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[rose]

[SPEC] Is DURGA the mirror that the Operator set up?

[usernameguy]

[SF-SJ]

Possibly...

[Theorizer]

Hey does anybody else just feel out of the story when every relates back everything to a computer. Like the staircase, people related it back to higher priority computer functions and what-not, Like is this really helping us out by turning everything so that it has to do with a computer? I like the idea of SP simply being like a human being, hiding from the pious flea and the queen, in a castle, not "Sp is a computer program, and she's hiding deep withing the memory of the computer, from a virus deleter gone physco" And so far how has relating back to actual hardware of the computer help us, when I first thought of, "IN" the computer, I thought of an entity that was able to acess everything that the computer had in it, and this entity is sending out a message. Not "Queen=C:/". So there's my ramble.

[sherpa]

Thing is, Theorizer, having real-world analogues of these metaphors is particularly useful - e.g. using the metaphor of the Flea and Widow to figure out the computer code and work out what's going on. Sure, you can leave it at the metaphor if it suits you, but trying to actually relate it to other ingame clues or to plausible real-world equivalents (e.g. DNA/twisted pair cable for the staircase) is useful, and brings up the big question "who is the Sleeping Princess"? If we leave it at metaphor, that's not a question at all.

[chaotic_mind]

[Theorizer]

[sherpa]

[Theorizer]

[Astald]

Understanding where all the entities in the system reside may be our first step into understanding how they got there. And understanding that may help us get them out, or whatever it is that becomes our goal.

[sherpa]

[Theorizer]

All the same, one of the hardest parts of this arg is when people use words that I didn't even know existed, have to look up, and forget what that word means in a hour.

[sherpa]

[Theorizer]

[usernameguy]

The internals of a computer are the characters' home. It is what they "see" from day to day. They have to look "through windows" to see the real world.

It's funny that you say we're associating each character with a computer part. That's not what I was trying to do, exactly. I was trying to relate the action to their surroundings. All three of the surviving computer characters (Melissa, the SP, and the Flea) all share the entire computer. At any moment any one of them could be using any part of the computer.

They have an odd relationship to the computer hardware itself. It's kinda like their (collective) body. Each of their minds would die without hardware. But it's not like human beings' minds and bodies. They can hop from machine to machine.

Each has a different awareness of their "computerness" and how their computerness relates to the real world.

The Flea, like the SPDR, is a xenophobe. It only really communicates in computer code. The Flea hasn't really shown any awareness of the hardware at all. He also deals strictly with his reality, never in allegory, metaphor, or analogy. This doesn't make him stupid, it just makes him very foreign.

The Princess understands code but seems to think in a different way. She may be aware of the hardware only in analogy. She actually sees the computer as "a castle" that surrounds her, the disk as "a mirror". In fact, most of her thinking seems to be one level removed from even the software. She lives in a virtual reality.

Melissa is much, much more sophisticated than either. She is intimately aware of the hardware and the technology she runs on. She is as fluent in code as the Flea. Yet she seems to prefer to think and talk in English, and in human terms. She switches from code to real world tactics to cold scientific thinking to analogy on a dime.