With This Ring (Young Justice SI) (Thread Twelve)

[Maxx Crowley]

Good heavens. Kryptonians with green lantern rings. That almost seems redundant.

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I know there is one Green Lantern origin story where the first choice for the ring WAS Clark, only to get bypassed because Abin Sur wanted the ring sent to a Human. Because...I dunno, Hal was a real earthling or something?

Maybe Paul's just Grayven Prime...Which would make his dad, who is almost certainly a perfectly ordinary man, Darkseid Prime.

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"So...How is the writing going son?"

"Oh, not too bad dad. Just had sorta evil me run into the guy he's been impersonating."

"Who is that again?"

"Grayven. Son of Darkseid. But what they don't know is that Grayven 16 is actually the comic version of Paul Prime"

"Darkseid....he's the bloke that Superman punches right?"

"In a manner of speaking, yes."

"Wait...so if you're pretending to be him, but he's actually you, that would make me......were the nature walks that bad son?"

"Dad...."

"I know I always insisted you clean your room..."

(I don't know nearly enough about English pop culture, school, and parenting to really make this work)

The Magic Archer class in Dragon's Dogma is a very special thing.

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I actually much prefer the Sorcerer. It's a ton of fun and just feels powerful as all hell.

I'm surprised that Batman/Bruce would use the Lazarus Pit to resurrect himself

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Well Miller Batman IS basically just an insane (extremely repressed homosexual) hobo who is under the delusion that he knows better than anyone else. So it's not surprising he would think the world would end without him to boss it around.

 

[uju32]

Huh.
Now that I think about it, RenPaul gave up a whole lot of information about himself and his allies without receiving any in return.
He just up and told the other Grayvy that he's working with Weaponeers, Maltusians and New Gods.
And the most he knows about OG Grayvy is that he has a spaceship.

Better step up your intel game.

"Talk to Father," you say? Really? What makes you think that is even a remotely useful, let alone good, idea, Grayven? It is interesting that you're holding to the fake backstory you came up with in the face of evidence that the real Grayven exists independently of you.

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Because Darkseid is well aware that there are two Grayvens.

Recall that he's been aware of Paul!Grayvy ever since he burned off RenPaul's orange brand on Desaad.
He sent a Brimstone and Devillance the Pursuer to test him. He had the FatherBox reporting back to him ever since RenPaul took it from Desaad, which means none of that soul surgery was done without his approval.

And recall that the easiest thing for Desaad to fuck RenPaul over would have been to send word to the other Grayvy. Yet this seems to be the first time they are seeing each other. Obviously Darkseid gave orders.

Darkseid is not incompetent. He is not infallible, mind, but he generally acts rationally. He either
A) doesn't care which Grayvy wins bears the name as long as that one meets his standards
B) is using RenPaul to motivate OG!Grayvy
C) Is pulling an elaborate practical joke
D)Might actually believe that this is a Grayvy that got his soul wiped and is rebuilding from scratch. Given some of the shenanigans New Gods go through, it wouldn't be the strangest thing around. Remember what happened with the Source Wall?

Either way, Big D is drawing amusement from this shit.

No, I think he really is Grayven at this point. That's just how his soul was created. It was the motherbox that was working for Darkseid that helped him create the soul, and it would have had access to the original.

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I disagree. I think he just went deeper into the mask for everyone's sake.

Do recall that he just realized that his old FatherBox, the one he let build him a soul and hear some of his thoughts, was reporting to an enemy. Even when he was in an alternative universe.And Darkseid literally put a fragment of the Antilife Equation inside his head. He doesn't know what it does. He doesn't know if it gives Darkseid a window to look inside his thoughts or memories.


In those circumstances, you do your best not to break character, not even inside your head.
Especially when the possible consequences are the deaths of you and everything you love and value. And he has a lot of things he loves these days; his daughter, his friends, even those clothes he's complaining about.

Correction: Damnit, it was the Sphere, not the Motherbox that was spying for Darkseid.

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Correction: It was the FatherBox that was working for Darkseid.
He destroyed it, and then got Himon to build him a MotherBox

 

[RichardWhereat]

Right. So. I have to go read an arc again.

 

[BrambleThorn]

I don't understand what taking to Darkseid would accomplish, he doesn't seem to mind that a second Grayven has popped up.

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Kissing the ring. You don't want to risk him favoring Grayven-16 over Renegade in the upcoming conflict because Grayven-16 sent a gift basket, but Renegade didn't. And if there is one thing really Darkseid likes, it's when things are all being about him.

"-may wish to carefully consider the ongoing consequences of not dealing with these rings more promptly."(-editor note: the formatting color got removed, so this is now being said by a leprechaun apparently.)

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Paul has known about the loose rings since the day he summoned them due to a vision he had from the Ophidian. It was also the whole point of the Blume episode that Larfleeze got set loose on the galaxy due to that and was looking for the rings he lost.

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He know about them being in the Vega Systems, the stellar cluster close by and containing Larfleeze's Lair. And has already recruited Starfire and Blackfire as Orange Lanterns to patrol there in any more rings pop up. He had no idea the rings had spread beyond Vega into the wider galaxy until Ragnar, which just happened prior to the meeting.

The site rules don't appear to define 'spoiler', so I doubt that mentioning the name of a character who has been trailered for months is of any significance.

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Obviously that depends on if the trailered spoiler looks like the iconic Millennium Falcon or not.

Beyond the fact that this is an utterly horrifying statement, but your personal preference is noted, I'm fairly certain that that WOZ on the matter was that long term branding basically burns your brain out.

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I have to agree with the other guy. Mind control that comes with mandatory happiness/emotional satisfaction is just better than death (and whatever uncertain hell or oblivion might come after) from an objective utilitarian moral viewpoint. If the choice was between them, I'd be more comfortable accepting the mind control (actually emotional priority retargeting) for myself or others, as long as the control mitigated suffering under it. That, and arranging the probable deaths of someone because you personally are uncomfortable with keeping the mind control going is rather morally bankrupt. Not necessarily out of character, since OL is powered by selfishness. But not as good as sucking it up, taking one for the greater good, and getting over it.

(The devs actually have an imprisoned strong AI in a box that procedurally generates the story's content. Look at the file size of the game, it's not enough to hold all the assets seen in a single playthrough, much less all of them. There's an actual reason the game needs an internet connection even in singleplayer. The AI's codename is MZ, but I've already said too much.)

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If you need an always on internet connection to play the game, you have a malware infected version and are probably part of a botnet somewhere. The rumors of the devs having a house AI are because of the efficiency of the code. Yes, that small size really is the actual program, not just a client side terminal. You are suffering from the familiarity effect. Nearly all programs available today are bloated, inefficient, pieces of crap that glut available memory. You are so used to it to subconsciously assume that is just the way things are. But there is no physical law dictating programs have to be that size, it's mainly an artifact of the trend in increasing memory and processing capabilities, and lazy programmers and the the corporations who pay them forgetting how to make better code, and counting on continual hardware improvements to make up the difference.

So when an old school style program comes along with a memory footprint that is a magnitude smaller in size, people actually start talking about AI's, and Aliens, instead of realizing that modern programming practices and culture really is that bad.

 

[Maxx Crowley]

That, and arranging the probable deaths of someone because you personally are uncomfortable with keeping the mind control going is rather morally bankrupt. Not necessarily out of character, since OL is powered by selfishness. But not as good as sucking it up, taking one for the greater good, and getting over it.

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I disagree entirely.

Furthermore, despite my country's history, I am not a slaver. I will not turn people, even my enemies, into property. Not even happy, smiling property who will thank me for doing so BECAUSE I make them thank me with my mind rape powers. I will not take a person, destroy whatever parts of them that make them, them, while transforming them into a entirely different person more suited to my needs/desires. As such, they are no longer the person they were, but an impostering puppet wearing the meat of the former person. I will not keep people in some disgusting mockery of life just to make MYSELF feel better, feel so morally upstanding because "Well, at least I didn't kill them"

What you are suggesting is the most morally bankrupt, evil thing I can think of. So, I agree to disagree.

Finally, were I a Lantern in this fictional universe, and there existed another Corps that did what has been suggested. I would fight to the end to stop them.

I will happily be the Rachel, and will never bow to the Cassies.

Remember kids. Never go full Cassie.

 

[SaltyWaffles]

Thing is in DC-verse you are more your soul than your body especially when it comes to new gods so the fact that Paul has basically a clone of Grayvens soul makes him pretty much a Grayven.

Also im fairly sure Zoat doesnt write his "big bads" to hold idiot balls so Darkseid already knows and probably considers a soulclone of Grayven to be good enough to acknowledge especially if hes doing a good job at it.

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Basically this. Darkseid already knew, but he considered Grayven to be sufficiently interesting, worthy, and similar that he decided to give Grayven a chance. And boy has Grayven delivered.

 

[varoksa]

Basically this. Darkseid already knew, but he considered Grayven to be sufficiently interesting, worthy, and similar that he decided to give Grayven a chance. And boy has Grayven delivered.

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Definitely this now that i think about it, has any one of his children been able to wham people with the anti life like darkseid does? until what Paul just did i dont think any of them even come close and considering Darkseid only really cares about the anti-life equation then it would make hilarious twisted sense that Paul!Grayven be his favourite.

He wont care that Paul!Grayven tries to resist it, everyone will try to resist it, its all meaningless in the end before his will, all it does is give him better understanding of it through Paul!Grayven's struggle with it.

 

[rkyeun]

Darkseid doesn't care which Grayven is the "real one". His son is Conquest. Whichever Grayven kills the other or forces it to submit is Conquest. It's like the Highlander. There can be only one. Which one it is... less important.

 

[Buggy]

Mind control is alright.

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No it isn't, mind control is really bad.

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I think a critical thing that you're both missing is what exactly the premise of your argument is. I think you both think the premise of the argument is "Is mind control morally better than death?". However, there's a big problem with that premise; it's nonsensical. Questions along the line of "Is X morally acceptable?" make as much sense as "What is the square root of banana?", or "How long will it take until the Earth runs out of speed and falls into the sun?".

If you ask "Does X think mind control is morally better than death?", the answer is clear, Bramble is yes and Maxx is no. But if you ask "Is Y moral?" rather than "Does X think Y is moral?", you're implying the existence of a universal standard of morality, with which you can compare situations regardless of location, time, or individuals involved. And quite simply, such a thing doesn't exist. Someone might say "but God-", but I have seen no sufficient empirical evidence of God, and if you still think he exists anyway then a thousands-of-years-old book, which has undergone countless translations and cannot be verified as being an actual product of God, is not a good basis to judge his actual morality.

So, if you two even want it to be possible to reach a conclusion, you need to decide which moral reference frame you are using. If you're each using your own, then you've successfully informed each-other of your own stance on mind control, but will never reach a logical conclusion because you don't agree on the premises of your argument, and thus cannot have a argument at all.

 

[Mr Zoat]

So if the two Grayven's are sharing the "New God of Conquest" mantle, they are indeed splitting the power from that?

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I don't know why I'm bothering, given how many people listened last time...

This is not Dresden Files. There are no Mantles.

Assuming Grayven here is similar to the Justice Lords universe he probably had contact with the Citadel when he considered recruiting the Gordanians. No real way to tell if he did follow through though

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Oh yes there is.

"Darkseid....he's the bloke that Superman punches right?"

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No way would my Dad be able to identify Darkseid.

 

[Gantradies]

This is not Dresden Files. There are no Mantles.

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b..b..but they look so stylish!
and they're great for dramatically swishing as you leave the room!

 

[finbikkifin]

I don't know why I'm bothering, given how many people listened last time...

This is not Dresden Files. There are no Mantles.

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The thread seems pretty clear on it. You're probably wrong. You aren't even the original Zoat - some people have been reading this story longer than you've been writing it!

 

[shepsquared]

Oh yes there is.

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And now I'm gonna have to reread the story. Damn.

 

[Wheenesss]

Funny thing about New Gods... once Paul became a New God who claimed he was Grayven, and most people believed him, he actually became Grayven to some extent, full stop. That's part of the way New Gods work, IIRC: quite literally if you fake it you can make it.

Further, Paul!Grayven can claim that "I had assumed I was the Grayven who was originally from this universe. Given I've discovered I have a "twin", it appears I was wrong.", because that is a thing that already exists.

Thanks
Luc "Gravy" French

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Are there examples of this in the comics?

 

[Coda]

If you need an always on internet connection to play the game, you have a malware infected version and are probably part of a botnet somewhere. The rumors of the devs having a house AI are because of the efficiency of the code. Yes, that small size really is the actual program, not just a client side terminal. You are suffering from the familiarity effect. Nearly all programs available today are bloated, inefficient, pieces of crap that glut available memory. You are so used to it to subconsciously assume that is just the way things are. But there is no physical law dictating programs have to be that size, it's mainly an artifact of the trend in increasing memory and processing capabilities, and lazy programmers and the the corporations who pay them forgetting how to make better code, and counting on continual hardware improvements to make up the difference.

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Look, I know that paid DLC is a controversial subject, but that doesn't make it malware. If you've got the 3600 Sectors expansion pack, it streams content from the Internet. Otherwise there are only a handful of sectors that have actual unique content and the rest of them are full of nothing but generic auto-quests with palette-swapped rubber forehead aliens. There's plenty of game experience to be had still, and I praise the devs for giving the game an offline mode, but you aren't getting the full experience.

You're also conflating code efficiency with asset sizes. Yes, the game software is remarkably efficient and compact, but the only way to make game content smaller is to either skimp on the details, or procedurally generate it at runtime. And yes, the game DOES use a lot of procedural generation to fill space, but the core storyline alone involves thousands of unique, predefined characters, dozens of accessible planets, and hundreds of hours of recorded dialogue. There's only so far you can compress that without losing quality.

I will agree that the strong AI is probably only a rumor. It's most likely just a painstakingly well-tuned expert system.

 

[Segev]

Lonnie Machin and Virman Vundabar is also not teenagers.

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Then it seems odd you'd reply to my post about Sodam Yot being a candidate for YJ team recruitment, based on his age of 15, by listing those others as potential recruits. If your point was that being a teen isn't a prerequisite, it would have behooved you to spell that out explicitly, since the context in which my comment was made regarding Sodam Yot involved you enlightening people to the fact that he was only fifteen, when it appeared others were thinking him an adult.

It therefore is a logical conclusion that you were, in listing additional people who meet criteria for recruitment into the YJ team, that the particular criterion I used to nominate Sodam Yot was also being revealed to be met by those others, rather than a denial that that criterion was in fact requisite.

You can't be correcting assumptions in one direction and then assume others won't assume your future corrections by example aren't in the same direction, rather than a different one.

Furthermore, despite my country's history, I am not a slaver.

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From which nation in Africa are you?


Sorry, yes, I know you probably mean you're from America, but this America-hating meme angers me. America has nothing special about its history of slavery compared to other nations of the world except for the fact that we explicitly went to war to end the practice in our nation. And we weren't even the last nation to end it. Heck, there are still nations that practice it! Calling out our nation's history of slavery as if it somehow indicates that our citizens would culturally value it is insulting and false. It is universally reviled as a practice here, and we have a long history of fighting to end it that begins with or before the founding of the nation. There were forces within this country that fought for slavery, but the history is if them losing ground and of the actual spirit of this people and this culture being one that values freedom so much that we will go to war to expunge slavery and free people from tyranny.

Kindly do not denigrate my homeland by pretending that the history of it does not involve a hard-fought rejection of a practice that was eliminated later still in other nations, and indeed is still practiced in still others. (And I'm not even counting the slavery-in-all-but-name of various totalitarian regimes, such as North Korea.)

 

[Mr Zoat]

Then it seems odd you'd reply to my post about Sodam Yot being a candidate for YJ team recruitment, based on his age of 15, by listing those others as potential recruits.

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Oh. Sorry, I misunderstood. I thought that you meant Lantern Corps recruitment, not team recruitment.

 

[Segev]

Oh. Sorry, I misunderstood. I thought that you meant Lantern Corps recruitment, not team recruitment.

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Ah, that explains it.

Yeah, I was reacting to the revelation that he's a teen, and thus a fit for the !sidekick squad.

 

[Empiricist2]

To people saying that the Grayvens share souls, they don't. Otherwise Grayven 16 would have noticed that at various points he suddenly got much weaker for no reason. His reaction then would have been along the lines of him being pleased at finding the guy who keeps wrecking his soul, rather than thinking him an imposter.

Now that I think about it, RenPaul gave up a whole lot of information about himself and his allies without receiving any in return.
He just up and told the other Grayvy that he's working with Weaponeers, Maltusians and New Gods.

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He's almost bragging really. Grayven 16 trying to attack our Grayven through any of the people he listed as allies would quickly result in him being a colorful smear on the ground. So giving up that information didn't particularly harm him.

Yes, that small size really is the actual program, not just a client side terminal. You are suffering from the familiarity effect. Nearly all programs available today are bloated, inefficient, pieces of crap that glut available memory. You are so used to it to subconsciously assume that is just the way things are. But there is no physical law dictating programs have to be that size, it's mainly an artifact of the trend in increasing memory and processing capabilities, and lazy programmers and the the corporations who pay them forgetting how to make better code, and counting on continual hardware improvements to make up the difference.

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Mostly what Coda said. I was specifically talking about file size, not memory usage or anything else. The vast bulk of modern game file size is textures, sounds, cutscenes, and similar things. Reducing code size is a thing, but it's hardly ever done except on extremely constrained systems, and is not worth optimizing for on a desktop. I'm honestly unsure of what a multi-gigabyte executable would even imply.

 

[Impartial Panic]

Ah. I'm… Going to need to talk to Father, aren't I?

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well this is going to be a fun talk.

I hope Darkseid knew and thought it was hilarious.

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That does seem to be his brand of humor.
Darkseid knew paul was an imposter but let the game continue since paul made a good show of it.
He exposed him to anti-life to ensure paul knew who was top dog and was probably amused that he managed to mostly recover from it.

Of course I have to wonder what he'll put the real Grayven through just to fuck with both of their heads.
True one of you is an imposter and the other one worthy of being my son, this one has made a good showing so far but what of you?

 

[Coda]

Reducing code size is a thing, but it's hardly ever done except on extremely constrained systems, and is not worth optimizing for on a desktop.

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It's done more than you might imagine. Any code that has to be streamed over the Internet (as opposed to installed locally) gets optimized for size because the limiting factor there is how long it takes the code to get from point A to point B.

Optimizing compilers also target binary size optimization because the more code you can fit in the CPU's instruction cache, the faster it runs. Obviously you can't fit the entire program into the i-cache, but you want tight compute loops to be as compact as possible.

Reducing code size is also done just as a development help, because large code bases are harder to maintain and more likely to have bugs. The computer doesn't much care, but the humans do.

In the end, though, this doesn't actually impact your core point, because none of these things are done with the intent of optimizing the installed size of the application binary itself.

Nearly all programs available today are bloated, inefficient, pieces of crap that glut available memory. You are so used to it to subconsciously assume that is just the way things are. But there is no physical law dictating programs have to be that size, it's mainly an artifact of the trend in increasing memory and processing capabilities, and lazy programmers and the the corporations who pay them forgetting how to make better code, and counting on continual hardware improvements to make up the difference.

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It should also be noted that in many cases glutting available memory isn't an accident, but rather it's intentional. It's not lazy programmers; it's a time-space tradeoff. You WANT your program to use as much memory as possible (but not more, that's bad) because the alternative is increased loading times because you have to go reload or recompute that data when you could have just held onto it.

It should also be noted that consumers don't pay money for minimalism. Increasing memory and processing capabilities means that the people BUYING the software expect it to do more. When you pass a certain minimum threshold of performance, doing the same thing but faster doesn't really gain you much, but being able to do more things with the resources at your disposal has meaningful value.

Yes, there's some unnecessary inefficiency in there. Yes, there are some tasks where doing the same thing but faster really IS what you want -- core operating system tasks, for example, need to get in, get done, and get out of the way so they're not taking up system resources from the stuff the user actually cares about. Yes, there's definitely a lot of software out there that's bloated beyond what's actually necessary to accomplish its goals and it suffers for it.

But to paint the entire industry with that sweeping condemnation is completely failing to observe that there are many good engineering reasons for technology to have developed the way it has, and in most cases there IS a good reason for it beyond cutting corners.

 

[Sebazu]

Mr Zoat is the next episode going to be full Renegade?

 

[lefthandturnsign]

Random thought that may have been raised before:

Other than moral complications, what prevents the orange corps from using larfleeze's existing construct lanterns in their war with the reach? Even if construct lanterns are somewhat less effective than normal ones, you'd think a few hundred/thousand of them would be a force to be reckoned with. Even if they were only called out for major targets.

 

[Mr Zoat]

Mr Zoat is the next episode going to be full Renegade?

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Yes. With a few SI interludes as normal.

Other than moral complications, what prevents the orange corps from using larfleeze's existing construct lanterns in their war with the reach? Even if construct lanterns are somewhat less effective than normal ones, you'd think a few hundred/thousand of them would be a force to be reckoned with. Even if they were only called out for major targets.

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Lack of precision.

 

[weredrago2]

This will sound like a random question from out of the blue, but does the Interstellar Power Lamp count as an alternate power ring? I was digging up some Green Lantern variants/analogues online and it stuck out to me. To be honest, I wasn't expecting to find a case where DC copied itself.