It was her moment to redeem herself and prove she was a good genius as she helped someone she once wronged retain their life as she mended their relationship and her own inner pain only for some random lunatic to spit in the face of her struggles and build the solution out of nothing in her spare time just for the fun of it.
Yes I can understand part of the pain and frustration she is feeling at this moment…
Then again practicality vs ethics of in this cause moral resolution.
Well apparently it’s Tigerlily’s moment now. Happily, Dr. Lee is providing 100% of Tigerlily’s RDA of “Dismayed Squares” (admittedly, for rather stretched values of “square”).
Quin: You have a point, but Tigerlily has a 200 foot robot.
It took a lot of help from others (mostly Gavotte) to get Virginia to this point. She isn’t really in a position now to say “help me with this bit but not that one”. She still wouldn’t be, mind you, if the clone-o-mat had been built for her benefit rather than for Nick’s.
But wait! Nick has expressed a preference for the cyborg state! He self-identities as an Osprey class whirligig. What would his reaction be if he awoke to find himself alive again in his own cloned body?
With Dr. Lee having just bestowed the traditional means of waking him up…
No doubt Nick would rather be alive, and in any body that can interact with the outside world, rather than cut off or dead. (The adjustment period to the temporary vessel might be a bit rough, though.)
Virginia should be able to transfer Nick’s brain to the body/hull of his choice later. Given the current state of Annex 1, they may even be able to recover the Osprey he was in before. (And give Mr. Green his well-deserved comeuppance!)
Come ON, people! This is a COMEDY. Therefore it will END with a WEDDING.
Which mean NICK will need physical sexual capability in order to mate with Virginia, which he has longed to do ever since consciousness impinged.
Therefore we know what sort of body he will be assigned, yes?
“What would his reaction be if he awoke to find himself alive again in his own cloned body?” What makes you think it clones organic bodies. With the name “mecha-clone-o-mat” I assumed it would clone mecha-s.
Yeah, me too. Although I’m not sure how an Osprey could come out of a machine that size. This is definitely the only unrealistic thing about this situation.
I was going to recommend Skin Horse in a Discord Server I admin in, which has a lot of discussions about gender and sexuality, as an excellent example of a story where dysphoria is treated in a dignified and serious manner while not being too overt about it. I wanted to look up about this before doing it…
Man, I am so pissed off, right now. Someone seriously appropriated Nick in order to deliver their awfulness to the world.
Keep on fighting the good fight, Shaenon. You are the best in the industry, as far as I’m concerned (not to take credit away from Jeff, of course)
The other thing to remember is that at the time he self-identified as an osprey that turned out to be the only thing that would get Skin Horse to help him so it may have been nothing more then a flag of convenience that he needed to fly at the time. Let’s see if he still thinks that way now that being human is an option. ^_^
Well, no. He didn’t like being human at any time in VR or in the Violet drone. I think he genuinely meant it. This is kind of like Tobias from Animorphs. You COULD be permanently human. But that’s not always the best choice, or even one he’s comfortable with.
I think this depends on Lee. If she affirms her love, he’ll stay. Otherwise, no reason to NOT go back to something he liked being.
She was perfectly happy with him as a helicopter, so he could go back to being one and it wouldn’t change her feelings. But he may decide that being human wouldn’t be so bad after all if he actually has a chance with a woman. In his former body (and his chosen lifestyle) he had zero prospects of ever making it with a lady.
But I’m wondering… If that’s a mecha-clone-o-mat, does that mean that the clone that comes out will be a mecha? If so, it could very well produce him a new helicopter body….. maybe even with a few additional… um……. parts.
BTW, I consider this proof that Dr. Lee hasn’t gone full Mad yet or she’d be holding her chin thinking up ways to tweak the mecha-clone-o-mat to augment Nick 3.0 with greater strength, stamina and healing factors…
It’s not proof of anything. She said long ago that she overthinks everything. It doesn’t mean she couldn’t do it. After all, she rigged up a life support system from a coffee pot and a happy meal. But where Virginia thinks about things, Tigerlily just does them. Virginia is just showing her frustration over that point.
Oh, I agree Dr. Lee could improve the mecha-clone-o-mat, as well as your excellent summation of her differences from Dr. Jones. I merely maintain that her idiosyncrasies actually anchor her this side of Madness.
Can the clone-o-mat be tweaked it so that the clone body is circumcised?
It would be bad if Nick were to look down and say “This ain’t kosher!”
As a tangent, I just finished reading all of Nick’s Livejournal/Wordpress blog (including the hilarious UNITY side story!), and didn’t find something I was wondering about: What is Nick’s Hebrew name? “Nicholas” is from Greek, speaking of things that aren’t kosher.
Yiddish is Jewish. It has a lot a Hebrew elements in it.
And the origin of the name Nicodemus is from the Bible. It was the name of a Greek Jew who defended Jesus before the religious leaders. So while yes, it is Greek, it’s also a perfectly good name for a Jew.
While Yiddish does mean “Jewish”, the Yiddish language itself is a Germanic dialect, spoken by Ashkenaz Jews from Central and Eastern Europe. Many Ashkenaz Jewish family names derive from Yiddish-German for historical reasons. The Hebrew name given to a child has nothing to do with the Yiddish-derived family name; it comes from the Hebrew language directly, or more commonly, from the Tanakh/Old Testament (there are couple in the OT that are not from Hebrew; Mordechai and Esther).
While Nicodemus may have been the name of a Jew in the New Testament, the New Testament is not a book that Jews will reach for when trying to find names for their children. “Nicodemus” may well have been used by Jews in the first century CE; Nick Zerhakker, as an Ashkenaz Jew born in the late 20th century CE would have been named according to modern Ashkenaz Jewish custom, which would not have looked to Greek names for any reason to use as the Hebrew name for a child.
Writing a name with Hebrew characters does not make the name a Hebrew name.
For example, “אלברט” (Albert) is a Germanic name, even when written with Hebrew characters, and “Moshe” (משה) is a Hebrew name, even when written with Latin characters.
The bit about babies not remembering pain is controversial (especially in this very context) and (IMHO) at best half-right. The long-term effects of a quite painful and incomprehensible experience before the baby has language with which to *index* their memories is… unclear.
That said, there are still African tribes that circumcise as a manhood rite, so mid-to-late teens.
I can’t find a Hebrew equivalent, but his Hebrew name doesn’t even have to be related at all; he could be named after a family member, or it could even be completely different.
Yeah, that aspect disturbed me too, but if we accept spring powered teleporters, then spring powered super-fast cloning isn’t any sillier. Its just more disturbing to think about.
It looks like I’m the only one who caught the “[function]-o-mat” reference that is nod to the now-finished webcomic about mad science Casey and Andy. One of the creators of which went on to write a well-received novel that was eventually made in to a movie: The Martian.
While it may indeed be an homage to Casey and Andy (I never read it, so I don’t know how specifically similar Tigerlily’s “mega-fly-mecha-clone-o-mat” might be to anything in the comic), there were various thing-o-mats long before there were any webcomics. The Automat – which dispensed food (but not brains as food) – goes all the way back to 1895.
Nominations are open for the Tigerlilly Bam! Award – which is given annually to the mad scientist whose invention is both highly relevant to some immediate situation and most “off the cuff.” The relevance part, granted, may be difficult for mad scientists… and, hey, no fair creating a situation to match the invention. The off-the-cuff part relates the invention arriving with the least amount of research, planning, or development.
Regardless of whether or not Tigerlily’s machine grows him a human body or some kind of android, Nick still has tons of cybernetics laced into his brain. It’s reasonable to think that he would still have the technopathy he had while he was a helicopter, and he may even be able to pilot/inhabit without reinstalling his brain in it. Nick could get the best of both worlds out of this.
What are they going to do if they clone a new body from that brain and it turns out that it *isn’t* Nick? I mean, it sounds like Ανς had been dumping plenty of brains in the sludge…
The way I understand “permanent extirpation” is that the brain is saved in a jar and permanently stuck in the walnut forest. So it would be the rest of the body that ends up in the sludge pit. So there’s a chance that Nick was one of the few, if not the only brain in there. And almost certainly the only one wired with cybernetics and encased in Darpa-grade gel.
Oops, dropped the second alpha, and maybe it should be hyphen-capital-sigma (since the real symbol, the crossed-out capital sigma, isn’t a Unicode glyph… I suppose we could use the Covariance symbol instead, but that’s not in Unicode either, and anyway that seems counter to the spirit of the thing).
On the topic of making nick human while he identifies as a helicopter and the ethics thereof ccombined with shipping and what lee wants, i propose: transformers.
From coffee to coke. Nick is going to be soooo hyper.
Which is what every gamer really needs! ^___^
This will be the first real caffeine buzz Nick has had in some time. And straight to the brain, no less! (Cue “Song 2” by Blur.)
Could be worse: Nick could be a Mountain Dew addict.
Cue Doc and Roger, with their own take on Mad Science. E.g. The wormhole gun.
http://www.the-whiteboard.com/autowb169.html
Priorities, Dr. Lee. Isn’t Nick more important than not having your silliness benchmark moved?
It was her moment to redeem herself and prove she was a good genius as she helped someone she once wronged retain their life as she mended their relationship and her own inner pain only for some random lunatic to spit in the face of her struggles and build the solution out of nothing in her spare time just for the fun of it.
Yes I can understand part of the pain and frustration she is feeling at this moment…
Then again practicality vs ethics of in this cause moral resolution.
Well apparently it’s Tigerlily’s moment now. Happily, Dr. Lee is providing 100% of Tigerlily’s RDA of “Dismayed Squares” (admittedly, for rather stretched values of “square”).
So, like… a rectangle?
Well, she’s an emotional wreck, and her life is a tangle now, so I’d say that Doctor Lee is a wreck tangle.
Quin: You have a point, but Tigerlily has a 200 foot robot.
It took a lot of help from others (mostly Gavotte) to get Virginia to this point. She isn’t really in a position now to say “help me with this bit but not that one”. She still wouldn’t be, mind you, if the clone-o-mat had been built for her benefit rather than for Nick’s.
C’mon, Ginny! Give Tigerlily’s Clone-o-mat a try. You know you want to. ^_~
But how funky will he be? How…fly?
How much flyer can you get than a literal flying machine?
Wonderful! Tigerlilly RULES!
But wait! Nick has expressed a preference for the cyborg state! He self-identities as an Osprey class whirligig. What would his reaction be if he awoke to find himself alive again in his own cloned body?
With Dr. Lee having just bestowed the traditional means of waking him up…
No doubt Nick would rather be alive, and in any body that can interact with the outside world, rather than cut off or dead. (The adjustment period to the temporary vessel might be a bit rough, though.)
Virginia should be able to transfer Nick’s brain to the body/hull of his choice later. Given the current state of Annex 1, they may even be able to recover the Osprey he was in before. (And give Mr. Green his well-deserved comeuppance!)
Come ON, people! This is a COMEDY. Therefore it will END with a WEDDING.
Which mean NICK will need physical sexual capability in order to mate with Virginia, which he has longed to do ever since consciousness impinged.
Therefore we know what sort of body he will be assigned, yes?
Precisely.
Lack of capabilities Idn’t stop Moustachio and Hitty.
Mostachio is LITERALLY inside Hitty right now. Think about it.
“What would his reaction be if he awoke to find himself alive again in his own cloned body?” What makes you think it clones organic bodies. With the name “mecha-clone-o-mat” I assumed it would clone mecha-s.
Yeah, me too. Although I’m not sure how an Osprey could come out of a machine that size. This is definitely the only unrealistic thing about this situation.
Parts is parts.
As Helen was fond of saying, Mad science is not limited by the possible.
Once he’s in a body that can consummate a marriage with Ginny I have no doubt Nick will be happy to self-identify as human. ^_^
Oh god.
All this time, he was literally an attack helicopter that self-identified as a teenage boy from the internet.
Oh god.
I just got that.
OH MY GOOOOOOODDDDD!!!
Skin Horse predates the awful “I identify as an attack helicopter” meme and I hate the universe forever for doing things like this to me.
I was going to recommend Skin Horse in a Discord Server I admin in, which has a lot of discussions about gender and sexuality, as an excellent example of a story where dysphoria is treated in a dignified and serious manner while not being too overt about it. I wanted to look up about this before doing it…
Man, I am so pissed off, right now. Someone seriously appropriated Nick in order to deliver their awfulness to the world.
Keep on fighting the good fight, Shaenon. You are the best in the industry, as far as I’m concerned (not to take credit away from Jeff, of course)
The other thing to remember is that at the time he self-identified as an osprey that turned out to be the only thing that would get Skin Horse to help him so it may have been nothing more then a flag of convenience that he needed to fly at the time. Let’s see if he still thinks that way now that being human is an option. ^_^
Well, no. He didn’t like being human at any time in VR or in the Violet drone. I think he genuinely meant it. This is kind of like Tobias from Animorphs. You COULD be permanently human. But that’s not always the best choice, or even one he’s comfortable with.
I think this depends on Lee. If she affirms her love, he’ll stay. Otherwise, no reason to NOT go back to something he liked being.
She was perfectly happy with him as a helicopter, so he could go back to being one and it wouldn’t change her feelings. But he may decide that being human wouldn’t be so bad after all if he actually has a chance with a woman. In his former body (and his chosen lifestyle) he had zero prospects of ever making it with a lady.
But I’m wondering… If that’s a mecha-clone-o-mat, does that mean that the clone that comes out will be a mecha? If so, it could very well produce him a new helicopter body….. maybe even with a few additional… um……. parts.
I’m sure Dr. Jones can whip up a combat helicopter if it comes to that
From a blender.
BTW, I consider this proof that Dr. Lee hasn’t gone full Mad yet or she’d be holding her chin thinking up ways to tweak the mecha-clone-o-mat to augment Nick 3.0 with greater strength, stamina and healing factors…
It’s not proof of anything. She said long ago that she overthinks everything. It doesn’t mean she couldn’t do it. After all, she rigged up a life support system from a coffee pot and a happy meal. But where Virginia thinks about things, Tigerlily just does them. Virginia is just showing her frustration over that point.
Oh, I agree Dr. Lee could improve the mecha-clone-o-mat, as well as your excellent summation of her differences from Dr. Jones. I merely maintain that her idiosyncrasies actually anchor her this side of Madness.
God Bless you Tigerlilly! Your mojo is going at warp speed!
I understand that as a Mad scientist, get stepped by another mad scientist can be very riling.
I have to agree that it’s unlikely Dr. Virginia Lee has ever experienced an inferiority complex before!
If she cloned from Unity’s brain, would she get a Unity or… brrr… uh, forget I said anything!
Wait! Wait! Very important detail!
Can the clone-o-mat be tweaked it so that the clone body is circumcised?
It would be bad if Nick were to look down and say “This ain’t kosher!”
As a tangent, I just finished reading all of Nick’s Livejournal/Wordpress blog (including the hilarious UNITY side story!), and didn’t find something I was wondering about: What is Nick’s Hebrew name? “Nicholas” is from Greek, speaking of things that aren’t kosher.
Probably Nicodemus.
“Nicodemus” is also Greek.
Yeah, but you can spell it in Hebrew.
“Zerhakker” isn’t exactly screaming Hebrew, either. Yiddish?
Yiddish is Jewish. It has a lot a Hebrew elements in it.
And the origin of the name Nicodemus is from the Bible. It was the name of a Greek Jew who defended Jesus before the religious leaders. So while yes, it is Greek, it’s also a perfectly good name for a Jew.
While Yiddish does mean “Jewish”, the Yiddish language itself is a Germanic dialect, spoken by Ashkenaz Jews from Central and Eastern Europe. Many Ashkenaz Jewish family names derive from Yiddish-German for historical reasons. The Hebrew name given to a child has nothing to do with the Yiddish-derived family name; it comes from the Hebrew language directly, or more commonly, from the Tanakh/Old Testament (there are couple in the OT that are not from Hebrew; Mordechai and Esther).
While Nicodemus may have been the name of a Jew in the New Testament, the New Testament is not a book that Jews will reach for when trying to find names for their children. “Nicodemus” may well have been used by Jews in the first century CE; Nick Zerhakker, as an Ashkenaz Jew born in the late 20th century CE would have been named according to modern Ashkenaz Jewish custom, which would not have looked to Greek names for any reason to use as the Hebrew name for a child.
Writing a name with Hebrew characters does not make the name a Hebrew name.
For example, “אלברט” (Albert) is a Germanic name, even when written with Hebrew characters, and “Moshe” (משה) is a Hebrew name, even when written with Latin characters.
Well, if the clone isn’t circumcised, I believe there are some around who would enjoy remedying that condition.
Yeah, but babies don’t remember pain. I don’t think an adult male would be ecstatic at the idea of being circumcised….maybe with painkillers…
The bit about babies not remembering pain is controversial (especially in this very context) and (IMHO) at best half-right. The long-term effects of a quite painful and incomprehensible experience before the baby has language with which to *index* their memories is… unclear.
That said, there are still African tribes that circumcise as a manhood rite, so mid-to-late teens.
What would they do with the foreskin?
That invention already exists.
It’s called a scalpel.
Look, Virginia: just because you *can* do everything, doesn’t mean that you *have* to.
‘Sorry – what part of “Mad Scientist” do you not understand?’
But Ginny’s sane. Just ask her. ^_^
And that’s the difference between a genius scientist and a Mad scientist.
What I came here to say.
Virginia is good. Tigerlily is solid gone.
How is his brain not being installed to pilot the annex?
It would be a shame to deprive Hitty and Moustachio of that pleasure
It’s a giant robot. Nick can pilot, Hitty handles the smasher arm, Moustachio can navigate. (Hey, it worked for Sei Jyushi Bismark.)
That’s the next step, just so Dr. Lee can one-up Tigerlilly. Then she’ll tweak the clone-o-mat to make a new cyborg body to put the brain in later.
“I say! Let’s give these ruffians what-for!”
“CALIBRATING SMASHER ARM…”
*rapidly pounds unstoppable army of war machines to smithereens*
“SMASHER ARM CALIBRATED.”
*gently knocks hat off of astonished enemy general*
Nicodemus, maybe?
Bleh, meant to reply to Owlmirror above. Sorry.
Are you sure? Apparently that’s Greek too.
I can’t find a Hebrew equivalent, but his Hebrew name doesn’t even have to be related at all; he could be named after a family member, or it could even be completely different.
Sorry, didn’t see your comments before I made mine above. So you can see more responses up there.
Are we _sure_ that’s Nick’s brain and not some random brain that was discarded in the sludge?
Thought we agreed that Dr. Lee knows every inch of Nick’s brain and can identify it with ease.
This question might have been resolved completely if Shaenon and Jeff had not passed on the excellent opportunity for a Hamlet reference.
“Alas, poor Nick! I knew him, Gavotte. A fellow of infinite jest…”
These two seem like an awesomely dangerous/dangerously awesome combination.
Spring-powered?
Yeah, that aspect disturbed me too, but if we accept spring powered teleporters, then spring powered super-fast cloning isn’t any sillier. Its just more disturbing to think about.
“From a coke machine”. Oh I’m certain coke was involved……
She’s Mad. She doesn’t need coke of any sort. She’s got her Mojo back!
It looks like I’m the only one who caught the “[function]-o-mat” reference that is nod to the now-finished webcomic about mad science Casey and Andy. One of the creators of which went on to write a well-received novel that was eventually made in to a movie: The Martian.
While it may indeed be an homage to Casey and Andy (I never read it, so I don’t know how specifically similar Tigerlily’s “mega-fly-mecha-clone-o-mat” might be to anything in the comic), there were various thing-o-mats long before there were any webcomics. The Automat – which dispensed food (but not brains as food) – goes all the way back to 1895.
Nominations are open for the Tigerlilly Bam! Award – which is given annually to the mad scientist whose invention is both highly relevant to some immediate situation and most “off the cuff.” The relevance part, granted, may be difficult for mad scientists… and, hey, no fair creating a situation to match the invention. The off-the-cuff part relates the invention arriving with the least amount of research, planning, or development.
Regardless of whether or not Tigerlily’s machine grows him a human body or some kind of android, Nick still has tons of cybernetics laced into his brain. It’s reasonable to think that he would still have the technopathy he had while he was a helicopter, and he may even be able to pilot/inhabit without reinstalling his brain in it. Nick could get the best of both worlds out of this.
What are they going to do if they clone a new body from that brain and it turns out that it *isn’t* Nick? I mean, it sounds like Ανς had been dumping plenty of brains in the sludge…
The way I understand “permanent extirpation” is that the brain is saved in a jar and permanently stuck in the walnut forest. So it would be the rest of the body that ends up in the sludge pit. So there’s a chance that Nick was one of the few, if not the only brain in there. And almost certainly the only one wired with cybernetics and encased in Darpa-grade gel.
Oops, dropped the second alpha, and maybe it should be hyphen-capital-sigma (since the real symbol, the crossed-out capital sigma, isn’t a Unicode glyph… I suppose we could use the Covariance symbol instead, but that’s not in Unicode either, and anyway that seems counter to the spirit of the thing).
Thus: Ανα-Σ, the company which isn’t the sum of its parts, with neither professional standards nor tolerance for deviation.
Or perhaps we could use the anti-sigma Ↄ ? No, that was silly even when Clau-Clau-Claudius proposed it…
On the topic of making nick human while he identifies as a helicopter and the ethics thereof ccombined with shipping and what lee wants, i propose: transformers.
“You turned me into a PRANCING Headmaster?”
“If you don’t like it, we can–”
“SPORK, no. This is the coolest thing ever!”
THIS is what a fully charged up Mad genius looks like……