2010-07-12: Collapse

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The Comment Golem
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2010-07-12: Collapse

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Discussion thread for Collapse
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Talancir
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Re: 2010-07-12: Collapse

Post by Talancir »

[delurk]

oh. my. god. it took me a couple read throughs before I figured out how this relates to everything. this is.... wow.

I'm not gonna spoil this, I'll let someone else do that. oh my god.

[/delurk]
EmperorArthur
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Re: 2010-07-12: Collapse

Post by EmperorArthur »

How Sad.

It does make you wonder whether Humans where gods answer, or what the Trolls where originally supposed to be.....
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Re: 2010-07-12: Collapse

Post by normalphil »

Pretty much that, yeah.
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Re: 2010-07-12: Collapse

Post by Talancir »

nah this goes to show that humans is probably not created by anilis and senilis. it's possible that they always existed, but were used as a template.
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Re: 2010-07-12: Collapse

Post by mindstalk »

Whee!
Spoil? Ya shouldn't be reading this if you haven't seen the comic.

"solar cycles" is ambiguous, but if it means days, then 365 day years would give 42,268 years. This seems plausible with elven/dwarf history, such as it is, more so than 15 million years.
Self is presumably Senilis, Other Anilis, Third is Exitialis, who actually is dead, not god of death. It would seem the three were physically linked in some way, though it's possible grief and shock get classified as "plasma dissolution".

XO1275 are paedagogusi/baka fairies. "We can make life!"
O16475 are dwarves. Wonder what they were like if bakas were the test run. No "magic", psionic waveform interaction, though. Not sure how either run were meant to "hyper-evolve" if they were sterile.
O19521 are elves, with crude (and eventually flawed) self-rep, and the first religion/lies. Nature of the flaw unspecified; as noted, Rarune is clearly fertile with humans. Generation length unknown, but about 100 years would use up the solar cycle timespan. Poe said "An elf reaches physical maturity a bit over 150 years of age; though socially they won't really be considered an adult till they are nearly 500+ years old. "
O26609 are trolls and the elves were right, mistakes. Of course, so were elves.

Weird contrast between stereotypical clinical computer and more human-like plea.

Rather different style if this is page 2 of a spread.

One wonders what the serial numbers mean. Big jumps there.

Someone's idea that humans might be the result of dwarves' superintelligent fixing of the problem actually seems plausible now. Dwarves and bakas were told what the goal was, dwarves could probably see what the problems were, dwarves might have done something. Despite a lack of magic.

Fixing elves is apparently really really hard. Or expensive. Perhaps foreshadowed in Ianilis not being able to really cure the errants. Doh for the morphic stability field.

Hmm, did dwarves have a morphic field? They couldn't *use* magic, but they might have still *been* magical. If they didn't, that might be the die off -- ostensibly biologically immortal, but accidents and entropy happen.

Uncontrolled apotheosis would help stabilize the 'gods'? I sense optimism. Or desperation.
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Re: 2010-07-12: Collapse

Post by mindstalk »

Talancir wrote:nah this goes to show that humans is probably not created by anilis and senilis. it's possible that they always existed, but were used as a template.
Not created by the gods, no, but I think Arthur meant the God that the Collectives were appealing to.
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Talancir
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Re: 2010-07-12: Collapse

Post by Talancir »

I think the flaw is that the female elves just run out of eggs?
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Kerostasis
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Re: 2010-07-12: Collapse

Post by Kerostasis »

mindstalk wrote:Whee!
Spoil? Ya shouldn't be reading this if you haven't seen the comic.

"solar cycles" is ambiguous, but if it means days, then 365 day years would give 42,268 years. This seems plausible with elven/dwarf history, such as it is, more so than 15 million years.
I was reading that slightly differently -- it's not the time scale between "then" and "now", its the time scale between the creation of Senilis/Anilis (through the method of corporeal separation / apotheosis) and the point at which they realized they were decaying. In that case, 15 million years is entirely plausible. The time since then is unknown still, but long.

O26609 are trolls and the elves were right, mistakes. Of course, so were elves.
...
Someone's idea that humans might be the result of dwarves' superintelligent fixing of the problem actually seems plausible now. Dwarves and bakas were told what the goal was, dwarves could probably see what the problems were, dwarves might have done something. Despite a lack of magic.
I was trying to decide if the last aborted run was trolls or something else (maybe humans, maybe something we haven't even seen), but this seems reasonable.
Talancir wrote:I think the flaw is that the female elves just run out of eggs?
It wasn't a problem with individual elves running out after a certain age (human women do that too, somewhere around 50-ish, and that doesn't stop us from reproducing as a race). It was a problem with the species running out entirely after a certain number of generations, so I assume it has to be some progressive error in the way they reproduce that slowly accumulates to a larger and larger problem with each new generation.
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Re: 2010-07-12: Collapse

Post by mindstalk »

All the signs point to the gods having created the trolls, and not the humans. The bakas know of trolls, the trolls worship the 5 Great Mothers, the elves credit trolls to the gods but are bemused by humans.

Thing with the elves is that unless there's something weird behind the scenes, generations are only somewhat relevant. They're immortal, remember? Absent murder or suicide, first generation elves can be alive today. And second, and third... it's like oWoD vampire: even if 13th generation vampires can't make new vampires of their own, lower generations ones can keep turning humans. Maybe Misa's sterile, but why could her parents make a new Misa? Or their parents have new kids? Generational decay on its own won't cut it.
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