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Puella Magi Adfligo Systema

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Raiseth said:
Aurora is a reference to that one time Asuka!Quest managed to shut the Space Battles server down by its incorrigible awesomeness. :V

There was a toucan picture, someone sued for copyright infringement, the server went down while they tried to resolve the situation, so the toucan Witch is, like, personification of Space Battles or something ( or a silly joke, take your pick ).

If you reread the fight with Aurora, you could see how her familiars kinda spend time arguing with each other, and the background seems to be lagging somewhat, and so on.
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oh my god

"Aurora, the Witch of self destruction. Her nature is apathy. She damages the keystone of her own Barrier, making it inhospitable even to her own Familiars."

I never new that and now I can't stop laughing at her witch card
 
Well, seems things happened while I was out for a bit
QuantizedOne98 said:
*Going to check the latest page*
*Blinking*
*Re-check and double check*
Uh... Guys? Isn't today the quest's 5th birthday? Why doesn't anyone even mentioned this?
Anyway, congratulation, @Firnagzen ! This quest certainly still stay strong on its course !
Really eager to catch up and join the discussion in the future ! Only 600 pages to read !
Wish you guys all luck !
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Happy birthday Sabrina (please ignore the day of delay)!

You're really reading through the discussion thread?
And I thought that the story-only took me a lot of time.

[X] Proceed with vote in abeyance

While I agree that we shouldn't antagonize uselessly Tokyo, I don't think it's something we can reach a conlusive decision on right now.
One of the main reasons for the "official" visit is to get a gist on how things trurly are and how to proceed after all. So for now I'll agree with @Muramasa and say that we should let the pace flow before adding other stuff.
 
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About Homura. In light of Mami's suggestion, how about this:

Homura is worried she is being supplanted as the main force in Madoka's protection, and feels inadequate, because Sabrina seemingly does things more successfully than she ever could.

That's a load of tripe, of course.

Sabrina knows many things, some of them Homura wouldn't even imagine in her right mind, but Homura's practical knowledge about Witches, Megucas and "spending money" is vast and nearly damn invaluable.

Sabrina is also not as focused on Madoka's protection as Homura is, because, frankly, it's impossible to be as focused as Homura is. We would actually need to be a rogue Clara Doll or something for Sabrina to achieve that level of dedication.

Protecting Madoka is empathetically the job Homura is the best person for. Sabrina is here, as she likes to say, "to help", and in this case it means she is here to help Homura with this task, not to do it for her. Again, protecting Madoka was and remains Homura's exclusive right, privilege and obligation. ( choose two. )

If Homura still thinks about leaving Mitakihara or something after she defeats Walpurgisnacht, we've gotta ask her if she really is okay with entrusting her task to us. Sabrina will try her level best and will probably succeed, but Sabrina's best in protecting Madoka and Homura's best in the same are really two different things. We just have quite a lot of unfair ( from certain points of view ) advantages going for us, and some of them have a limited lifespan.

I don't want to lock Homura into thinking her eternal penance is protecting Madoka or some silly thing like that, but she needs to realize that she is not useless by any stretch of imagination, and Madoka's safety is one of those jobs where the number of people doing it is "not really enough".

Something to think about. Later. For now,
[X] TO THE INTERNETS!
-[X] vote in abeyance

I'm not really sure what talking with Homura so soon after the last time would accomplish. She's a person and needs to process things a little, but well, maybe she has.
 
Raiseth said:
Sabrina is also not as focused on Madoka's protection as Homura is, because, frankly, it's impossible to be as focused as Homura is. We would actually need to be a rogue Clara Doll or something for Sabrina to achieve that level of dedication.
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you sure we're not love?
but yeah
we are great in certain situations, but a lot of our advantages, like our metaknowledge, will grow less useful over time until we can't rely on it at all, and frankly? if we tried to take on homuras role of protecting madoka and keeping her out of danger and away from the incubator I don't know if we would last a week before we failed
 
Right, because I'm on the side who isn't comfortable with the way things are going, a vote plan then:

[X] Final politics points.
-[X] Perhaps you're getting too bogged down in what it would take to make clear seeds work, especially if it means stepping in and revamping Tokyo's structure, which could well set you against them.
--[X] You're doing this to facilitate a kinder world, not dictate precisely how it comes about.
--[X] Ultimately, clear seeds are a macguffin, and if the needs of preventing fighting over those macguffins are untenable for Tokyo then you can offer something else instead.
-- [X] You have ideas for how to pass out cleansing beyond just without clear seeds, but you've also had ideas for grief seed exchanges in the past, taking one for the equivalent of every two refreshed, and if it comes down to it, you can just cleanse as a stopgap solution and let them spend the next six weeks arguing on what's best and how they'd need to adapt.

-[X] On the topic of recruitment:
--[x] If we intend to recruit from Tokyo, how much training does Homura think we would need for everyone to get used to working together? And just for recruiting in general, really, What's should our deadlines for recruitment be, in other words?

-[x] Admit your brochure envy: You kind of want to crib from Tokyo and make a primer for introducing girls to Mitakihara.

[x] Vote in abeyance


These last few updates we've talked about recruiting, and Homura has been both reasonably comfortable with it in Madoka's company, and approving of our consideration of the subject. I think now is a good time to ask her about deadlines for training.

But yeah, the more I think about clear seeds the more I realize that... they're actually kind of a outright bad solution to cleansing as its stands? Their macguffins and metaphorical nuclear reactors in a world where magical girls are already primed to fight over grief seeds and hunting territory, not to mention situations like Asunaro. In the end, we need to move beyond them, before people get hurt.

We have a lot of hopes for them in the vein of dewitching but, for cleansing tools? Practically their only virtue is that they're better than grief seeds. Which is kind of like saying total war is better than everyone starving to death.

---------------------------------------

Incidentally, here is my specific plans for the pleb test and the line of research that follows from it: Overlong and bloated since I get carried away and hyped up on this topic, but... I'll admit I'm incredibly excited about it, even if I understand the need to curtail that and be systematic about it all.
[] Pleb test on a seed you haven't interacted with yet: Figure out if this is an inherent property of enchanted grief, or did you transferring your magic during your experiments on clear seeds transfer your power.

A subsequent vote, if it's confirmed:

[] Could you do something similar with teaching magical girls? Experiment with channeling your magic into Mami's her ribbons. (Hold off on anything more direct than that until you're more consistent in not breaking things when you enchant them.)
-[]Possible alternate solution: Recall your examination of Sayaka's power gems: How would you go about constructing one manually?

[] Ask Mami: When you channel magic into her ribbons are you extending your powers? Or is she holding onto some small portion of your powers when you do that? You want to see if you can share your memories of the times your were most in tune with your wish, how they relate to her own feelings about herself, and see if you can share a bit of your wish, and your power, with her that way.
--[] Ask her to tell you if she gets a headache or anything, as that's probably a sign that you should stop and try again later.
-[] Channel into a ribbon the times you were most in tune with your wish, and where it intersects with Mami's own feelings and her pride in herself. Talk as you do so, and let your words give context to the feelings. Sympathy and Unity (entrust yourself to someone else, you will never be alone)
--[] Be careful. Go slowly. Take your time. Don't rush. Enjoy the moment and treat as a quiet conversation you're having with your magic just as much as you're conducting an experiment together. If you need to abort the test just enjoy it with words instead of magic.

List of Emotions Begins here:

--[] The times you've saved people and helped them be well, and Mami's pride in aiding others: Pulling Sayaka and her family out of the fire. Masami and Hiroko, Touhoku and Sendai's reaction after you gave them the clear seed. Contacting Kazumi and bringing her over. The many people you've saved from witch kisses.
--[] The times you've helped magical girls to live and work together, and Mami's desire to have others in her life: Helping Homura work with others. The times you've fought witches alongside each other. Assisting the Saints. Shopping together. The Picnic. Karaoke.
--[] Your powers, discovering them, learning, teaching. The times Mami spent advancing her own magic, and in being a teacher of others: Being a mentor to Sayaka, the comments on how far she's come, and your hopes for how far she'll go. Your troubles with enchantment, her tale about first making her muskets, how it felt when you first succeeded, and the feeling of enchanting grief. The times you spent learning from Mami and she spent teaching you. The first time you cleansed Mami, and the amazement she felt. How it feels to cleanse and the relief that's felt afterwards.
---[] Here and now, sharing this with her in hopes that something amazing can come of it.


(alternatively, the same could be done for Homura, if altered to fit.)

[] Give her an enchanted grief marble while you work: see if she can do anything with it, personally or with her ribbon.
 
Firnagzen said:
"Hm..." you frown. "That said... I kind of want to refine that a bit? Just to be, uh, more specific, I guess. I mean, twenty angry magical girls showing up on your doorstep is one thing. I wanna formalize what we do if someone abuses a Clear Seed."
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This was exactly not what I meant. People have pointed out that this perpetuates the "us vs them" mentality and that is specifically what I wanted to avoid and resolve. Hitomi and Madoka established last night that, absent something really unpleasant, the only major sticking point between us and the Tokyo Council was that their approach to peace was coercive. Then it was brought up that our conditions for Clear Seeds are "first do no harm" and everyone decided that for some stupid reason that that also meant "total pacifism". I was attempting to point out that "first do no harm" is not "total pacifism". We don't want vigilante justice and we don't want loose cannons and we don't want exploitation or corruption. Police are coercion. The entire point of a government is that it maintains a monopoly on violence and uses that to compel compliance with the rule of law. Coercion in the form of a modern police force and justice system and legitimate government that operates by the consent of the governed is entirely reasonable. But, of course, it gets interpreted as "Let's set up a modern police force!" Which is totally fucking useless because we already established that we don't have the time or manpower to do that yet. The point was that the Tokyo Council does have the authority and the power and the resources and if we can convince them to replace their "twenty angry meguca at your door" approach to resolving conflicts then all of our problems with them go away and we can hand them all the clear seeds they want.
 
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you know im with
[X] the phoenixian

also we know from homuras revenge that its possible for magical girls to share magic. is it possible that might have something to do with people being able to push magic through another meguca's magical constructs?
 
Vebyast said:
This was exactly not what I meant. People have pointed out that this perpetuates the "us vs them" mentality and that is specifically what I wanted to avoid and resolve. Hitomi and Madoka established last night that, absent something really unpleasant, the only major sticking point between us and the Tokyo Council was that their approach to peace was coercive. Then it was brought up that our conditions for Clear Seeds are "first do no harm" and everyone decided that for some stupid reason that that also meant "total pacifism". I was attempting to point out that "first do no harm" is not "total pacifism". We don't want vigilante justice and we don't want loose cannons and we don't want exploitation or corruption. Police are coercion. The entire point of a government is that it maintains a monopoly on violence and uses that to compel compliance with the rule of law. Coercion in the form of a modern police force and justice system and legitimate government that operates by the consent of the governed is entirely reasonable. But, of course, it gets interpreted as "Let's set up a modern police force!" Which is totally fucking useless because we already established that we don't have the time or manpower to do that yet. The point was that the Tokyo Council does have the authority and the power and the resources and if we can convince them to replace their "twenty angry meguca at your door" approach to resolving conflicts then all of our problems with them go away and we can hand them all the clear seeds they want.
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I don't know what to say.

... you do know your vote is the one that won, right?
For example
Vebyast said:
But, of course, it gets interpreted as "Let's set up a modern police force!"
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Vebyast said:
You'd just prefer less "20 angry magical girls at your front door" and more "modern policing organization".
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Maybe because of that? I just kinda... I'm not processing. My capo doesn't capiche.
 
soulsguardian said:
you know im with
[X] the phoenixian
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Explain.
The Phoenixian said:
-[X] Perhaps you're getting too bogged down in what it would take to make clear seeds work, especially if it means stepping in and revamping Tokyo's structure, which could well set you against them.
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Yeah, the trick to getting them to change is to demonstrate to them that there are better ways and provide a reason to change. Clear Seeds would be a pretty good motivator.
The Phoenixian said:
--[x] If we intend to recruit from Tokyo, how much training does Homura think we would need for everyone to get used to working together? And just for recruiting in general, really, What's should our deadlines for recruitment be, in other words?
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I can already answer this. Homura has attempted to hire these people in the past. Homura is not capable of training them to work together. I doubt that they are capable of organizing training among themselves. So the answer is that Homura has already selected her recruitment targets with the assumption that they will be working with no training at all. Training will of course help, because teamwork is always good, but I guarantee that Homura's answer will be "I don't know because I've never tried it."

Edit: This may also be a timestop topic.
The Phoenixian said:
--[X] Ultimately, clear seeds are a macguffin, and if the needs of preventing fighting over those macguffins are untenable for Tokyo then you can offer something else instead.
-- [X] You have ideas for how to pass out cleansing beyond just without clear seeds, but you've also had ideas for grief seed exchanges in the past, taking one for the equivalent of every two refreshed, and if it comes down to it, you can just cleanse as a stopgap solution and let them spend the next six weeks arguing on what's best and how they'd need to adapt.
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If I interpreted the various discussions correctly, cleansing itself is inherently destabilizing. Restricting cleansing enough to keep Tokyo functional would make it no better than the current situation.
Raiseth said:
I don't know what to say.

... you do know your vote is the one that won, right?
For example



Maybe because of that? I just kinda... I'm not processing. My capo doesn't capiche.
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Yeah, I know that my vote is the one that won. That's why I'm so unhappy. I wrote the vote, I explained my position at least twice, I even summarized it, and yet when the vote turned into words coming out of Sabrina's mouth she went and said exactly the opposite of what I voted for. It would have been perfectly fine if it'd been interpreted correctly. But no, I guess I have to go back to writing thousand-word votes to explain every single detail of every single word in my entire vote.

I said it right in the vote: "We only give clear seeds to pacifists" is wrong. We'd be perfectly fine with letting the Tokyo Council enforcing laws about Clear Seeds if they did it with a modern police force instead of angry mobs, because coercion is a core feature of a legitimate government.
 
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arK said:
You're really reading through the discussion thread?
And I thought that the story-only took me a lot of time.
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Well, for a quest like PMAS, reading through the discussion thread is certainly more interesting! It shed light into how Sabrina's decisions and actions came to be, and I can catch some of the really cool stuff here. (In fact, if I didn't see people celebrate last year's anniversary, I surely would have missed it yesterday)
It has only been one year (or two? I don't remember :( ) . Many things happened along the line and my muse died some times. But hey, maybe this time I'll be able to catch up!
See you later!
 
oof
I attempted to read the discussion thread the second time around and nearly passed out cause I could not handle it. one one hand you see all the interesting discussions and theories people had
one the other you see that the flame wars, vitriol, and people going whole ham is in fact NOT a new thing
 
Firnagzen said:
=====
OK. I hate to do this again, but once more, the vote and the update ballooned out of control. So I'm ending the update here, and I'm calling in a hard limit - vote only on this particular chunk of discussion. You may refine the discussion with Homura (in particular, if you want to add anything from what Mami said), but please do not expand it too much.

Also, five flippin' years of PMAS. Thank you all for being here - PMAS wouldn't be the same without you guys.
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needs a threadmark.
 
The problem with making a single trustworthy group in charge of policing is that group composition might change over time, more people joining that group because they want the power making the group slowly become composed mainly of more power hungry girls.

Basically I think we also need to set up a watcher for the watchers, some sort of complaint process, a mechanism to move the policing responsibilities to another group - stuff along those lines.
 
Raiseth said:
Aurora is a reference to that one time Asuka!Quest managed to shut the Space Battles server down by its incorrigible awesomeness. :V

There was a toucan picture, someone sued for copyright infringement, the server went down while they tried to resolve the situation, so the toucan Witch is, like, personification of Space Battles or something ( or a silly joke, take your pick ).

If you reread the fight with Aurora, you could see how her familiars kinda spend time arguing with each other, and the background seems to be lagging somewhat, and so on.
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Not AsukaQuest, SayakaQuest. Same author though.
 
I think we're getting too lost on the technical details. As long as we can get some kind of arrangement where cleanse offers and clear seeds are permissable in Tokyo, that's good enough for me. We can worry about the nuances later and it doesn't have to be solely decided by us. In fact, it shouldn't be.
 
Vebyast said:
This was exactly not what I meant. People have pointed out that this perpetuates the "us vs them" mentality and that is specifically what I wanted to avoid and resolve. Hitomi and Madoka established last night that, absent something really unpleasant, the only major sticking point between us and the Tokyo Council was that their approach to peace was coercive. Then it was brought up that our conditions for Clear Seeds are "first do no harm" and everyone decided that for some stupid reason that that also meant "total pacifism". I was attempting to point out that "first do no harm" is not "total pacifism". We don't want vigilante justice and we don't want loose cannons and we don't want exploitation or corruption. Police are coercion. The entire point of a government is that it maintains a monopoly on violence and uses that to compel compliance with the rule of law. Coercion in the form of a modern police force and justice system and legitimate government that operates by the consent of the governed is entirely reasonable. But, of course, it gets interpreted as "Let's set up a modern police force!" Which is totally fucking useless because we already established that we don't have the time or manpower to do that yet. The point was that the Tokyo Council does have the authority and the power and the resources and if we can convince them to replace their "twenty angry meguca at your door" approach to resolving conflicts then all of our problems with them go away and we can hand them all the clear seeds they want.
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Alright. I misinterpreted the vote somewhat, but I believe that even with that intent - the core discussion still came through, of how it would be possible to get Tokyo to handle it.
 
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