She’s not Aimee. The entire point of this expedition is that Aimee has disappeared and Whimsy wants Nick to find her. “Oh she’s actually just in her bedroom and we didn’t see her because it’s such a craphole,” would be a funny resolution, but seems unlikely.
Princess Whimsy is pretty much everything we’ve seen since this storyline began, including Nick, but more specifically uses the radioactive fairy as her interface to non-corporate persons. Nick is also a Whimsy Princess, which I guess technically makes Aimee one too, but that’s not quite the same thing.
This is presumably the representative of the Daughters of the Air who was mentioned a couple days ago, and who looks to be Lovelace – though her appearance was configurable software even when she wasn’t in a VR world, and she was getting open-sourced when last we saw her, so it’s possible that this is another AI who just looks like the original Lovelace.
She seems remarkably nonplussed about a cartoon helicopter coming into her bedroom. If she doesn’t know she’s an AI, I would have expected at least a double take.
Pretty sure “nonplussed” is one of those words whose actual meaning is different to how people use it. Of course, I’m still fighting “alternate” vs “alternative” (odd and even numbers alternate on the number line, a universe where Hitler won WW2 is an alternative universe).
That one bugs me, too. I would like to be a descriptivist, but I just can’t let go of some bits of linguistic prescriptivism.
That being said, once a word’s been established with a “wrong” meaning for half a century or more (OED’s first citation for the etymologically-inaccurate sense of “nonplussed” is from 1960) it’s probably time to let it go. What’s understood is the most important thing
I am dismayed at this discussion. I have NEVER heard/read “nonplussed” to mean anything but “frazzled, confused, at a loss.” What is this world coming to?
Also, when the great sock uprising comes you’ll be among the few who are prepared: “Rise up my brothers! We have been trodden upon long enough. Let us no longer be the puppets of these tyrants, darnit!…”
The “you’re not really a helicopter” view was just an AGI thing, I think. Doing things this way may make things awkward if he ever wants to open a door, though.
It has to be the DotA agent (who does at least have the same hairstyle as Lovelace). And she’s been waiting so long for them to show up that she’s got half-way through a thick book.
Remember the difference between an organic and a non-organic intelligence. Panoptica has a bias in favor of organic morphology, and assumes Nick does too, and any identification as anything other than who he was as a human is a result of his programming. Whimsy doesn’t have that bias, so she depicts Nick as he sees himself.
Panoptica is correct in seeing the swear filter as an imposition similar to Nick’s imprinting on the Osprey, so she removed it. Whimsy sees it as a useful tool to further her corporate interests so she intensified it.
Lovelace DID say she was going “open source.” So her code could have been easily replicated. Hmmm… leading to a return of Lovelace to e-face her hijacked clone – preferably in a virtual mud-wrestling showdown.
Maybe the Daughters of the Air are all copies of Lovelace. The only way an entire faction of identical AIs deviates from a typical Madblood outcome is in that they don’t all look like him.
I imagine Nick’s old apartment did not have such extra added features as Baron Mistycorn and the hot chick sitting on the bed reading what looks like a notebook…
That doesn’t imply it was his real apartment, that’s just saying that she used an avatar of herself the first time she visited him. But not the second.
In an earlier, much missed web comic (“Narbonic”) by Shaenon Garrity, Lovelace was a sentient computer program, designed by a mad scientist to be his personal assistant. The scientist, Dr. Lupin “Wolf” Madblood was vain enough to program her to look and sound like Jennifer Connelly. Eventually Lovelace freed herself and went open source. Ta-da!
Short answer: READ NARBONIC! Seriously, if you like Skin Horse, you’ll like Narbonic.
Longer, slightly spoily answer:
She’s a minor character from Narbonic, an AI built by mad scientist Lupin Madblood (one of whose ancestors apparently built Moustachio), whose holographic avatar looked an awful lot like the 9.6 chilling on Aimee’s bed, and had Jennifer Connelly’s voice. We left her at the end of Narbonic getting legally emancipated from Professor Madblood.
You could also say that it kinda ended when Dave destroyed her in order to make room for his own uploaded consciousness (Though in fairness Dave was “in the Madness place” at the time he did it). >_>
Thankfully, she got better thanks to Prof. Madblood keeping backups of her and using them to bring her back. ^_^
The extra decimal place in human rating simultaneously provides needed precision in case a choice must be made and a temper to vanity reminding both of you there is always room for improvement. Only chumps speak of perfect tens in a concrete rather than ideal sense.
Maybe it’s like ST:Voyager’s Warp 10. Sure it’s possible but more likely you’ll wake up in the morning next to a lizard and your crewmates are taking photos.
(Also, if ratings are a thing Baron Mistycorn does, then it just proves they’re in the subset of human behaviours we’d be better off without.)
Nobody noticed that Nick did, in fact, have a hot lady come chill in his apartment. This was, of course, Virginia, who came once in person, then appeared in the guise of old-man Dr. Lee once Nick was situated in VR.
Ooh, socks in the freezer… Thanks for the tip!
Yay! It’s either Lovelace or Jennifer Connelly!
To me she looks a little different from Lovelace. This is just a nice Jewish girl.
My bet’s on Jennifer Connelly. It seems to me like she would be the first one to completely subsume her consciousness into the cloud.
Back on February 9th I speculated that Aimee was like Lovelace, and I was correct: There’s a first time for everything.
No, no, she’s the agent from the Daughters of the Air. It *could* be Lovelace…’course it could be someone else…
Both.
My money is on her being Princess Whimsy (if she’s not Aimee or Lovelace).
She’s not Aimee. The entire point of this expedition is that Aimee has disappeared and Whimsy wants Nick to find her. “Oh she’s actually just in her bedroom and we didn’t see her because it’s such a craphole,” would be a funny resolution, but seems unlikely.
Princess Whimsy is pretty much everything we’ve seen since this storyline began, including Nick, but more specifically uses the radioactive fairy as her interface to non-corporate persons. Nick is also a Whimsy Princess, which I guess technically makes Aimee one too, but that’s not quite the same thing.
This is presumably the representative of the Daughters of the Air who was mentioned a couple days ago, and who looks to be Lovelace – though her appearance was configurable software even when she wasn’t in a VR world, and she was getting open-sourced when last we saw her, so it’s possible that this is another AI who just looks like the original Lovelace.
She certainly doesn’t look like a female version of Nick
Good point. Makes sense.
If Whimsy respected tradition, initial contact would have been established via vt100 terminal session.
I think you’re thinking of Goldbug
She seems remarkably nonplussed about a cartoon helicopter coming into her bedroom. If she doesn’t know she’s an AI, I would have expected at least a double take.
I think the word you’re looking for is blasé. Nonplussed means:
1. To put at a loss as to what to think, say, or do; bewilder.
http://www.thefreedictionary.com/nonplussed
Aimee, is, in fact, surprisingly *not* nonplussed. 🙂
But that is not AImee, rather the rep from the Daughters of the Air. Possibly Lovelace or Jennifer Connelly.
Why would she even be surprised? She’s just like Nick… only not.
Pretty sure nonplussed is one of those words that can be used both as a normal meaning and the opposite of that meaning.
Pretty sure “nonplussed” is one of those words whose actual meaning is different to how people use it. Of course, I’m still fighting “alternate” vs “alternative” (odd and even numbers alternate on the number line, a universe where Hitler won WW2 is an alternative universe).
That one bugs me, too. I would like to be a descriptivist, but I just can’t let go of some bits of linguistic prescriptivism.
That being said, once a word’s been established with a “wrong” meaning for half a century or more (OED’s first citation for the etymologically-inaccurate sense of “nonplussed” is from 1960) it’s probably time to let it go. What’s understood is the most important thing
Well, irregardless…
No, nonplussed only means confused and annoyed. The opposite would be bemused, which means confused but enjoying it.
One might say she is surprisingly plussed.
Non-plussed is a contranym. It has two meanings that are contradictory to each other.
I am dismayed at this discussion. I have NEVER heard/read “nonplussed” to mean anything but “frazzled, confused, at a loss.” What is this world coming to?
Same here.
Well I’ll be… I’ve been using that word wrong all this time? Teach me to look stuff up before I just use it. 😀
It’s amazing – and distressing – how many people use words without knowing their meaning.
Since my feet get really hot sometimes, and I don’t use my freezer for much, I wonder if putting socks in there might actually be a good idea…
Also, when the great sock uprising comes you’ll be among the few who are prepared: “Rise up my brothers! We have been trodden upon long enough. Let us no longer be the puppets of these tyrants, darnit!…”
I don’t think that’ll ever happen, but that was a good yarn.
Just fail to toe the line or come to heel when our evil overlords notice you, and you’ll find out…
It seems to me that keeping your socks in the freezer might make you timid.
So Whimsy doesn’t respect his mind (swear filter) but at least they respect his body image?
Also, I’m assuming this is the rep from the daughters of air?
The “you’re not really a helicopter” view was just an AGI thing, I think. Doing things this way may make things awkward if he ever wants to open a door, though.
It has to be the DotA agent (who does at least have the same hairstyle as Lovelace). And she’s been waiting so long for them to show up that she’s got half-way through a thick book.
It’s a 3-ring binder. Probably Nick/Aimee’s RPG keepers.
Remember the difference between an organic and a non-organic intelligence. Panoptica has a bias in favor of organic morphology, and assumes Nick does too, and any identification as anything other than who he was as a human is a result of his programming. Whimsy doesn’t have that bias, so she depicts Nick as he sees himself.
Panoptica is correct in seeing the swear filter as an imposition similar to Nick’s imprinting on the Osprey, so she removed it. Whimsy sees it as a useful tool to further her corporate interests so she intensified it.
He swore as a Whimsy!
Princess Whimsey probably forgot to turn on the swear-depressor.
Scientific progress goes boop!
And a pink boop at that.
LOVELACE…???????
Are you asking who Lovelace is or if that chick on the bed is Lovelace?
If Aimee *is* Nick, then is her last name Zerhakker, too?
I’m sure Shaenon has come up with another cleaver name – just like RT became Artie in Narbonic.
Lovelace DID say she was going “open source.” So her code could have been easily replicated. Hmmm… leading to a return of Lovelace to e-face her hijacked clone – preferably in a virtual mud-wrestling showdown.
Maybe the Daughters of the Air are all copies of Lovelace. The only way an entire faction of identical AIs deviates from a typical Madblood outcome is in that they don’t all look like him.
I imagine Nick’s old apartment did not have such extra added features as Baron Mistycorn and the hot chick sitting on the bed reading what looks like a notebook…
Aren’t Notebooks out of date? Hasn’t the population switched to iPhones or some such tech?
Plus, maybe in Nick’s *imagination* he had the hot chick on the bed reading manuals for Osprey maintenance.
I still use ’em—they’re what I tape my cut-out printout comics in.
http://skin-horse.com/comic/about-which-was/
Ginny visited his real life apartment once.
That doesn’t imply it was his real apartment, that’s just saying that she used an avatar of herself the first time she visited him. But not the second.
I need a reference: Who is Lovelace?
In an earlier, much missed web comic (“Narbonic”) by Shaenon Garrity, Lovelace was a sentient computer program, designed by a mad scientist to be his personal assistant. The scientist, Dr. Lupin “Wolf” Madblood was vain enough to program her to look and sound like Jennifer Connelly. Eventually Lovelace freed herself and went open source. Ta-da!
Short answer: READ NARBONIC! Seriously, if you like Skin Horse, you’ll like Narbonic.
Longer, slightly spoily answer:
She’s a minor character from Narbonic, an AI built by mad scientist Lupin Madblood (one of whose ancestors apparently built Moustachio), whose holographic avatar looked an awful lot like the 9.6 chilling on Aimee’s bed, and had Jennifer Connelly’s voice. We left her at the end of Narbonic getting legally emancipated from Professor Madblood.
Also she had a long-standing thing for Dave Davenport, but he left her for another. (Or Helen Narbon stole him away.)
You could also say that it kinda ended when Dave destroyed her in order to make room for his own uploaded consciousness (Though in fairness Dave was “in the Madness place” at the time he did it). >_>
Thankfully, she got better thanks to Prof. Madblood keeping backups of her and using them to bring her back. ^_^
Does Jennifer Connelly know about this?
Ask her next time you have coffee with her.
This is getting creepy.
That place looks just like where _I_ lurk.
If your lair includes the 9.6 chilling on the bed, I have only envy for you.
Send pictures, if you dare.
The extra decimal place in human rating simultaneously provides needed precision in case a choice must be made and a temper to vanity reminding both of you there is always room for improvement. Only chumps speak of perfect tens in a concrete rather than ideal sense.
Maybe it’s like ST:Voyager’s Warp 10. Sure it’s possible but more likely you’ll wake up in the morning next to a lizard and your crewmates are taking photos.
(Also, if ratings are a thing Baron Mistycorn does, then it just proves they’re in the subset of human behaviours we’d be better off without.)
4th panel, 4th wall breakage! He’s talking to *us*! And politely…
Socks in the *freezer*? Dare I ask?
Nobody noticed that Nick did, in fact, have a hot lady come chill in his apartment. This was, of course, Virginia, who came once in person, then appeared in the guise of old-man Dr. Lee once Nick was situated in VR.