Post by lucidChthonia on Sept 15, 2012 3:56:56 GMT -5
((OOC: This is supposed to be a post on LC's blog, which she started after she was successful on sburb.org's official blog and wanted to keep all her own posts in one place. In the meantime she has posted well over a thousand small FAQ-ish or essay posts that look somewhat like this, using new data from the Seer Network as well as logic and statistics. She is at least reasonably IC famous for this, and FAQ authors tend to follow her blog for the latest Seer Network developments. Her personal life can also be followed from whether the apologies she makes at the very bottom of every post are about her or not.
This is part of a very long-running series that she is doing of some of her more influential early posts.
Further posts in the thread can be assumed to be blog comments.))
==========================================
Classics Repost: The Endless Climb
Timestamp 40-9519943
lucidChthonia (8)
----
I am currently rerunning many of my most-referenced blog posts over the years, with added commentary.
----
The survival rate for first-roll (including first-session and also replayer first non-native roll) Mind players has perceptibly increased since the first Seer Network census. The timestamp 10 census had a survival rate of 53% for aggregate first-roll Mind players, and it has edged above 60% in the timestamp 40 census.
I have reason to believe that at least some of this increase was catalyzed by me.
It was generally accepted in the earliest days that your Mind player was to be treated carefully, as they were mentally unstable and would BT if their fragile sense of choice was ever challenged; and that if they ever began PKing that they were to be put down, preferably quickly and mercilessly as one would with a rabid dog.
This doesn't happen anymore. And I suppose some of it was because Myra, our Founder of Mind, agitated (as was her way), but she was never much good at writing for persuasion. I was one of the earlier regulars in the Mind forum (alongside watching the Seers before they made the Seer Network an official thing that I was grandfathered into for access). I've since watched it grow, from a collective of maybe five of us, to a bustling community of at least fifty natives and a constantly rotating cast of current rollers. And I watched, and I tallied up information.
And then one day I wrote this essay, and it resonated. Fairly quickly I was no longer doing merely "academic" research, I was expected to answer interviews and write and justify my own existence. As a Sylph, this came easily enough to me, in a way that it didn't to most of the other early-timestamp Mind players. (I think we were lucky that I was a well-internalized native champion class and at least had a vague idea what to do.) I think there are still interviews of me being a surprisingly coherent newbie floating around PrototypeTowers somewhere, although I will not dig them out for you. I was eventually tapped to write the overview FAQ chapter on Mind for grindinglyGodliest's "Sburb Glitch FAQ", which I will plug here (ignore the low-maturity incoherent self-guilt postscript).
(By the way, if you are a current Mind player and want more detail, I recommend encapsulatedConditioning's "Decisions and Data: The Mostly Definitive Mind Player's Guide to Sburb". Which, by the way, is what the Mind forum is generally referring to when they talk about the DaD FAQ.)
And that about brings us up to the point in time where the next Repost will be situated, so I'll stop here.
----
Original
============================
The Endless Climb
Timestamp 19-1318277
lucidChthonia (4)
----
I write today about an unusually personal topic for us mental cases. [Endless Climb].
Praised, cursed, the only thing standing between your session and destruction, the BT that nearly destroyed your life - the only thing that we native Mind players seem to agree about is that [Endless Climb] is a formative experience in a way that few other berserk triggers are.
[Endless Climb] exposes us to every single possible decision in a session. Not merely the ones that matter, not just the ones that might be alpha or plot-important Splinter. Every single one. And we do not simply watch this window into a thousand lives; we experience it, line for line, wound for wound, scream for scream. [Endless Climb] is, first and foremost, the most intense emotional experience we have or will ever be put through in our lives. It is this that makes it so powerful.
And yet it is for this powerful prognostication ability that many of us are killed.
----
[Endless Climb] is triggered by thinking too deeply about fate and predestination vs. choice and decisions within Sburb, in the abstract. From what I have observed, these are the three most common causes:
> * The Mind player ends up in an alternate/offshoot timeline.
> * A player decides to deliberately ignore the Mind player's advice.
> * The Mind player hears about the ectobiological cloning session, and entertains the idea of not sending the children to their proper meteors.
(Incidentally, it is of interest of the session's temporal stability that you not let this last one happen. [Climb]ed Mind players have been known to attempt to kill the paradox children before they ever leave the lab.)
Less common causes include prophecies and time travel stable loops directly involving the Mind player, and philosophical discussions about the meaning of causality in Sburb.
----
The real brain-breaking, from my perspective, is this: not only did I witness every conceivable split in the timeline and decision point, I experienced all of them first-hand, a hundred selves at once. And because most of these decisions lead to doomed timelines, the fear and pain and anger completely overwhelmed the amount of happiness and sanity. I saw, in so many of these timelines, that a single misstep could cause disaster, and so many of the decisions were so trivial - why would my choice of shoes to meet the Denizen for the first time cause a Splinter?
I watched myself take a fork in a dungeon that I didn't even see until three months hence, and the wrong corridor held a pit to which I quickly fell to my death.
I watched my co-players and friends do horrible things when they were threatened with death. When they knew that their lives were forfeit. I watched a few of them sacrifice to make sure that I would continue, or perhaps to sacrifice to make sure that their alpha selves would continue, but I watched far more die with a raised middle finger and a snarl to the Game that spawned them.
I was stabbed and torn apart and crushed and disemboweled, no two deaths the same; and I watched others dying of knives or hammers or explosions or countless other causes. I witnessed just how /little/ it took to tear apart a body.
I saw a thousand Wraiths and a hundred botched Entrances and doom in countless ways, all of which could, and should, have been averted with a decision. And, where I could, I averted them. But there were too many for me to remember, too many for me to do anything but feel, and scream, and hope at least some of them I would recognize later. It felt like eternity, spent watching what one wrong move would cost me, and helpless to change or avert any of these possible futures.
Is it really any wonder that few, if any, of us come out of this experience mentally intact?
----
I think [Endless Climb] was not originally intended to be a berserk. I think it was intended to be a high-level scrying ability with a substantial pluck discount due to the fact that it left you defenseless during the casting and emotionally drained afterwards (i.e. Aggrievance). The real trouble may well have been when it was repurposed to serve as Mind's berserk trigger.
Because when you use [Endless Climb] that was directly triggered by contact with a Player or a concept directly related to players? The Aggrievance code has a source that it latches onto instead of being an abstract "I hate everything and I don't want to play anymore". This, I suppose, is adaptive, insofar as helplessness is not really helplessness until you have no control over the cause? I am unsure about this conclusion.
If any of you code-divers want help me take a closer look at how Aggrievance unfolds, feel free to leave a comment and/or shoot me a PM. I'd like to know more.
----
The favorable result of [Endless Climb], the one I'd hope for, is probably Aggrievance. It's not an experience I would wish on anyone, but a few hours to a few days' worth of helpless catatonia is far preferable to... well, to the other option.
The other option being why Mind players are often mistaken for PKs by the underinformed: the notorious post-climb murder instinct. See, many of us, after going through this experience, are mentally exhausted, unable to perform our duties of being reasonable and logical, and act solely on instinct to eliminate whatever "caused" us so much grief. Which is usually a fellow Player. Unfortunately, there is no way to tell the difference between someone who has gone PK because of temporary post-Climb psychosis, or someone who has gone PK because [Endless Climb] really has permanently broken their mind. The latter is rare, and most likely apocryphal.
Early guides to Mind players tend to emphasize the dangers of "post-Climb psychosis". In my opinion, these dangers are vastly overstated, because there is no way to tell the difference between the temporary single-mindedness of the immediate post-Climb state and someone who has had a complete psychotic break due to the sheer emotional overload of [Endless Climb]. The latter is at least a plausible theory, or at least was, in the time before sburb.org. However, in my time watching the Mind subforum unfold and populate itself with native and current Mind players, I have not heard a single report of a consistent PKer who was originally and permanently broken by [Endless Climb].
I'm not saying it's not possible. I am merely saying that in twenty timestamps I have never seen it happen.
If you are not Mind, and you watch one of us kill for this reason, I am asking only for you to understand, and give us a second chance.
----
Today's apology is a collective apology, by Mind players towards all those we have wronged or bloodied. And a collective thank-you, for those of you reading this that understood, and let us live.
This is part of a very long-running series that she is doing of some of her more influential early posts.
Further posts in the thread can be assumed to be blog comments.))
==========================================
Classics Repost: The Endless Climb
Timestamp 40-9519943
lucidChthonia (8)
----
I am currently rerunning many of my most-referenced blog posts over the years, with added commentary.
----
The survival rate for first-roll (including first-session and also replayer first non-native roll) Mind players has perceptibly increased since the first Seer Network census. The timestamp 10 census had a survival rate of 53% for aggregate first-roll Mind players, and it has edged above 60% in the timestamp 40 census.
I have reason to believe that at least some of this increase was catalyzed by me.
It was generally accepted in the earliest days that your Mind player was to be treated carefully, as they were mentally unstable and would BT if their fragile sense of choice was ever challenged; and that if they ever began PKing that they were to be put down, preferably quickly and mercilessly as one would with a rabid dog.
This doesn't happen anymore. And I suppose some of it was because Myra, our Founder of Mind, agitated (as was her way), but she was never much good at writing for persuasion. I was one of the earlier regulars in the Mind forum (alongside watching the Seers before they made the Seer Network an official thing that I was grandfathered into for access). I've since watched it grow, from a collective of maybe five of us, to a bustling community of at least fifty natives and a constantly rotating cast of current rollers. And I watched, and I tallied up information.
And then one day I wrote this essay, and it resonated. Fairly quickly I was no longer doing merely "academic" research, I was expected to answer interviews and write and justify my own existence. As a Sylph, this came easily enough to me, in a way that it didn't to most of the other early-timestamp Mind players. (I think we were lucky that I was a well-internalized native champion class and at least had a vague idea what to do.) I think there are still interviews of me being a surprisingly coherent newbie floating around PrototypeTowers somewhere, although I will not dig them out for you. I was eventually tapped to write the overview FAQ chapter on Mind for grindinglyGodliest's "Sburb Glitch FAQ", which I will plug here (ignore the low-maturity incoherent self-guilt postscript).
(By the way, if you are a current Mind player and want more detail, I recommend encapsulatedConditioning's "Decisions and Data: The Mostly Definitive Mind Player's Guide to Sburb". Which, by the way, is what the Mind forum is generally referring to when they talk about the DaD FAQ.)
And that about brings us up to the point in time where the next Repost will be situated, so I'll stop here.
----
Original
============================
The Endless Climb
Timestamp 19-1318277
lucidChthonia (4)
----
I write today about an unusually personal topic for us mental cases. [Endless Climb].
Praised, cursed, the only thing standing between your session and destruction, the BT that nearly destroyed your life - the only thing that we native Mind players seem to agree about is that [Endless Climb] is a formative experience in a way that few other berserk triggers are.
[Endless Climb] exposes us to every single possible decision in a session. Not merely the ones that matter, not just the ones that might be alpha or plot-important Splinter. Every single one. And we do not simply watch this window into a thousand lives; we experience it, line for line, wound for wound, scream for scream. [Endless Climb] is, first and foremost, the most intense emotional experience we have or will ever be put through in our lives. It is this that makes it so powerful.
And yet it is for this powerful prognostication ability that many of us are killed.
----
[Endless Climb] is triggered by thinking too deeply about fate and predestination vs. choice and decisions within Sburb, in the abstract. From what I have observed, these are the three most common causes:
> * The Mind player ends up in an alternate/offshoot timeline.
> * A player decides to deliberately ignore the Mind player's advice.
> * The Mind player hears about the ectobiological cloning session, and entertains the idea of not sending the children to their proper meteors.
(Incidentally, it is of interest of the session's temporal stability that you not let this last one happen. [Climb]ed Mind players have been known to attempt to kill the paradox children before they ever leave the lab.)
Less common causes include prophecies and time travel stable loops directly involving the Mind player, and philosophical discussions about the meaning of causality in Sburb.
----
The real brain-breaking, from my perspective, is this: not only did I witness every conceivable split in the timeline and decision point, I experienced all of them first-hand, a hundred selves at once. And because most of these decisions lead to doomed timelines, the fear and pain and anger completely overwhelmed the amount of happiness and sanity. I saw, in so many of these timelines, that a single misstep could cause disaster, and so many of the decisions were so trivial - why would my choice of shoes to meet the Denizen for the first time cause a Splinter?
I watched myself take a fork in a dungeon that I didn't even see until three months hence, and the wrong corridor held a pit to which I quickly fell to my death.
I watched my co-players and friends do horrible things when they were threatened with death. When they knew that their lives were forfeit. I watched a few of them sacrifice to make sure that I would continue, or perhaps to sacrifice to make sure that their alpha selves would continue, but I watched far more die with a raised middle finger and a snarl to the Game that spawned them.
I was stabbed and torn apart and crushed and disemboweled, no two deaths the same; and I watched others dying of knives or hammers or explosions or countless other causes. I witnessed just how /little/ it took to tear apart a body.
I saw a thousand Wraiths and a hundred botched Entrances and doom in countless ways, all of which could, and should, have been averted with a decision. And, where I could, I averted them. But there were too many for me to remember, too many for me to do anything but feel, and scream, and hope at least some of them I would recognize later. It felt like eternity, spent watching what one wrong move would cost me, and helpless to change or avert any of these possible futures.
Is it really any wonder that few, if any, of us come out of this experience mentally intact?
----
I think [Endless Climb] was not originally intended to be a berserk. I think it was intended to be a high-level scrying ability with a substantial pluck discount due to the fact that it left you defenseless during the casting and emotionally drained afterwards (i.e. Aggrievance). The real trouble may well have been when it was repurposed to serve as Mind's berserk trigger.
Because when you use [Endless Climb] that was directly triggered by contact with a Player or a concept directly related to players? The Aggrievance code has a source that it latches onto instead of being an abstract "I hate everything and I don't want to play anymore". This, I suppose, is adaptive, insofar as helplessness is not really helplessness until you have no control over the cause? I am unsure about this conclusion.
If any of you code-divers want help me take a closer look at how Aggrievance unfolds, feel free to leave a comment and/or shoot me a PM. I'd like to know more.
----
The favorable result of [Endless Climb], the one I'd hope for, is probably Aggrievance. It's not an experience I would wish on anyone, but a few hours to a few days' worth of helpless catatonia is far preferable to... well, to the other option.
The other option being why Mind players are often mistaken for PKs by the underinformed: the notorious post-climb murder instinct. See, many of us, after going through this experience, are mentally exhausted, unable to perform our duties of being reasonable and logical, and act solely on instinct to eliminate whatever "caused" us so much grief. Which is usually a fellow Player. Unfortunately, there is no way to tell the difference between someone who has gone PK because of temporary post-Climb psychosis, or someone who has gone PK because [Endless Climb] really has permanently broken their mind. The latter is rare, and most likely apocryphal.
Early guides to Mind players tend to emphasize the dangers of "post-Climb psychosis". In my opinion, these dangers are vastly overstated, because there is no way to tell the difference between the temporary single-mindedness of the immediate post-Climb state and someone who has had a complete psychotic break due to the sheer emotional overload of [Endless Climb]. The latter is at least a plausible theory, or at least was, in the time before sburb.org. However, in my time watching the Mind subforum unfold and populate itself with native and current Mind players, I have not heard a single report of a consistent PKer who was originally and permanently broken by [Endless Climb].
I'm not saying it's not possible. I am merely saying that in twenty timestamps I have never seen it happen.
If you are not Mind, and you watch one of us kill for this reason, I am asking only for you to understand, and give us a second chance.
----
Today's apology is a collective apology, by Mind players towards all those we have wronged or bloodied. And a collective thank-you, for those of you reading this that understood, and let us live.
