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

Re: Template Sweeps

[mind_game]

Whitespace brainphone is it, yes. There might be more elegant methods, but this is one I can do without intervention from somebody else and without having to move my coin-use-capable Device body around. I check every three hours when I'm up, just in case, as a routine maintenance task. So far nobody's been born while I was looking.

1. If you're not specific enough about who you're trying to brainphone, the current version has an adequate error handling system to tell you that that's the problem. So if there were two or more of someone, I'd notice, and someone could go check it out.

2. Currently we don't know about half-alts and our magic doesn't define half-alts as within tolerances for althood. We probably wouldn't find any blends or fractions with the standard sweep method.

3. Not necessarily, but we do tend to have a reasonably good assessment of what magic comes with a universe, and the local Bell usually has the state of the art in mental defense. We'd try other means if we found a Bell who couldn't brainphone or needed magical patching to do it, since this would make it likelier that somebody else would hide from the sweep. It's pretty uncommon for us to find worlds without making immediate non-sweep-based contact with a local Bell.

4. Maybe. This isn't a really big deal, though. Most of the people we're looking for we might as well talk to; the bad-news templates we'd be more careful before tracking them down in a world with really threatening magic levels.

Blank text brainphone messages are confirmed highly unobtrusive.