The Sims

Magic Markers and violent world

/ staticsky

I remember in 5th grade it was campaign season for student council & student body President. For the campaigns no one was allowed to use pre-printed boards, every campaign poster was hand drawn – suddenly the halls were no longer swimming in the smells of poor hygiene, but rather that smell plus Magic Markers.  You’d almost get a buzz going to the cafeteria. 

I walk into the office and discovered the smell of magic markers haven’t changed and I wonder if the giddiness I feel is from its brain alerting effects of its smell or just good memories of childhood.

So the supplies for the science fair arrived today.  And the Cela seems to be taking the “science fair” concept surprisingly literally.  Markers, boards, scissors, tape.  And if I was to make a unscientific observation but the nostalgia of these items has given everyone a giddiness and suddenly there is interest in this project.  Either that or the smell of magic markers also has give them a bit of a buzz.

A stack of personal slates had arrived, one each.  We all now have some access to the Intecela, basically The Sims Corner of the local grid.  There is a “read me” file (how retro) that let us know we’ll be getting wider access after the fair and any materials we develop should be place on our corner so that everyone can access.

This morning’s meeting started with the non-project statuses, because everyone seems to be jonesing to talk about what they’ve learned even it is things like the fact that two floors below us they have turned their cafeteria into an amazing curry place.  Hopefully we get access to move about soon, maybe after the fair.  Other folks say they’ve heard that there are other themed cafeterias and even hang out rooms on other floors.  Stan said there are a set of “pillow rooms” in the floor above us, which raised some eyebrows.  

Chen presented some posters he printed out last night, and they were not for the fair.  they were like tests for color blindness, in color you could clearly read “This Cela Sucks” and “I Enjoy The Outdoors What Abzu?” He had to say Abzu like “about you” to make the “joke” work.  It didn’t, it don’t work.  Chen’s idea was to put them up everywhere because unreadable if viewed with the B&W monitors.  Sam from anthropology noted that there was probably full time staff somewhere monitoring us, and with color monitors.  The B&W ones I saw were probably just a show of power, alluding to the archetype of surveillance being B&W monitors.  Lisa, the biology team lead, chimed in that depending on the contrast settings on the B&W monitors the messages might actually be visible since the color blind tests concentrate on hues and not brightness of the colors.  I think they were ganging up a bit on Chen, probably because of that “what Abzu” joke.  Chen seemed unbothered and noted he was putting them up around the office anyway.  Respect.

Now to the projects.  I asked if the Tangent team would be able to present today so that tomorrow we could get more folks on the science fair team and they said they were ready already.  If you’re just basing a presentation on hunches and memories of data, as there is no data, a presentation can come together really quickly.

Kim from Geology and Otto from Chemistry made the presentation.  Very professionally they started with a long list of caveats that they wrapped up by stating that their conclusions were basically “maybe.”  None the less everyone was in rapt attention.

We took what we thought was a minor change (7 millimeters) and saw the changes quickly and dramatically.  The “ape” that didn’t die on tangent kept leading wars and battles, changing a culture of a species that really didn’t have much of one.  Since we were looking at so much in aggregate we didn’t notice that these small things let to smelting for weapons while other ape communities hadn’t even developed agriculture.  The CO2 in Tangent was higher our “feelings” that storms were worse, likely were true.  Environmental lead increased, Tangent’s apes and lizards were getting dumber, their executive functions muted.  Quick violent reactions were more common.  Weapons of war became the technological drivers in the northl.  It wasn’t a feeling – Tangent was more violent, weather to war.  To say this is just a theory though is being generous.  There isn’t any data to point to – just memories of data.  Victim to the Big Boom.

There was a quiet, I didn’t want to call status to close on what really seemed like a downer, though what they were saying was fascinating.  Then from the back someone shouted “holy shit that’s a lot of goggles.”

Boxes and boxes of old school VR goggles were opened by the entrance.  One thing to say about Abzu is that they don’t have supply chain issues.  You put it in the Sacred Form and it appears the very next morning.

I got to spend a little time with Janice today.  We didn’t talk about “us” if there is such a thing for us anymore, but we did talk about Sally.  Sally is excited about her “field trip” to another cela next week, but Janice is rightfully terrified.  She is trying to talk herself down of course.  Sally spent a lot of the evening on her slate talking with her new acquaintances, friends?  Janice met some of the kids and briefly their parents, it all seemed normal even if the conversation with the parents started with the screen started with a disclaimer dialog box noting the rules of the communication:  No real names (except for the children), no discussion of what you or anyone in your cela are doing, no discussion of any personally identifiable information of anyone in your cela, etc. etc. The faces and voices of the adults were obscured digitally, though they seemed and sounded like normal folks and not like obscured witnesses on an old time TV investigative show.  Okay it didn’t seem normal at all, but really what choice did Janice have, and this all was so important to Sally.

Janice also said that Sally had skimmed what was on the shared slate, maybe I should call that the Unicorn Slate, and was not happy with Latin as a new subject. 

Over to you Adit – How’s Kaitlin? I heard she had a reaction to the cafeteria’s food.

Distraction does set the mind at ease

/ staticsky

As has been the case before, our team lives and relaxes by doing the work – work on our project (or project adjacent) – work they hopefully still love, and especially now when there is nothing else.  Again this morning, and I think perhaps every morning from now on, begun with the team gathering in our central area.  The status brief portion of the status meeting was indeed brief – as work on anything at all had just began. It was mostly teams announcing what hardware they need immediately and that for what items they would be filling out additional sacred forms.  

Next, and perhaps in reality the most important part of the meeting, was the status about – us.  Our people, this place, what we have learned.  Janice started by first thanking everyone who had volunteered to help with Sally, i.e. being Sally’s escorts, guard the bathrooms for her, etc.  And she made an announcement that got a cheer, Sally talked with other kids yesterday.  As much as Sally loves us and has fun with us, let’s face it we are all adults, perhaps not in maturity, but definitely in age.  So a lady named Jane (wait, why does Lady Jane sound familiar?) stopped by Janice and Sally’s room short of breath and told Sally she had rushed over because she realized that Sally had never been invited to the meeting which had just started. Since she noted Sally wasn’t online she had rushed over to let her know.  [there were chuckles amongst the team about this glorious example of Abzu’s high tech organization].  What meeting?  Oh, it was Sally’s introduction to some of the other kids in Abzu.  Sally’s slate (Abzu supplied, not this one) had been configured with the, get this, The Intecela – the Abzu wide grid.  Sally had more access than anyone on our team.  The call went well – it sounds like, surprise, surprise, the other kids are pretty geeky too.  None of them are in our Cela so Lady Jane (I’m sticking with that) is going to arrange a field trip soon for Sally to meet them all in person.  More cheering all around.

After that great news the meeting got pretty lighthearted. Chen noted that he and Erik had a chat with some folks from another group that works on our floor.  They didn’t tell Chen or Erik what their projects entailed because supposedly our team is supposed to go into the science fair all “tabula rasa.” Yeah, that won’t be hard.  Anyway they did let Chen and Erik know that our team is nicknamed The Sims around the Cela. While we don’t know anything about anyone, it looks like they know what we do, I wonder if they know more about what we do than we do.

The general reaction to the nickname was met positively by the folks that had even heard of the old game. When Chen started explaining the game he went off on a tangent about putting all the sims folks in a pool and then building a fence around it so they couldn’t escape and they all would swim themselves to death, there was an uncomfortable hush until Alice chimed in with a very loud aside “guess I better double check his code.”  Chen laughed the hardest.

“Sims it is” I ended the meeting with, and then called out folks to work on the early stages of Visual POV.  Kaitlin and Adit of course because it eventually will segue into POV but also Chen and Makda to work on a basic VR device so we can quickly get private communication happening outside of just Sally’s slate.  Makda is part of Kaitlin’s team and seems to have an affinity for retro-tech like Chen – once they have the parts we’ll have our private chalk board up and running in a day (or two)

I desperately want to talk to Janice about “us” and that seems incredibly selfish with everything else going on.  I just have to wait.  And how does “us” work in a Cela anyway?  The truth is this is a prison for us, certainly a very interesting one, but it is a place we can’t leave – and it is weird that fact seems to be normalized already.

I think this is why my entries have been longer and more regular – I have internalized I have nothing else I can do, which is a lot more restricting than my previous situation of just not doing anything else.

And Adit, this is weird.  This “blog” has always been a semi-personal journal, the fact that we are also now formally using it as communication between us makes it awkward.  Just wanted to put that out there.