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Goddamn Teenagers (Worm, AU/time travel)

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Communication Styles
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    • "Did you notice any visual, audio or other cues?" Armsmaster asked.

    "No," Cherish said, wringing her hands.

    Armsmaster nodded while continuing to do something with the lab's monitoring suite.

    "A portal appeared," Impulse said confidently. "There was a piteous meowing from sick!cat, and other animal sounds from the hole in space."

    "Interesting," Armsmaster replied. "Panacea, did you notice similar noises when encountering portals during the recent Lindt operation?"

    "Hmm?" Amy looked up from the bedraggled furball. "Oh, uh? No? Mostly busy EMS noises?"

    "Hmm," Armsmaster responded.

    "Uh," Panacea continued, "I think I identified the problem?"

    When Armsmaster didn't respond, she continued, "I think she ate a piece of tinkertech?"

    Armsmaster turned sharply. "Characteristics? Does it appear immediately dangerous?"

    "Not biologically active," Panacea said. After a moment she continued. "It appears dormant for now. I don't know how she swallowed it, it's too big to safely pass. To retrieve it we will need to either do surgery, or I can try to slowly pass it through her body?"

    "Surgery," Armsmaster said firmly. Seeing Panacea's thunderous expression, he continued quickly. "Once the object has been removed, you can handle post-op. Unknown tinkertech is never safe."
    Note:
    Alec, stage whispering: I think that means he calls dibs.
     
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    • dc2008 said:
    sick!cat
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    I'll admit I'm curious how Alec pronounced this - I can think of several different ways, and none of them sound right...

    What does Amy mean by 'EMS'? Emergency Medical Services/Systems? Like an Ambulance siren? TLAs can be tricky to interpret... Electro-Magnetic ??? Dunno.
     
    Whitewings said:
    It's from object oriented programming and is pronounced <adjective>bang<noun>.
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    The particular usage is OOP-based, but referring to it as a 'bang' may actually date back to the old movable-type or letterpress days, when a typesetter may call out the required characters to a printer's aide, or someone dictating to a hot-metal typsetting operator may wish to declare their punctuation. The latter survived into 1950s-era secretarial manuals, although secretaries would have been taking dictation on a typewriter rather than a Linotype.

    Also, Armsy has a solid point, medically speaking; while Amy might be capable of resolving even the sort of foreign-body ingestion that would require surgical intervention here on earth, the risks go beyond the usual perforation/adhesion/strangulation trifecta for GI foreign bodies of mundane materials. Tinkertech might activate, or what is currently encapsulated might turn out to have toxins, heavy metals, any number of circumstances that will require rapid intervention. Going in prepped, and having Panacea on hand to mediate the risks of GI surgery like infection and scar tissue? It really is the right call.

    (Why yes two of my special interests involve written language and vet med, how did you know?)
     
    Working it Wrong, Part 2
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    • "Thank you," Brian said, looking directly at Taylor. "It was very nice of you to help Aisha with her planning."

    Taylor shuffled awkwardly, and tried not to blush. "Happy to help? She's good people." Taylor caught herself. "You are too," Taylor said quickly, "I mean—"

    Brain laughed. "I know what you mean. Yeah, she's good people. You, the group, even Lisa, it's been good for her."

    Taylor nodded.

    Brian paused a moment in thought, before saying "You seemed to be doing pretty good with Lisa there, too."

    Taylor shrugged. "I didn't want her to hurt herself."

    "Something Dad told me, teaching is a good way to help yourself understand things better."

    "Hmmm."

    Elsewhere

    "Owww my aching arms," Lisa didn't whine.

    Aisha rolled her eyes. "That's what you get for trying to troll Taylor."

    "But I wasn't trolling!" Lisa insisted.

    "The fuck you say? You won't convince me you were fucking up that bad on accident!"

    "Hey! That thing is complicated!"

    "There's instructions right there! With pictures and shit!"

    "Wait there's a what now?"
    Note: Oh noes! Compliments what do I do with compliments! And positive attention!
     
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    • I've seen it written that ! is used to represent a click sound in some languages? Like, tip of of your tongue against the forward palate, slightly sucking in the breath through the mouth, and releasing the tip?

    Don't quote me on the exact method used in the languages in question, I'm not a linguist. :)

    Would be challenging to pronounce after a ck sound at speed!

    As for the most current update: Thinkers aren't as smart as they need to be, that's why they got the Thinker configuration of their Shard. ;) I can't help but feel Lisa's Shard was trolling her, though.
     
    BethofDeath said:
    I've seen it written that ! is used to represent a click sound in some languages? Like, tip of of your tongue against the forward palate, slightly sucking in the breath through the mouth, and releasing the tip?

    Don't quote me on the exact method used in the languages in question, I'm not a linguist. :)

    Would be challenging to pronounce after a ck sound at speed!
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    IPA (the International Phonetic Alphabet) uses a symbol ( ǃ ) that looks nearly indistinguishable from ! in Verdana (my font default here), although it has a different Unicode designation, to represent alveolar and postalveolar clicks, and ǃǃ to represent retroflex clicks - Khoekhoe, for example, writes five different clicks using ǃ, although because of the way they are pronounced in various combinations, there are more alveolar click phonemes than that, a full 20. And then there's the dental click ( | ) and lateral click ( || )... and the palatal click ( ǂ ), although a lot of modern electronic communication uses regular old exclamation marks for the alveolar click and a hash ( # ) in place of the palatal click's ǂ because those appear on more modern keyboards.

    In other words... there's a lot of click sounds! Generally they are their own independent consonant, I'm not familiar with all the possible syllable combinations in all possible click languages, so some clicks may come after some plosives, but by speaker, the majority of languages still spoken that include clicks use a (vowel)-consonant-vowel-(vowel) construction, so it's not something one would normally have to worry about.

    Apparently European-language-tradition learners of click languages tend to screw up pronouncing them and come across as overly harsh, so I offer no pronunciation suggestions on any of these, since I speak zero click languages at all! (Except for one ritual language that has no current native speakers from an island community in Australia, all of these languages occur in southern or eastern Africa, which is a neat little feature of how language diversifies over time.)
     
    Kit said:
    IPA (the International Phonetic Alphabet)
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    Rather less (human) linguistic the earlier character encodings used with computers, before ASCII (7/8-bit) became universal (and more recently UTF), were often 6-bit, so only had 64 characters. This resulted in some really strange uses of character combinations - some computer languages had keywords in bold text in their manuals, and you didn't even have both upper and lower-case alphabetic characters!

    So, arguments about whether '!' is 'bang', or 'pling', pretty trivial!

    At least Alec isn't expecting people to understand Leet Speak...

    Communicating with human languages is a negotiated process, that evolves over time, no matter what the 'correct use of language' people would have you believe...
     
    Whitewings said:
    It's from object oriented programming and is pronounced <adjective>bang<noun>.
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    Kit said:
    The particular usage is OOP-based, but referring to it as a 'bang' may actually date back to the old movable-type or letterpress days, [...] The latter survived into 1950s-era secretarial manuals, although secretaries would have been taking dictation on a typewriter rather than a Linotype.
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    Thanks, TIL. I was aware of its use (and pronounciation) in OOP, but I didn't realise the use in fanfics (and more broadly, online) came literally from there, nor that the pronounciation came from dictation conventions... which I'm delighted to learn, being a bit of a typesetting nerd (an occupational hazard when (formerly) in CompSci academia, it seems)

    grommile said:
    *facepalm* Lisa, you're supposed to be the smart one.
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    BethofDeath said:
    I can't help but feel Lisa's Shard was trolling her, though.
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    Not necessarily? Lisa presumably avoids letting her power feed her information all the time, to both minimize Thinker migraines and have more leeway if something comes up where she needs all the Shard-powered inference.

    TBH, I have the impression Lisa is smart by Thinker standards, because she still relies on her own thinking, but Thinkers in general don't seem particularly smart compared to the general population, especially outside the areas where they are being fed information by their Shard.
    For instance, I wouldn't call Contessa smart; terrifying, sure, but she's just following her Shard's instructions and I find people who "just follow orders" pretty terrifying, to say nothing of the existential dread caused by the scale of her power and the capabilities she has access to.

    Granted, "parahumans taking INT and WIS as dump stats" seems to be a recurring theme in Worms. 😅
     
    nicoo said:
    TBH, I have the impression Lisa is smart by Thinker standards, because she still relies on her own thinking, but Thinkers in general don't seem particularly smart compared to the general population, especially outside the areas where they are being fed information by their Shard.
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    My understanding is that Lisa was smarter than average even back when she was Sarah (though probably not as much smarter as she liked to think).
     
    grommile said:
    My understanding is that Lisa was smarter than average even back when she was Sarah (though probably not as much smarter as she liked to think).
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    Sure, but that still leaves a pretty wide range open (and different kinds of intelligence, it's not 1D)
    You really nail it in the afterthought though: she thinks highly of her intelligence, and might not look for instructions (even fairly visible ones) when trying to do something; it's not uncommon, like people not even opening the instruction sheet before putting something together.
     
    nicoo said:
    You really nail it in the afterthought though: she thinks highly of her intelligence, and might not look for instructions (even fairly visible ones) when trying to do something; it's not uncommon
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    Some people, first thing they do when they confront something new is ask 'Where's the manual?'. On being told, 'It's intuitive, you don't need one!', they may be... less than totally happy.

    Lisa... unfortunately seems inclined to hyper-focus. This can be a really useful tool, your full attention is applied to the problem. Downside? If relevant info (like instructions, a manual, just over there) isn't within that focus...
     
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    Ace Dreamer said:
    Lisa... unfortunately seems inclined to hyper-focus. This can be a really useful tool, your full attention is applied to the problem. Downside? If relevant info (like instructions, a manual, just over there) isn't within that focus...
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    Yeah, I'm all-too-familiar with that... and you are right, framing it this way does make it look a lot like "oops ADHDid it again." It could be both, though IDK to what extent.
     
    Ace Dreamer said:
    So, arguments about whether '!' is 'bang', or 'pling', pretty trivial!
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    Ah, but is # the pound sign, a hash, the number sign, or an octothorp?

    The answer is yes! :D

    Communicating with human languages is a negotiated process, that evolves over time, no matter what the 'correct use of language' people would have you believe...
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    No kidding! Bantu languages use q to signify the same alveolar clicks. Khoekhoe was the example I picked because it pulls its modern orthography (the conventional spelling of a language's written form, for non linguistics nerds) from the IPA. And despite the best efforts of the prescriptivists, even institutions like the Académie Française, language - like the people who use it - is constantly changing.
     
    Communication Styles, Part 2
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    • "How can you not know when you'll be able to operate on the kitty?" Amy asked incredulously. "You either have an operating theater and personnel, or you don't?"

    "To operate safely," Armsmaster said firmly, "we need to know more about the tinkertech."

    "We know that she ate it?" Amy replied testily. "So whatever atmosphere mix is in her stomach should be fine, as well as tools that would be non-reactive with her stomach lining and stomach acid?"

    "Oy," Impulse interrupted.

    Armsmaster ignored him. "We can't assume that it is an inert mass. Think of it as if it were a biological organism."

    "But it's not? I checked."

    "Mrrrrrw," the bedraggled furball agreed.

    "OY," Impulse interjected, again, as Cherish tried ineffectually to shush him.

    "I know. Think of it as if it were. Would the fact that it is not interacting at this time be sufficient?"

    "Oh." Amy blanched. "OH."

    "HEY SCIENCE HEADS!" Impulse shouted. Both turned.

    "Can we just ask what the little dust bunny ate?" Impulse continued. "Or at least ask for more details? Whoever sent her here knows something. Even if they didn't see the mischief ball chow down, they know where they found the thing? Or where it was before? Something? Maybe not a walkthrough, but at least a gameFAQ?"

    "While a worthwhile idea," Armsmaster began, as Amy nodded thoughtfully, "communication could prove... hmmm. I'll message Dr. Weaver." He began doing something with his equipment.

    Impulse rolled his eyes, and looked up at the ceiling. "Hey, kitty-loving portal people! Drop a note maybe, or send a we come in peace dude! We'll help the allergy bomb here, but we can do better if we know what the fuck we're dealing with?"

    Amy rolled her eyes. "You can't possibly expect that to--"

    She was interrupted by the appearance of a portal.
    Note: Sometimes, you need a smart man. Sometimes, you need a wise woman. And sometimes, you need a lazy fool.
     
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    • Ace Dreamer said:
    I've heard that lazy smart people are what you really need (from Heinlein, among others). They arrange things so they (and, if you're lucky others) get to do less in future...
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    Lazy smart are good as commanders. Active smart are good staff officers but you DO NOT want them in command. Lazy stupid can be MADE useful, if aggressively supervised. Active stupid need to be put down, pushed out, quarantined, or otherwise remediated.
     
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