After some complaining and excuses, Phoenix gives in and comes back to your ship. Parecci and his buddy watch you go reluctantly. When everyone's back, Phoenix inquires into how Torcumb died. He also asks how far you're willing to go to defend your homeland. [who can be on the chatboard tomorrow at 4 PM EST?] also I'm thinking that this experiment isn't the most efficient... the DM/Player dichotomy works really good in real life but maybe this whole 'game' would be much improved if it was just a roleplay-type thing where each person has total power of their character and extraneous characters and we're just mutually telling a story and interacting... what do you think? Send me a PM or comment here

I get your overall gist but I have a bone to pick with the specific analogy you used: On Induction [bertrand Russell] It can't be proven but via induction we can (subjectively?) place the probability as very very high

dawh was saying that we can trust things to instict & intuition that have been refined by evolution. But there was no evolutionary benefit to have a particular worldview, and if there is a natural tendency toward some belief, then it's tuned for survival and not for correctness.

I'm sorry I haven't been on much and haven't yet laid down a concrete system for aquamancy, but I've been really busy. I'll be gone all day too tomorrow, though, so later today I'll try to get some stuff up and move this along

i've been pretty busy but right now so far all of Darth's programs are in, so are two of Izzy's and two of Mr. Apple Pi's. I know dawh is working on his and soon I'll be able to work on my own. If anyone else has PMed me about making their algorithm for them and wasn't mentioned here, PM me again cuz I've been pretty busy, sorry Anyway, we should be ready soon for T2

"With pleasure," Phoenix says, sneering back. "You obviously know about the aquabombing of Eyros a few years back that kicked off this whole natty venture. He stared into his drink with a sigh, his eyes reflecting a disturbed darkness of years in the military. "Recently after, we set up shop on another small skyboulder and called it Seyros with the intent to mine it. The idea was to show the Vortex that we weren't going to bow down to their methods or let their philosophy infect Kamala. Three years later and you can see how good of a job we've done... hmph!" He snorted into his ale. "The situation has worsened tenfold. Kamalan villagers harbor Vortex agents out of a mixture of reverence, fear and ideology. Anyway, Seyros is an obvious target. Rumors have been filtering up through the Kamalan underworld that several big-time drug dealers have shifted investments and the financial clues seem to point to an upcoming disaster on Seyros. I work with some smugglers here in Venarto - or, rather, I used to - with narcotic connections to Kamala & the Vortex, and it seemed like a certainty. You shouldn't have come to me. You should've gone to Kamala - if the assault is happening, it's happening right now. Seyros is at the edge of the Kamalan archipelago, about a good day's sail from here on the kind of big royal galleon that I'm sure Commander Torcumb hooked you up with. Speaking of good old Ranus, how is he?" edit typo

sorry for the distraction if we want to have an actual conversation we could schedule a chat, otherwise i'm looking for Zara or someone else to reply on here

gah i'm an idiot. I forgot about the chat function that brainden already has! garrr. We'll just use that http://brainden.com/chatboard.htm

hmm... can you do groupwide chats? [if not, AIM is best]

is there a chat function on gmail or something?

[i just got a good idea... does anyone here have AIM? It would be a perfect way to handle rapid back-and-forth exchanges or actual conversations, or just some activities in general... anything done officially with me on AIM would then just be posted as a transcript here to the forum (unless it was private knowledge to a specific set of characters). Please PM me to say either your AIM screename or that you have no AIM / don't want to use it for this purpose, though it'd be convenient. I won't post them on the thread nor will I post my own on the thread, but I will PM your AIM to everyone involved in this game]

Leaving Ranus's body belowdecks to be guarded by Mmarf, Caecilius and Yara (seeing as Sarcas talked himself into going ashore with the crew), the aquavator shot down toward the surface of Venarto. Zara, Sarcas, Sazzvin, Raif, Nameless Thief and Tonrana are on their way down. You guys walk out of the base onto an elevated stone walkway that flows directly above a small river. Venarto is in the Lower Aire where these kind of rivers, called flowoffs, are common. You guys follow the progress of the flowoff all the way to the edge of Venarto where it tumbles off a stone lip into the swirling red clouds below. You are really at the edge now. It's look like into the eye of Jupiter - you can see a dusty whorl of billowing red clouds and orange streaks of gaseous deposits floating and flying amid the complex wind patterns. The stone pathway takes a sharp turn to the left and follows the edge for a little bit before winding down a rocky slope that angles right up to the very edge of Venarto's existence. Here, the flowoff has become a babbling brook dispersed over the rocky slope and is flowing like a sheet off the edge of the sky island. According to earlier estimates by the ship navigator, Mmarf Arrtos, the flowoff goes straight into the Aeternal Storm seeing as there is nothing directly below Venarto to stop the ray of rainfall. Right on the edge of this infinite waterfall, clinging halfway over solid rock and halfway over empty space, is the tavern known as The Overhang. Here is where the sky island is at its widest equator, and beneath this point it starts curving inward toward its root. The Overhang has a few small landing jetties for personal aircraft, otherwise it's just a tavern. You guys enter… immediately you recognize Parecci and his buddy in one corner of the bar, looking around with dark eyes. By a tall masonic fireplace you see a loner sitting at a table wreathed in a brown travelling cloak. His face is covered with scrubble like a dark moss. He's staring despondently into a tankard of ale. You recognize the faded thread pattern of a phoenix on his shoulder, one of the last things Ranus Torcumb asked you to look out for before he died. Phoenix sees your reflection in the surface of his drink and turns around abruptly to get a good look at you guys. "Well, come on, sit down, I'll buy you a drink!" he hisses, and tells a waitress to bring out 6 mugs. "From whence have you come?"

Raif does a quick check and sees that Ranus is somewhat bloated. With a flick of a dagger, Ranus seems to deflate with a trickle of water, but much of the bloating remains, his eyes vacant and ghostly, staring infinitely beyond into some great void of nonexistence. Raif closes the eyes sadly. Freedom Commander Ranus Torcumb of the Fourth Star is dead. After cremating the body according to Mawanism, the religious sect that Torcumb subscribed to, Raif goes to the others with the results: "He was drowned."

[Just a note: bodies are never buried in Atmos. There simply isn't enough space. Most people are cremated with their ashes thrown the winds. The really rich ones request their ashes to be deposited in depth charges right into the Core itself. Some cultures put their dead onto "funeral rafts" made of porous logs and filled with gases, then set on fire to both cremate the person and release the gases, sending the raft up into the sky. In Venarto it's customary to put grapes and olives into the dead person's mouth and then burn them]

"Ah, rejectin' us, are yeh?" the second Tannan roars with laughter, and turns away, decidedly unhelpful. The other one looks at Zara inquisitively, looks at the ship, then looks back to Zara. "You know, I could hook you up if you need some, you know, supplies." Yara narrows his eyes. "What kind of supplies?" The deckhand shrugs. "You need anything, Na'tuunie?" Yara ignores the derogatory comment and asks again: "What are you selling? I need something very specific. Something that rises with dawn and sets with dusk." The deckhand brightens up and hands him a rolled up a slip of paper (extracted from within the folds of his robe). He turns to Zara and says "You can try Triple, but everyone there's out to rip you off. There's a tavern called The Overhang. It's on the opposite side of Venarto from Triple, as far as you can get. It's a little on the pricey side but it's got great views of the void. That's where the real smart locals hang out and the merchants that stop by for refueling." He indicates the fleet of Sky Merchant ships behind him. Zara recognizes some of their league logos and scows without realizing it. "I'm Parecci, by the way," the guy says suddenly, his facial expression changing a little, sticking out his hand to shake while his friend lights a cigarette and looks on the scene with distaste. "We're looking for someone that calls himself Phoenix," Yara tells Parecci. Both deckhand suddenly change their posture. "He's involved with a small smuggling ring out in Triple," says Perecci. "But they had a falling out two days ago. The barkeep of The Overhang has been sheltering Phoenix since. That b*stard's sure got himself into a rut..." Just then Sarcas comes out of the belowdecks with a bag of potatoes in his arms, one of many in the food stores. You've got a shocked look on your face that says it all: there are no potatoes in this bag. Only a dead body. You went down to start up a stew for when the crew gets back, and instead found a dead body aboard. The body rolls out. It's Ranus Torcumb... By the way, Parecci and his friend didn't see any of that, they departed toward the aquavator that goes up and down between the Venarto surface and the bridge. Apparently they decided to grab a bite to eat at The Overhang too.

When you finally arrive at Venarto, The Rainslicer lowers its starboard docking ring onto a tether spear emerging from a long stone bridge. One end of the bridge is the domed cap of an aqua-pelled elevator that launches out from the mists below that cover the surface of Venarto. The bridge then spans an infinite chasm until it burrows itself into a tunnel near the base of the sky island Shard. Sky islands are wide on top, flattening out into wide rocky lips all the way around, but as you get deeper into a sky island it curves inward toward a spiky bottom tip called the 'root'. The bridge between Venarto and Shard enters Shard above 1/3 of the way up from the root. As soon as The Rainslicer, now with minimal lift, slides all the way down the tether spear and comes to rest on a giant rubber lugnut, a few olive-skinned Tanna throw a gangplank across from the bridge to the upper deck of The Rainslicer. The current sailors on shift throw some of the rope to the Tannans, who tie them securely around some posts, and then the group disembarks. "Do you hail from the Monarchy?" one of the dockhands inquires. You inspect him carefully, but his skin tone suggests he's a farmer in Venarto below, not a member of the USE city of Shard. You look to your right - where the bridge enters Shard there are two guard posts that rise out of either side of the wide stone bridge decked out with the crimson red of the USE (in sharp contrast to the royal blue colors of the Monarchy that some of you happen to be wearing). To your left and down, the mists roll away, giving you a splendid view of the entire sky island of Venarto. Most of it is beautiful farmland and olive & grape vineyards with the occasional white-column-esque plantation building. A few towers rise up near the far end, where a long ledge protrudes from the sky island like an arm of protoplasm jutted out into the turbulent winds of Atmos. The three rusty steel towers at the end of that ledge is where most of the lower class of Venarto resides (albeit very small in size, limited in area and dwarfed in population by the massive Shard above it, there are quite a few subsistence farmers that come to work at Venarto and live in the triple towers). The towers are surrounded by swirls of vapor caught in the triangle between them and are interlaced with many bridges, catwalks, clotheslines, open air patios, prøstitution parlors etc. This area is known for its seedy illegality in the face of USE social customs. Somwhere among that smoky skyscape (in direct juxtaposition with the rolling fields on the actual mainland of Venarto) is your contact Phoenix. "Do you hail from the Monarchy?" the dockhand asks again. "And it'll cost you 8 crowns for us to guard yer ship," the other one says. What do you guys say (and who says what)?

chrispen: I honestly don't know everyone's gender lol. That would be a good thing for everyone to state...

maybe, maybe not. More out of necessity than anything (all ships have protocols like that, right?) well yeah - you can pick up whatever you want or even use a broken wine bottle as a weapon if you really want to (or are drunk enough to try it) - but no guarantees on how effective that would be But yes you can definitely loot dead people haha

yeah i've been thinking about that. The problem is the 3-dimensionality of the situation. I'll think more on this And duly noted: your course has been set for Venarto another thing to decide til I can get on again tomorrow with some more meat: what would your guys' plan be if, say, a pirate ship attacked? Who would do what, and use what, and when? etc. It's good to have that kind of stuff planned out and fundamental for any expensive-looking Monarchist galleon like The Rainslicer

yeah no rush, I'm still in the process of writing darthnoob's and izzy's and thinking of my own.

not yet. It's on a subjective basis. Worry about that stuff later Anyway I have to relinquish the computer to my mom here but I don't think it's yet been decided what your destination is..?

the examples you gave of disagreements among scientists are all in cosmological physics related areas... ie, very big mysterious things that are very very very very very far away. As for string theory, that's almost like a metaphysical theory, at least now. You're forgetting about the bulk of 99% of science that gives us what we've got today.... and most of that was at the fringe in its time, just like black holes and string theory now (although black holes aren't fringe science anymore - they're part of astronomy and physics) and its the very argument, disagreement and speaking of opinions is what makes science flow. When scientists all agree on one thing, be very afraid Science is built on revolution, disagreement, questioning the status quo and arriving at new hypotheses

I don't believe in morality at all... but that doesn't mean I have no morals. Let me explain: unlike most people I don't believe in any absolute handing down of divine rules or any set of things you should do in all circumstances. I think that morality and ethics (assuming it means what to do when there is more need than resource [a generalization] or some other dilemma) are: 1) subjective 2) mostly based on evolutionary triggered responses and deep emotions as opposed to hardcore logic 3) are hard-coded into our brains, ensuring the evolution of society -> evolution of species -> survival of genes 4) based on the individual circumstances. The fourth item is key. I have no general answer to most dilemmas. Maybe some, but even then not all-encompassing. It really does depend on the circumstances We do have an ingrained sense of what's wrong and right and most of that is based on empathy, ie, seeing other people as humans just like you