Talk To Glowfic Characters

[alicornucopia]

So we've started answering comments in "How To Read Effulgence" in character, and that's not really the ideal platform for those conversations. This is! You may address characters here and we may opt to answer in character. You will get a kind of loosely "backstage" out-of-continuity version of the character (in continuity proper, you cannot talk to them, since you aren't there) and if you want them at a specific (past relative to where we're writing) point in time, feel free to specify (e.g. "Addy in 1932", "Shell in her box", "the Joker while committed", "Minus right after he woke up from turning", "the alethiometer on the subject of 1207").

Any glowfic author may use this thread to receive questions.

You may also be interested in Make My Characters Talk To Each Other.

Comments

Jane Error Messages

[daniel_h]

Jane, I apologize if this is a sensitive subject, but I’m curious about the error messages given when you interacted with Materia unprotected.

What do the numbers mean, what do the messages mean, and what do they have to do with each other? I could figure out some of them (like the 3 blind mice or the PEBCAK), but was completely stumped by at least one of those three aspects of most of them.

For reference, here are those errors again, along with the worlds in which they appeared:

Sunshine, 559

cannot reticulate splines

Yggdasil, 6008

missing 1s in binary code

Apollo, 2

cannot count

Helios, 909

out of memory, all alone in the moonlight

Milliways, 0

problem exists between chair and keyboard

Atlantis, 3

blind mice

Rainbow, 112358

inferior pattern recognition

Wellspring, 18920

cannot connect to monitor lizard

Aurum, 99

bottles of beer on the wall

Alethia, 7788

lycanthropy

Re: Jane Error Messages

[daniel_h]

For an example of what I’m asking, Jarvis said that “cannot reticulate splines” is a reference to a video game where one of the loading messages was “reticulating splines”; presumably if reticulating splines is impossible, then at some point something will go wrong. I am unsure what if anything it has to do with being error code 559, though, or with this being the Sunshine world. Similarly “out of memory, all alone in the moonlight” is a play on “out of memory” computer errors and the song Memory, but bears no obvious relation to the number 909.

On the other hand, “error code 99: bottles of beer on the wall” is an obvious reference to the song, with the error code number and explanation making sense together, but doesn’t have an obvious reason of being a computer error.

So, my questions are, for each world above with their given error code and error message:

1. Does the error code number have a relevant meaning, like 112358 does as a Fibonacci reference?
2. Does the error message have a relevant meaning, like “cannot reticulate splines” or “problem exists between chair and keyboard” does as a type of joking error. If so, what?
3. Does the combination of code and message have a relevant meaning, like “error 99: bottles of beer on the wall” being a song reference? If so, what?
4. What relation, if any, do the above meanings have to computer errors

Re: Jane Error Messages

[mind_game]

Didn't see this when the first comment was posted at all for some reason.

Some of the numbers are random and unrelated to the corresponding error message; others (0, 2, 3, 99, and 112358) are incorporated into the jokes. The messages were pulled from a joke file I had socked away without filtering for quality and the numbers which didn't serve any jokes are just their position in the list of silly error messages.