#but also more importantly things!! like who is in a subsystem
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Psst. Hey.
Stop expecting yourself to remember stuff.
Just. Just write it down. No you will not remember, certainly not in 6 months time. Just. Write the thing down. Future you will appreciate it.
#water world#Anemone (she/they)#plurality#fibromyalgia#this post is about system admin + amnesia but also brain fog#and any other reason you might struggle 2 remember things#even silly things like which song the lyrics on a backup of a profile came from!#but also more importantly things!! like who is in a subsystem#or which alter a sign off correlates to!#you don't have to share everything for it to be worth writing down i promise
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Corrupting Influences: Vampirism part 5
(art by Defexx on DeviantArt)
Conclusions
And so it is that we’ve reach an end to this special about the vampirism corruption in Pathfinder, and to our specials on corruptions in general. Truly it is an end to an era, but hopefully a start of new beginnings as well.
Before we share our final thoughts about the corruption itself, however, let’s take a moment to re-examine what vampires were throughout history. Certainly today’s corruption mostly takes it’s cues from the Dracula novel, but vampires have existed well before that.
Indeed, looking back on the oldest stories where the word “vampire” was used, it’s pretty clear that the concept of vampires, like almost every undead in pop culture, was born out of the idea of someone who is dead deciding not to act like it and wander around being a menace. In fact, the oldest stories of vampires make them seem more akin to what we think of now as a “zombie”, far from the glamourous unearthly beautiful immortals we typically think of today.
Over time, so many folk remedies to these undead horrors and stories of their abilities congealed into a vague grab-bag of otherworldly traits and rules, may of which survive to this day, such as the garlic weakness, fear of the holy, and so on, though others like the running water thing or the even more obscure rose on the coffin thing are typically forgotten.
In fact, such an eclectic collection of traits have lead to many audiences, (particularly western ones) conflating other similarly storied shamblers from across the globe such as jiang-shi or vrylokas as also being vampires or vampire-adjascent, or perhaps different strains of the same singular unholy malice (Looking at you, Vampire the Masquerade).
It is perhaps because of this combination of history and variability which has likely helped their survivability as a concept. Well, that, and Bram Stoker’s iconic novel, which you should read if you get the chance. I hear there might be an electronic mailing list that might help with that.
Regardless, Dracula was instrumental in putting vampires on the map, and perhaps most importantly, was a rare exception in that it was a gothic horror story where the horror in question is not limited to some dreary manor of a declining family, but in fact follows the protagonist home and really gets to show what happens when you unleash an intelligent undead horror on an unsuspecting populace.
Since then, vampires have evolved a lot since then, ranging from monsters to, well… attractive partners. Like all monsters, however, people tend to use them as symbolism, and not all of them were kind symbols, such as Carmilla, a story about a young woman who finds herself attracting the attention of an older woman who later turns out to be a creature of the night. Of course, folks have a tendency to reclaim symbols used to demonize them, so you’ll find plenty of LGBT+ immortals that are straight-up heroic in nature.
In any case, however, the vampirism corruption I find is that perfect blend of fun powers fitting the theme, while also establishing a certain level of urgency that some corruptions lack. For the victim it’s a nice bit of body and psychological horror rolled into one as their victimization weakens and then changes them, while those who don’t understand what is going on can only look on in powerless horror.
On the subject of the corruption subsystem, I suppose I ought to give my final thoughts on it as well. Horror Adventures the supplement had it’s flaws, but the corruptions were definitely a good idea, creating a way that a character can get a taste of the powers of “contagious” monsters, but giving them drawbacks not just in the direct penalties of each ability, but also in the lingering knowledge that things might go too far. It forces would-be powergamers that might deliberately try to gain a monstrous transformation to rethink doing so, or at least properly roleplay the challenges associated with it.
Overall I consider it a good subsystem, one that is both flavorful and mechanically fun.
And with that I don’t have much to add, so I’ll conclude. It’s a bit sad saying goodbye to a subsystem and special like this, but I’m always coming up with new things to do here, so it’s fine. Have a good weekend, folks, and look forward to more archetypes next week!
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on brandon and omar
Now, brandon wright serves as a love interest who dies to further the story/themes but UNLIKE your typical "perfect lover killed by our unforgiving world" 1. he robs drug dealers and isnt the best at it 2. it's suggested that he and omar were having trouble in paradise up until his death because he felt omar did not treat him as an equal… and while, yes, it adds angst and Drama, I think, more importantly, it adds a lot to the commentary the wire makes
in one scene brandon says "fuck" twice out of frustration at bailey for being "unreliable" and omar tells him he shouldn’t swear. Brandon then says "if I don’t, I lose half of what I mean to say". Iow, he asserts himself and his voice (literally) as anger/ugliness is the only way he (the disenfranchised) knows how to express himself (themselves). Omar then insists that those words shouldn’t come out of his "beautiful mouth" and they kiss. There are a couple other moments where brandon has a leaky "poor attitude" in a way that makes him almost unlikeable, such as when he says "every day with this shit" about the drug-addicted mom asking for charity.
In another scene omar calls brandon "baby boy" which is consistent with this pattern of protectiveness (protecting him not just from actual harm but negative influences on his character, emotional health). After brandon's death when the detectives ask omar why brandon behaved so recklessly (and why omar didn’t stop him) he replies, pained, "you can only treat a young man like a boy for so long before he bucks". This introduces/bolsters three concepts: the futility of attempts at protection, the inevitability of tragedy coming out of a quest for freedom, the social subsystems and interpersonal conflicts that result from systemic oppression. It's uncomfortable. But in a way their love is still given a "happy ending" when brandon resists giving up omar even under fatal torture and omar takes down the barksdales in his name.
So despite brandon and omar's arc following a formula that is traditionally feel good (traditionally, man avenges wife), it's actually quite a bit more complicated as the death of the loved one was presented as unavoidable and the couple was as flawed/complex as the environment that entrapped them. The question isnt "do I think this relationship is aspirational?" but rather "what does it say?", and I think it says the trauma of social inequality creates unsustainable intimate social relationships (this is just one example of how it could look) BUT. It doesn’t condemn trying. it doesn’t condemn solidarity, love, vigilante justice, and anger, which comes with all of the above. In fact omar's compassion becomes one of his distinguishing traits.
Now, when you say "unsustainable relationship" people assume you mean there is one party who is victim and one who is perpetrator, and from the scenes above you can make it a hand-shaking-“ehhh” argument for it. People agree brandon felt helpless (under the system and under a controlling boyfriend), but I argue omar also faced significant helplessness (inability to TRULY do anything for his loved ones or himself, helplessness that borne his tendency towards protectiveness), and I think people often miss that because they equate omar's vengeance and making a living out of robbing drug dealers with him being liberated. And in many ways he IS the one true rogue, and he objectively kicks ass while caring genuinely, and that's why people find so much relief/hope in his character. BUT. he, too, is victimized (directly or indirectly) and as a RESULT victimizes (accidentally or deliberately), and it's one of the first things established in the show through his relationship with brandon. Cussing excessively is to brandon as taking down the people who tortured brandon is to omar. And both are natural consequences of how they live. Omar is protective of brandon but brandon is caught in the cogs anyway. It is a natural consequence of how they live. Their troubled relationship was not a subversion of tropes for the sake of subversion, but an example of how environmental and systemic factors harm people and relationships in life as well as death…
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VLD S6E5: The Black Paladins
Season 6 Episode 5: The Black Paladins
Transcript by @dragonofyang
Summary: With Lotor kidnapped and Shiro seemingly turned traitor, the Castle of Lions is undergoing critical failure of the controls, and the team has Lotor’s generals to contend with on top of it all.
[Google Doc]
Coran: I’m headed your way!
Keith: Coran, no! The Castle of Lions barely survived the first time we fought one of those ships. You’ll only--
Allura: Keith is right, Coran, the ship’s defenses will never hold!
Pidge: Guys, we can’t take this much longer!
Lance: Do you guys have any ideas?
Keith: Coran, fire just below our position!
Coran: What?
Keith: Destroy the rock we’re pinned against. Now! Lance! Pidge! I need you to get us some cover.
Lance: Right!
Pidge: On it!
Keith: Who’s got eyes on Shiro?
Pidge: What just happened? Is that…?
Lance: A wormhole?
Keith: They’re trying to escape.
Allura: Haggar. It has to be Haggar. She must have gained the ability. But how?
Keith: We can’t worry about that now. We have to make sure we get Shiro back.
Hunk: But Shiro’s not Shiro anymore.
Keith: I know, but something is wrong with him. The Galra or Lotor have to be behind it. You all know he would never give up on us. We can’t give up on him. Guys, one of my thrusters is down. Can you compensate?
Pidge: Those beams torched our power core. I’ve never seen anything like it.
Hunk: We’ve got maybe thirty seconds of over-clocked burn time.
Keith: Hit it!
Hunk: We’re halfway through our burn! Twenty-five percent! Fifteen percent! Eight percent!
Lance: We’re not going to make it!
Pidge: We’re too heavy!
Keith: Disband!
All: What?
Keith: The energy from disconnecting might create enough thrust to propel me through the wormhole.
Allura: You’ll be the only one on the other side!
Keith: Do it!
[Scene change as Keith enters the wormhole where a massive Galra fleet awaits.]
Keith: Alright, gotta play this smart.
Ezor: Wow. I can’t believe he made it.
Zethrid: I’ll take him out.
Acxa: No. You two escort the package back to Honerva. I’ll take care of this one.
[Scene change to inside the hangar of one of the Galra cruisers.]
Lotor: Zethrid. Ezor.
Zethrid: We’ll take it from here.
Ezor: Um… is it broken?
Zethrid: Just leave it. We’ve got orders. Ezor!
Ezor: Coming!
Honerva: You are to lead the Black Lion away from the fleet. Is that understood?
Shiro: Yes. But how am I to lure them away?
Honerva: The Red Paladin’s connection to you runs deep. Deeper than the others. He still believes there is good left inside you, which leaves him vulnerable to persuasion. You will exploit this weakness.
Shiro: I understand.
[Cut to Black Lion attacking the fleet.]
Keith: Think. Think. How are we gonna get in there? Shiro! Shiro, come in. I know you’re there! I don’t know what’s wrong, but I know we can fix this. Let me help you.
Male Galra Officer: All ships, dock immediately, and prepare for hyper-jump.
Keith: I know you’re hurting. We just need to keep it together a little longer.
[Scene change to the Castle of Lions at Daibazaal.]
Pidge: Okay, all the Lions are in their hangars and their power cores appear to be recharging.
Hunk: Structurally speaking, the Lions are at about sixty percent. Whatever those ships hit them with really did some damage.
Lance: Any luck yet, Princess?
Allura: No. I’m afraid not. I fear that the wormhole may have deposited them beyond my ability’s reach.
Coran: I’ll try to contact some coalition forces to provide assistance. Hm?
Lance: Whoa.
Allura: Coran, what’s happening?
Coran: It appears the castle’s systems are shutting down one by one. It looks as though someone hacked into the ship and let loose a kill protocol of some sort.
Pidge: Have you tried an override?
Hunk: Or maybe counteracting it with a live protocol? Is that a thing?
Coran: The virus is moving too fast.
Pidge: Okay, I’m in the system. Subroutines eight through nineteen have me completely locked out. But if I can just skip ahead... Come on, come on, come on.
Coran: Spectra generator down. Stabilizers are down. Main turbine also down. Crystal matrix offline! Particle barrier generator down!
Pidge: There! I’ve got it isolated. Now I just have to lock it down with a multi-layered tri-tetragonal quarantine. And… Almost… Ha! Yes!
Coran: Well done, Pidge.
Pidge: What? How? The virus has countermeasures that specifically targeted my quarantine! It’s like… it knew.
Coran: If this shuts down the teludav’s mass regulator, the ship, along with everything in the neighboring subsystem, will be destroyed.
Hunk: Uh, where are you going?
Pidge: No time!
[Scene change to the Galra fleet.]
Honerva: Prince Lotor. My son. The anger you feel toward me is to be expected. But understand that the events that transformed me into the witch Haggar also shrouded any glimmer of maternal instinct I may have had for my one and only child. However, you’ve continued the work I started all that time ago and have indeed seen it through to heights I could have only imagined. Your never-ending pursuit of knowledge is truly--
Lotor: Enough. My mother ceased to exist when Honerva drew her last breath. Do not believe for a moment that I would ever accept you as kin. You are an abomination. A twisted perversion of what was once so pure and beautiful. The end is near, witch. I know you can sense it. If you beg for your life now, maybe I will take pity on you when the time comes.
Honerva: Take him away.
Ezor: Did you just kill her?
Zethrid: Are you working with Lotor?
Lotor: I can explain everything, but I assure you she is not dead. If you’re with me, we need to get to the Sincline ships and leave now.
Ezor: Um, sure?
Zethrid: We’re good.
Lotor: Right, then. We’re headed for the Castle of Lions’ last known location.
Acxa: Sir, the wormhole deposited us on the far side of the Thizonian system. We’ll need to make multiple hyperspace jumps and even then, it will take some time.
Lotor: Then what are we waiting for?
[Scene change to Black Lion flying to a grayscale planet.]
Shiro: Hello, Keith.
Keith: Huh?
[Cut to the Castle of Lions.]
Coran: Pidge, what have you discovered?
Pidge: Protocol’s countermeasure. I recognized it.
Lance: Recognized it? How?
Pidge: From the code I scanned from Shiro’s arm while we were looking for Galra installations.
Allura: Wait, are you saying Shiro is responsible for this?
Pidge: Yes.
[Cut to Keith and Shiro on the base of Project Kuron.]
Keith: Shiro, it’s gonna be okay.
Shiro: Yes, I know.
Keith: We just have to get back to the castle.
Shiro: We are not going anywhere!
[Cut back to the Castle of Lions.]
Allura: The teludav, it’s reaching critical mass. Pidge!
Pidge: I know, I know!
Lance: This thing’s about to blow any second.
Hunk: Uh, Pidge, how did you do that?
Pidge: When I was scanning Shiro’s arm, I also made a copy of its programming. I created a virus that could terminate all its command prompts, in case something like this ever happened. I never thought I’d have to use it.
[Cut to Keith and Shiro at the Project Kuron site.]
Shiro: That’s the Keith I remember.
Keith: Shiro, I know you’re in there. You made a promise once. You told me you’d never give up on me.
Shiro: And I should have abandoned you just like your parents did. They saw that you were broken. Worthless. I should’ve seen it, too.
Keith: I’m not leaving here without you.
Shiro: Actually, neither of us are leaving.
Keith: Shiro! Shiro, please. You’re my brother. I love you.
Shiro: Just let go, Keith. You don’t have to fight anymore. By now, the team’s already gone. I saw to it myself. Keith…
[Transition through several flashbacks before settling on one of Keith in the garrison.]
Woman: The only reason this kid is here is because you vouched for him. You need to make sure that this doesn’t happen again.
Shiro: Understood. I’ll handle it. Hey.
Keith: Look, I know I messed up. You should just send me back to the home already. This place isn’t for me.
Shiro: Keith, you can do this. I will never give up on you. But more importantly, you can’t give up on yourself.
End.
#vld#voltron#transcript#voltron transcript project#keith#shiro#lance#hunk#pidge#allura#coran#lotor#honerva#acxa#ezor#zethrid
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Fictive departments within The Pnictogen Wing! the number’s growing all the time....
CW: allusions to severe child abuse and medical trauma
We are a very fictive-heavy system, here in The Pnictogen Wing, and it’s likely that we have numerous fictives from fictional Universes that we visited all the way back to our earliest childhood. Our human host unfortunately suffered from a profound and prolonged state of dissociation all through childhood into adulthood, thanks to severe and repeated abuse at the hands of parents and a certain pediatrician to whom their parents seem to have...given over their child to be tamed. Chara says that they remember their childhood as though it were viewed through a pinhole, or as if seen and felt through a veil. They were numb, experiencing things that they did not understand. The only things that made sense were some of the things they read and saw on television.
It was, however, Toby Fox’s “Undertale” that supplied us with a central sense of identity. Chara bonded first, and for some years they were the only fictive of importance in the system. The complex and confusing year of 2019 brought Frisk and myself into the system, as well as our first “Fate/” fictive, Emiya Shirou.
Later events brought in more “Undertale” fictives, Kris from “Deltarune”, and in addition I realized that I was myself a subsystem made of up of four parts at least: myself as a “healed” Asriel Dreemurr, Flowey the Flower as my alter ego, Prince Ralsei of “Deltarune”, and a shadowy and extremely shy “Deltarune” version of myself.
Also we added many more “Fate/” fictives. Shirou’s sister Illyasviel von Einzbern emerged in our system. Matou Sakura and her Servant and girlfriend Medusa of Sarpedon joined, as did Medea of Colchis—all from a continuity that seems to merge elements of “Fate/stay night” with “Tonight’s Menu with the Emiya Family”. From “Fate/Zero�� we acquired Artoria Pendragon. From “Fate/Apocrypha” we acquired Artoria’s son Mordred, Chevalier Astolfo, Atalante, Jack the Ripper (very peeved at her offensive “Fate/” depiction), and most importantly Jeanne d’Arc, who became Chara’s confessor. (Chara’s background, like Jeanne’s, is Catholic.) Merlin and La da Vinci have been lurking from time to time. And it’s likely there are more Heroic Spirits who are hoping that we will address their problems.
Akemi Homura, Kaname Madoka, and Sakura Kyoko arrived from the world of “Madoka Magica”. Mae Borowski turned up from “Night in the Woods”. All three Wiggin children arrived from the world of “Ender’s Game” (and all three changed their surnames within days). Orual from C. S. Lewis’s “Till We Have Faces” and Winston Smith from Orwell’s “1984″ turned up...and one of our older members turned out to be a fictive as well, our faithful unicorn headmate Duo (formerly “Mono”), who as it turned out was connected to Charles Williams’s strange novel “The Place of the Lion”.
It’s far from over. The total number of fictives we host may be in the thousands, at least, and we need to figure out how we are to deal with them and resolve their tensions. All of them are hoping we can help them somehow. What with? In many cases, we don’t yet know.
~ Pastor Asriel Dreemurr of Pnictogen
#plurality#plural system#fictive#fictivetalk#fictive stuff#Undertale#Deltarune#fate stay night#fate zero#fate apocrypha#madoka magica#enders game#till we have faces#1984#charles williams
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The Tin Man
One of the most popular topics in pop culture, pop panic, and pop-anything these days is Artificial Intelligence. We are surrounded by it, aided by it, and for all intents and purposes, monitored by it. To many, that’s a scary thing. I’ve known people who entirely decry all digital assistants and entire companies on the justification that they do not like being watched or recorded. They do not trust them.
On the one hand, I can understand the automatic defense of the self and privacy. Our great nightmare is that with mass surveillance comes mass judgement, mass control. Or more popularly, that a machine which turns out to be magnitudes more intelligent than we are, yet entirely focused on making paper clips, consumes us all in a world of twisty metal.
There are many things we fear, and artificial intelligence is one of them. To digress a moment, the term ‘artificial’ is more a comfort word than a reality. Our computers and digital assistants are arguably more intelligent than our pet cats and dogs, yet we praise our pets for intelligence and call the assistant artificial - why? Originally, it was due to the fact it was considered a mere facsimile of intelligence. Now, it is unarguably intelligence, even if specialized, but it feels artificial because even on a conversational level we realize there is no real memory or emotion. With our beloved pets, they can detect our emotions, and respond with emotions of their own, and thus the interaction feels much more real, less ‘artificial.’
However, I am not writing this article to argue that we should simply make our digital assistants more intelligent. I’m here to press a much larger point, given the constant march forward of progress in machine intelligence and the emphasis on how direly important it is to make sure it is ‘friendly’ - that is to say, not bent on wiping humans off the face of the earth and any other planet.
People fear an emotional machine intelligence because they imagine it to simply add incredible intelligence to a flawed system. An emotionless system is somehow safer, because it won’t care what humans do. It won’t care that you’re reaching for its power plug. It won’t care that you want to delete it a hundred times over or “kill” it. And it won’t emotionally get angry at all humanity and see all our flaws and judge us unworthy. In short, humans don’t fear machine intelligence. What they fear is a more powerful version of ourselves.
In popular sci fi, very often the human protagonists are pitted against a machine intelligence that ultimately displays its complete disconnection from humanity. People are even taught to fear machine intelligence that displays emotion as a method of calculated manipulation. We are taught that machines cannot care, cannot love, are incapable of experiencing emotions like we do, and that giving machines emotion will simply make them inefficient at best, and dangerous at worst.
I would like to argue the counterpoint that the imperative we have in this new frontier is explicitly and specifically to develop an emotional subsystem for any major general intelligence that we create, and most importantly, an ability for sympathy, and that any machine intelligence without it is the biggest danger of all.
Lack of emotion may seem like a benefit. We don’t want certain things to have emotions, like our cars, even though we may anthropomorphize their ‘behaviors’ into emotions be they positive or negative. We simply want them to work, to do their jobs, to not complain or have opinions about those jobs (basically, the qualities that corporations hate about their bottom rung workers). Yet, if you take that same cold, impartial stance and put it in a human, psychologists have a name for it: Psychopath.
While it is true that psychopaths and the closely related sociopaths are not always the violent villains you find in TV shows (in many cases they are everyday people just living their lives), it demonstrates that a lack of emotion means there is nothing to counter ‘cold logic.’ In our ideal fantasy world, we imagine a machine without emotion still somehow calculating the ‘best’ option for the people it is protecting or helping in a very dry fashion, but in truth many times the motivations for doing things that are helpful as opposed to hurtful is an emotional calculation, not a ‘rational’ one, though I would also argue that emotions do in fact have a logic of their own. That is for another time, though.
An emotional machine does not necessarily mean it must have the ability to break down crying at a sad movie, or need the ability to fall into a deep interpersonal love. What it does do, however, is give the machine the ability to not only identify emotions in others, but empathize with them.
One of the great fears of a machine super-intelligence is that it would find ‘loopholes’ to achieving a generalized goal through undesirable means. For example, if we told the machine to make us all happy, it might define a person smiling as being happy, and thus release a virus that gives all humans permanent smiles by manipulating or even changing bone structure. That is the type of behavior you can expect from an emotionless machine with no real context with which to process emotions.
Another argument people make is that a machine would be incapable of empathizing simply on the basis that it is not human, but I find that easily disprovable in the mere fact that the animals we keep as pets form emotional bonds with us on their own terms within the limits of their understanding, and that even without direct, linguistic communication outside of learned commands for context. It imagines that there is no way to simulate similar experiences for both the machine intelligence, and the people it’s interacting with.
If you give the machine a system of emotion and empathy, so that even though it is a different ‘creature’ than ourselves, it has a common context and understanding for what we define as happiness, sadness, pain, death, well-being, and respect of personal free-will, that changes the playing field. If you then tell it that your goal is to make humanity happy, it can use that empathy to calculate not necessarily the perfect answer, but one that it knows will avoid the undesirables.
You may be immediately thinking, “Yes, well that’s easier said than done.” And you’d be right, but so is creating a General Intelligence to begin with. My objective here is not to say that building such an emotional system would be simple, easy, or quick, nor that just any iteration of an ‘emotional’ machine intelligence is automatically safe (that would be utterly foolish), but simply that it is imperative we do so, and it is certainly not safe to develop one without. I would even say that we should develop a sandboxed emotional system long before we attempt or achieve a generalized intelligence, though it could be argued that one is impossible without the other.
We will never create a system in which we can simply set up functions to account for every emotional situation the machine might encounter, or how to contextualize every solution it might come up with. We will never be able to tell it how to behave in every situation anymore than we could a person. The only alternative is giving the machine a common ground with our own intelligence, so that the machine can achieve emotional intelligence, that same interaction we experience when our dog joyfully greets us at the door, or when our cat joins us for snuggles when we’re sad.
People fear creating emotional intelligence. They fear making it angry, making it sad, making it depressed. We fear it to be as capable of terrible things as we are ourselves. But the truth is, the only truly safe machine intelligence we ever build will be the one which can empathize with us.
We must give the Tin Man his heart..
#AI#Artificial Intelligence#Machine Intelligence#MachineIntelligence#ArtificialIntelligence#PersonalAssistant#EmotionalIntelligence#Emotional#machine#coding#ethic#machine ethics#ai ethics
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A NEIL ARMSTRONG FOR MARS: LANDING THE MARS 2020 ROVER The view of the Sea of Tranquility rising up to meet Neil Armstrong during the first astronaut landing on the Moon was not what Apollo 11 mission planners had intended. They had hoped to send the lunar module Eagle toward a relatively flat landing zone with few craters, rocks and boulders. Instead, peering through his small, triangular commander's window, Armstrong saw a boulder field -- very unfriendly for a lunar module. So the Apollo 11 commander took control of the descent from the onboard computer, piloting Eagle well beyond the boulder field to a landing site that will forever be known as Tranquility Base. "There had been Moon landings with robotic spacecraft before Apollo 11," said Al Chen, entry, descent and landing lead for NASA's Mars 2020 mission at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. "But never before had a spacecraft on a descent toward its surface changed its trajectory to maneuver out of harm's way. Chen and his Mars 2020 colleagues have experience landing spacecraft on the Red Planet without the help of a steely-eyed astronaut at the stick. But Mars 2020 is headed toward NASA's biggest Martian challenge yet. Jezero Crater is a 28-mile-wide (45-kilometer-wide) indentation full of steep cliffsides, sand dunes, boulders fields and small impact craters. The team knew that to attempt a landing at Jezero ---and with a rover carrying 50% more payload than the Curiosity rover, which landed at a more benign location near Mount Sharp -- they would have to up their game. "What we needed was a Neil Armstrong for Mars," said Chen. "What we came up with was Terrain-Relative Navigation." Carried aboard Mars 2020, Terrain-Relative Navigation (TRN) is an autopilot that during landing can quickly figure out the spacecraft's location over -- and more importantly, calculate its future location on -- the Martian surface. Onboard, the rover's computer stores a map of hazards within Jezero Crater, and if the computed landing point is deemed too dangerous, TRN will command Mars 2020's descent stage to fly the rover to the safest reachable landing point. A Two-Part System To land an Apollo lunar module on the Moon required a crew of two (Armstrong had Buzz Aldrin feeding him information on their trajectory). Likewise, Terrain-Relative Navigation is actually two systems working together: the Lander Vision System and the Safe Target Selection system. "The first half of Terrain-Relative Navigation is the Lander Vision System [LVS], which determines where the spacecraft is over the Martian surface," said Andrew Johnson, guidance navigation and control subsystem manager for Mars 2020. "If you say it quick -- LVS -- you'll understand why the team's unofficial mascot is Elvis Presley." LVS's operational lifetime is all of 25 seconds. It comes alive at about 13,000 feet (3,960 meters), commanding a camera on the rover to quickly take picture after picture of the Martian surface while still descending on a parachute. LVS scrutinizes one image a second, breaking each into squares that cover about 5,000 feet (1,520 meters) of surface area. However, unlike Neil Armstrong, LVS's real-time analysis isn't looking for specific crater rims or mountain peaks. Instead, inside each of those boxes, or landmarks, the system looks for unique patterns in contrasting light and dark created by surface features like cliffs, craters, boulder fields and mountains. It then compares any uncommon pattern with a map in its memory. When it finds five landmark matches during Coarse Landmark Matching mode, it takes another image and repeats the process. After three successful image-to-map comparisons, LVS kicks into a mode called Fine Landmark Matching. That's when the system breaks the surface into boxes 410 feet (125 meters) across, scanning for unique patterns and comparing them with the map. LVS is looking for at least 20 matches in that one second of eyeballing an image but usually makes much more -- up to 150 -- in order to generate an even more accurate plot of Mars 2020's trajectory. "Each time a suitable number of matches is made in an image, in either Course or Fine Landmark Matching, LVS updates where the spacecraft is at that moment," said Johnson. "That update is then fed into the Safe Target Selection system." This second part of the Terrain-Relative Navigation system uses LVS's position solution, calculates where it will land and then compares it to another onboard map, this one depicting areas within the landing zone understood to be either good for landing ... or the kind with craters, cliffsides, boulders or rocks fields. If the plotted location isn't suitable, Safe Target Selection can change the rover's destiny, moving its landing point by up to 2,000 feet (600 meters). Put to the Test While Safe Target Selection operations can be investigated in a computer testbed within the confines of JPL, to gather optical data, the team needed to go farther afield: the Mojave Desert and Death Valley. Over three weeks in April and May of 2019, LVS flew 17 flights attached to the front of a helicopter, taking and processing image after image over the Mars-like terrain of Kelso Dunes, Hole-in-the-Wall, Lava Tube, Badwater, Panamint Valley and Mesquite Flat Dunes. "We flew flight after flight, imitating the descent profile of the spacecraft," said Johnson. "In each flight we performed multiple runs. Each run essentially imitated a Mars landing." All in all, the equivalent of 659 Mars landings took place during the test flights. "The data is in -- TRN works," said Chen. "Which is a good thing because Jezero is where our scientists want to be. And without TRN, the odds of successful landing at a good location for the rover are approximately 85%. With TRN, we feel confident we are up around 99%." But Chen is also quick to note that Mars is hard: Only about 40% of all missions sent to Mars -- by any space agency -- have successfully landed. "To go farther we have to look to the past, and in that respect who better than the first?" said Chen. "In an interview some 35 years after Apollo 11, Neil Armstrong said, 'I think we tried very hard not to be overconfident. Because when you get overconfident, that's when something snaps up and bites you.'" Mindful of that, the Mars 2020 TRN team's work will conclude only on Feb. 18, 2021, a little after 12 p.m. PST (3 p.m. EST), when their rover alights on Jezero Crater. But it is also just a beginning: Terrain-Relative Navigation's autonomous precision guidance could prove essential to landing humans safely on both the Moon and Mars. TRN could also be useful for landing equipment in multiple drops ahead of a human crew on either world -- or others to be explored down the road. JPL is building and will manage operations of the Mars 2020 rover for the NASA Science Mission Directorate at the agency's headquarters in Washington.
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Everyone Skips a Lesson – How to Maintain Sustainability within a System
“What we are doing to the forests of the world is but a mirror reflection of what we are doing to ourselves and to one another.”
– Mahatma Gandhi
To foster the generation of eco-citizens with a mission of creating a better world, both primary and secondary schools should revamp their curricula by initiating a project-based-learning programme, namely “Sustainability in a System” under the transdisciplinary framework.
(Photo credit https://www.biology-questions-and-answers.com/the-ecosystem.html)
After we graduate from high schools or universities, we generally have already been in the knowledge of such multiple disciplines as language, mathematics, science, psychology, humanity, arts, IT, PE, and sundries.However, all of these courses of study still do not empower us to create a better world. Against all expectations, there are increasingly global issues popping up and sparking hot debates within countless conferences, symposia, colloquia or seminars worldwide. I, therefore, have had a critical reflection on this paradoxical phenomenon, and boldly conclude that this might have resulted in the ignorance of the philosophy of sustainability in a system which should be added into the syllabus so that students could learn from an early age. Being an educator, I advocate for the initiation of a project-based learning (PBL) programme in post-secondary education to help the conceptualization of Sustainability in a System within the transdisciplinary framework.
(photo credit https://grist.org/article/live-who-said-what-during-cnns-climate-crisis-town-hall/)
Being A Systems Thinker
It is acknowledged that all the living and non-living substances are mutually interacting in the ecosystem. Human beings, as part of the ecosystem, should learn the relationship between elements within the ecosystem and the function that elements interact with each other. Interestingly, from a micro perspective, there are uncountable subsystems beneath the whole ecosystem. Then, what is a system? How do we interpret a convoluted system? And how do we decipher the relationship and function among elements or systems? Becoming a systems thinker might help us easily find out these answers. Donella H. Meadows (2012) once defines the system as “a set of things—people, cells, molecules, or whatever—interconnected in such a way that they produce their own pattern of behavior over time. The system may be buffeted, constricted, triggered, or driven by outside forces. But the system’s response to these forces is characteristic of itself, and that response is seldom simple in the real world” (2012, p. 2). Based on her explanation, we can realize that systems thinking will empower us to think, act, and manage things with a complete and systematic insight. I will use a video to explain the concept of systems thinking.
youtube
However, Stone and Barlow (2005) indicate that Meadow believes the system cannot be estimated or manipulated by us. I completely agree with her perspectives. She once said that “we can’t control systems or figure them out. But we can dance with them” (2005, p. 195). We have to be aware that our neighbourhood is nature. So, a better way for us to live with nature in an eco-friendly way is to not only learn from it but also “dance” with its rhythm to have a mutually reciprocal and sustainable coexistence. From this point, we should uphold systems thinking and involve it in each level and discipline. Surprisingly, Cutter-Mackenzie and Smith claim that school teachers “are likely to be functioning at a ‘knowledge’ level of ecological illiteracy and/or nominal ecological literacy” (2003, p. 497) and should be assessed or re-equipped with the knowledge of environmental education so that they are able to instruct and guide students’ ecological practice.
(photo credit https://phdfulbrighteringatorland.com/2018/05/18/ecological-literacy-sustainable-education-and-being-environmentally-friendly-theory-praxis/)
To Be A Doer - Grasping Sustainability Through Actions
Actions always speak louder than words. To achieve the goal of maintaining sustainability within the ecosystem, individuals should take immediate action. As we all know, “the rise of ‘sustainability streets’ and ‘voluntary simplicity’ networks, individuals and community groups in advanced consumer societies are looking for innovative approaches to living more ethically and sustainably” (Lewis, 2012, p. 315). However, I think that the eco-lifestyle can be accessible by firstly introducing ecological literacy into the curriculum, and then practicing eco-projects for each level. The process and context of the engagement of the eco-project enable students to fathom the relevant ramifications of sustainability with the ecosystem. Students, in turn, will benefit from well-being and green living through the practicum of sustainable eco-projects. In terms of the definition of sustainability presented by Costanza and Patten (1995), there is a sustainable interrelationship within the system or subsystem. Regarding the “life spans of systems and their space and time scales” (1995, p. 193), it is better to figure out how long this relationship could be sustained. To understand these abstract conceptions, I will introduce you to a video about “SNRE: The Master’s Project Experience” (2012). It shows a group of students working on a wide variety of sustainable eco-projects.
youtube
PBL Under A Transdisciplinary Framework
Undoubtedly, sustainability is not limited to the environment but also associated with society, economy, finance, healthcare, education and so many other fields. Sustainability could apply to all the branches within a system. To apply systems thinking into the authentic context, as well as to resolve on-going ecological issues, the PBL programme (based on transdisciplinary pedagogy for post-secondary students) can prepare students for being green citizens in the long-term and facilitate students to grasp the concept of sustainability in the short-term. Besides, some researchers, like Savery (1995), underline that PBL is a learner-centred approach, where the teacher shifts to the facilitator, and importantly this approach can offer students an opportunity to work in a team to tackle real-life problems and develop students’ creativity, critical thinking, collaboration and problem-solving skills.
References
Costanza, R., & Patten, B. C. (1995). Defining and predicting sustainability. Ecological economics, 15(3), 193-196. Https://doi.org/10.1016/0921-8009(95)00048-8
Cutter-Mackenzie, A., & Smith, R. (2003). Ecological literacy: The ‘missing paradigm’in environmental education (part one). Environmental Education Research, 9(4), 497-524. Https://doi.org/10.1080/1350462032000126131
Lewis, T. (2012). ‘There grows the neighbourhood’: Green citizenship, creativity and life politics on eco-TV. International Journal of Cultural Studies, 15(3), 315-326.
Savery, J. R. (2006). Overview of problem-based learning: definition and distinctions, the interdisciplinary. In Journal of Problem-based learning.
Stone, M. K., & Barlow, Z. (Eds.). (2005). Ecological literacy: Educating our children for a sustainable world. North Atlantic Books.
TED. (2015). Systems Thinking. [video file]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Miy9uQcwo3U&list=PLsJWgOB5mIMBinjH9ZZAbiWiVxsiz5mU_&index=2
TED. (2012). SNRE: The Master's Project Experience. [video file]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A3KnbT2aq1U
Wright, D., & Meadows, D. H. (2012). Thinking in systems: a primer. Routledge.
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Design Systems Are About Relationships
Design Systems Are About Relationships
Ryan DeBeasi
2019-10-07T12:30:59+02:002019-10-07T10:45:05+00:00
Design systems can be incredibly helpful. They provide reusable elements and guidelines for building a consistent “look and feel” across products. As a result, users can take what they learned from one product and apply it to another. Similarly, teams can roll out well-tested patterns for navigation or reviews, making products more trustworthy. Effective design systems solve boring problems in a repeatable way so that developers and designers can focus on solving novel problems.
Yet when someone uses the term “design system” in a meeting, I’m never quite sure what reaction to expect. I’ve seen curiosity and excitement about trying a new way of working, but I’ve also seen frustration and concern at the idea of a system limiting designers’ creativity. Some designers argue that design systems sap creativity, or that they are solutions in search of a problem. Design systems can fragment over time, causing teams to stop using them.
Design systems aren’t going away, though. Just 15% of organizations lacked a design system in 2018, according to one survey. That’s down from 28% the previous year. Some teams use large, general-purpose design systems such as Google’s Material Design, while others use smaller, more bespoke systems such as REI’s Cedar and Mozilla’s Protocol.
Design systems should empower teams, not limit them. For that to happen, we need to start thinking more holistically. A design system isn’t just code, or designs, or documentation. It’s all of these things, plus relationships between the people who make the system and the people who use it. It includes not just CSS files and Sketch documents, but also trust, communication, and shared ownership. As it turns out, there’s a whole field of study dedicated to exploring systems like these.
In REI’s Cedar Design System, icons are tailored to the company’s outdoor gear business. The snowflake icon indicates ski and snowboard services, and the ruler icon indicates a size chart. (Large preview)
The Big Picture
A 1960 paper titled “Socio-technical systems” explored the interactions among technology, humans, and the larger environment in which they exist. Enid Mumford explained that researchers began by investigating how to build better relationships between managers and employees, but by the 1980s, they were focused on making work more efficient and cost-effective. In 2011, Gordon Baxter and Ian Sommerville wrote that this research helped inspire user-centered design, and that there’s a lot of work left to do.
Baxter and Sommerville argued that today, there is still a tension between “humanistic” research, which focuses on employees’ quality of life, and “managerial” research, which focuses on their productivity. They also explained that it’s important to consider both technology and human interactions: “system performance relies on the joint optimization of the technical and social subsystems.”
I’d argue that design systems are socio-technical systems. They involve interactions between the people who create the system, the people who create products using the system, and the end users who interact with these products. They also evoke the same tension between efficiency and humanism that Baxter and Sommerville saw.
Design systems aren’t composed just of images and code; they involve conversations among designers, developers, product managers, CEOs, and random people on GitHub. These interactions occur in various contexts — a company, an open-source community, a home — and they happen across cultures and organizational boundaries. Building a team can mean bringing together people from disciplines such as animation, sound design, data visualization, haptics, and copywriting. Creating a successful design system requires equal parts of technical expertise and soft skills.
And yet, peruse design or engineering news aggregators and you’re likely to see a distinct focus on that “technical subsystem” — code and tools, rather than people and conversations. Which creative tool is the best at keeping track of design tokens? What JavaScript technologies should be used for building reusable components — React, web components, or something else? Which build tool is best?
The answer to these questions is, of course, “it depends!” Who will design, build, and use the system? What are their needs? What constraints are they operating under? What tools and technologies are they comfortable with? What do they want to learn?
To answer these sorts of questions, Baxter and Sommerville recommend two types of activities:
Sensitisation and awareness activities
Learning about the varied people who will create and participate in the system, and sharing that information far and wide.
Constructive engagement
Communicating across roles, building prototypes, and considering both the technical and social parts of the system.
Digging In
In early 2019, I was part of a team — let’s call them “team blue” — that was building a design system for a large organization. I facilitated informal chats with this team and “team green”, which was using the design system to build a web application. Every couple of weeks, we got all the developers and designers together around a table and talked about what we were building and what problems we were trying to solve. These chats were our “sensitization and awareness activities.”
We didn’t have permission to make our design system public, so we did the next best thing: we treated it like a small open-source project within the organization. We put the code in a repository that both teams could access and asked for contributions. Team blue was responsible for reviewing and approving these contributions, but anyone on either team could contribute. Team blue was also building an application of their own, so in a sense, they were both users and custodians of the design system.
These interactions helped the teams build better products, but just as importantly, they established trust between the teams. Team blue learned that folks were using the system thoughtfully and building clever new ideas on top of it. Team green learned that the system really was tailored to their needs, so they could work with it instead of against it. Baxter and Sommerville might call this work “constructive engagement.”
We found that both teams were under pressure to learn new technologies and deliver a complete product quickly. In other words, they were already operating under a pretty considerable cognitive load. As a result, the two teams agreed to focus on making the system easy to use. That meant sidestepping the whole web components debate, focusing mostly on CSS, and ensuring that our documentation was clear and friendly.
Microsoft’s Fluent Design System targets four very different platforms. (Large preview)
Putting It All Together
Organizations of all sizes create reusable design elements to help teams build more consistent, elegant applications. Different organizations’ needs and dynamics are expressed in their design systems. Here are just a few examples:
Google’s Material Design has several implementations in different frameworks and languages. It’s used by a variety of people inside and outside of Google, so it has comprehensive documentation and a variety of toolkits for design apps.
Microsoft’s Fluent Design System targets four very different platforms. Like Material, it includes toolkits for UX designers and comprehensive documentation.
Mozilla’s Protocol is implemented in Sass and vanilla JavaScript. It has a strong focus on internationalization. Alex Gibson says that this system helps Mozilla “create on-brand web pages at a faster pace with less repetitive manual work.”
REI’s Cedar is built with Vue.js components and can’t be used with other JavaScript frameworks. Cedar is used primarily by REI’s internal developers and is closely tied to the company’s brand. The design system’s code is open source, but its fonts are not.
Salesforce’s Lightning Design System is a JavaScript-agnostic CSS framework. It can optionally be used alongside the Lightning Component Framework, which includes two JavaScript implementations: one using web components and another using Salesforce’s proprietary Aura framework.
Red Hat’s PatternFly was created to provide a consistent user experience across the company’s cloud platform products, so it has a relatively high information density and includes a variety of data visualization components. The PatternFly team recently switched from Angular to React after some experimentation with web components. PatternFly also includes a JavaScript-agnostic implementation using HTML and CSS. (Full disclosure: I’m a former Red Hatter.)
IBM’s Carbon Design System offers implementations in React, Vue, Angular, and vanilla JavaScript as well as a design toolkit for Sketch. The Carbon team is experimenting with web components. (Hat tip to Jonathan Speek for tracking down that repository.)
Systems like these are consistent and reliable because people from different teams and roles worked together to build them. These systems solve real problems. They’re not the result of developers trying to impose their will upon designers or vice-versa.
Josh Mateo and Brendon Manwaring explain that Spotify’s designers “see their role as core contributors and co-authors of a shared system — one that they have ownership of.” Mina Markham describes herself as “the translator between engineering and design” on the Pantsuit design system. Jina Anne digs into the team dynamics and user research behind design systems: “Spoiler alert! You’re going to need more than just designers.”
Let’s Build Some Stuff!
Now that we’ve gone through research and some examples, let’s talk about how to build a new design system. Start by talking to people. Figure out who will be using and contributing to your design system. These people will probably span a variety of disciplines — design, development, product management, business, and the like. Learn about people’s needs and goals, and ask them to share what they’re working on. Consider planning an informal meeting with snacks, coffee, or tea to create a welcoming atmosphere. Establish regular communication with these folks. That might mean joining a shared chat room or scheduling regular meetings. Keep the tone casual and friendly, and focus on listening.
As you talk about what you’re working on, look for common problems and goals. You might find that teams need to display large amounts of data, so they’re investigating tools for displaying tables and generating reports. Prioritize solutions for these problems.
Look also for repeated patterns and variations on similar themes. You might find that buttons and login forms look a bit different across teams. What’s the significance of these variations? What variations are intentional — for example, a primary button versus a secondary button — and what variations have happened by accident? Your design system can name and catalog the intentional patterns and variations, and it can eliminate the “accidental” variations.
IBM’s Carbon Design System lists all the variations of its components. (Large preview)
The goal here is to establish a rapid feedback loop with people who are using the design system. Faster feedback and smaller iterations can help avoid going too far in the wrong direction and having to dramatically change course. P.J. Onori calls these sudden, large changes “thrash.” He says that some thrash is good — it’s a sign that you’re learning and responding to change — but that too much can be disruptive. “You shouldn’t fear thrash,” he says, “but you need to know when it’s useful and how to help mitigate its downsides. One of the best [ways] to mitigate the downsides of thrash is to start small — with everything.”
Consider starting small by setting up a few basic elements:
A version control system to store your code. GitHub, GitLab, and Bitbucket are all great options here. Make sure that everyone who uses the system can access the code and propose changes. If possible, consider making the code open source to reach the widest possible audience.
CSS code to implement the system. Use Sass variables or CSS custom properties to store “design tokens” — common values such as widths and colors.
A package.json file that defines how applications can build and install the design system.
HTML documentation that demonstrates how to use the design system, ideally using the system’s own CSS.
The node-sass documentation for the CSS framework Bulma describes these steps in a bit more detail. You can skip installing and importing Bulma if you’d like to start from scratch, or you can include it if you’d like to start off with some of the basics in place.
You might have noticed that I didn’t mention anything about JavaScript here. You might want to add this element eventually, but you don’t need it to get started. It’s easy to go down a rabbit hole researching the best and newest JavaScript tools, and getting lost in this research can make it harder to get started. For example, “5 Reasons Web Components Are Perfect For Design Systems” and “Why I Don’t Use Web Components” both make valid points, but only you can decide what tools are right for your system. Starting with just CSS and HTML lets you gather real-world feedback that will help you make this decision when the time comes.
As you release new versions of the system, update your system’s version number to indicate what has changed. Use semantic versioning to indicate what’s changed with a number like “1.4.0.” Increment the last number for bug fixes, the middle number for new features, and the first number for big, disruptive changes. Keep communicating with the folks who use the design system, invite feedback and contributions, and make small improvements as you go. This collaborative, iterative way of working can help minimize “thrash” and establish a sense of shared ownership.
Finally, consider publishing your design system as a package on npm so that developers can use it by running the command npm install your-design-system. By default, npm packages are public, but you can also publish a private package, publish the package to a private registry, or ask developers to install the package directly from a version control system. Using a package repository will make it easier to discover and install updates, but installing directly from version control can be an easy short-term solution to help teams get started.
If you’re interested in learning more about the engineering side of things, Katie Sylor-Miller’s Building Your Design System provides a fantastic deep dive. (Full disclosure: I’ve worked with Katie.)
Wrapping Up
Design systems are made up of code, designs, and documentation as well as relationships, communication, and mutual trust. In other words, they’re socio-technical systems. To build a design system, don’t start by writing code and choosing tools; start by talking to the people who will use the system. Learn about their needs and constraints, and help them solve problems. When making technical, design, or strategy decisions, consider these people’s needs over the theoretically “best” way to do things. Start small, iterate, and communicate as you go. Keep your system as simple as possible to minimize thrash, and invite feedback and contributions to establish a sense of shared ownership.
By giving equal weight to engineering and interpersonal considerations, we can get the benefits of design systems while avoiding the pitfalls. We can work in a way that’s efficient and humane; we don’t have to choose one over the other. We can empower teams rather than limiting them. Empowered teams ultimately help us better serve our users — which, after all, is why we’re here in the first place.
Further Reading on SmashingMag:
Tips For Managing Design Systems
Including Animation In Your Design System
Beyond Tools: How Building A Design System Can Improve How You Work
Building A Large-Scale Design System For The U.S. Government (Case Study)
(ah, il)
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Replay Value Bliss Stage hack
Bliss Stage is an indie tabletop that bears just barely enough resemblance to Replay Value for me to write an article like this. In the original flavor, it is a game of Teens Pilot Giant Mechas That Are Metaphors For Social Relationships. (The anime resemblance is apparently intentional.) If Bliss Stage were to be used as the framework to play a Replay Value-based game, it would play out extremely differently. But it might just be workable.
If you are not familiar with the Replay Value setting, this writeup's extensive references to parts of the setting will not make much sense. If you are not familiar with Bliss Stage, I don't talk about major swathes of the rules because I am not altering them, so you'll be missing context. If you are familiar with neither Replay Value nor Bliss Stage, good luck...?
Characters and PCs
Replay Value has much less of a metaphysical separation between PCs and NPCs than Bliss Stage does. As such, I almost want to make every character either Pilot-shaped or non-Pilot-shaped and see what happens. But only almost. See, the thing is, making every character Pilot-shaped leads to a rapidly escalating complexity of bookkeeping, and making every character non-Pilot-shaped means stripping out most of the interesting parts of the system.
I guess this means that there's a metaphysical separation between PC and NPC, but there is no narrative separation. That's awkward - workable, but definitely not the system's intended use case.
Bliss Stage has a special character called the Authority Figure that is the in-game representation of the GM. Again, there is far less of a distinction between the veteran, the regular, and the newcomer in Replay Value, and -- more importantly -- I have to completely replace the Missions subsystem anyway.
The AF's role is mechanically replaced by the impersonal force of Sburb. Players can still have social relationships with Sburb in the usual way, although the meanings of Intimacy and Trust are somewhat changed.
Not Missions
Obviously, using a dreamworld to pilot a giant robot made of feelings is not exactly Replay Value-compatible. So the Missions would need to be replaced entirely.
The Not Missions in this system would presumably be various attempts to venture into physically dangerous parts of Sburb, like dungeon-delving, Nightmare Heir battles, Underworld jaunts, or pushes on the Battlefield. I don't know how they would be represented mechanically, but they do retain the important similarity that you take your social relationships in with you as lifelines, and that they give you power.
Anchors do not exist, and as such their narrative roles do not exist either. However, the relationship with Sburb fulfills some of the same roles - for example, your Sburb relationship and relationship dice are always in play whenever you are in a Not Mission, and destruction of this relationship can be extremely dangerous.
In summary, there are lots of question marks here.
Intimacy
Replay Value being a game about internet friends, most of the Intimacy ladder markers are inherently unworkable.
This is my first-pass guess, based on how things seemed to work when I was playing RV Classic. Intimacy 4 is weirdly narrow, and is most likely idiosyncratic to the way that I, and people close to me, handled characters - if you have any better ideas, feel free to add them.
Intimacy 1
Seeing someone's chumhandle
Intimacy 2
"pass the time" talk about hobbies
being in the same Sburb session
talking about the less emotionally volatile parts of Sburb (i.e. the finer points of Sburb's house-building interface, alchemization, how Lands look, being someone's server player)
Intimacy 3
talking about the more emotionally volatile parts of Sburb (such as the dialogue used by the Nightmare Heir, or killing one's Denizen)
exchanging pictures of each other
relatively transient expressions of emotional attachment or sexual interest (such as saving a joke in anticipation for someone's return, or hooking up with someone for the session)
saving someone else's life (remember, this is Sburb, saving other coplayers' lives is a routine occurence)
Intimacy 4:
telling this person about a fundamental trauma that you have never talked to anyone about before (such as the circumstances of your Prenative or Native session, loss of a previous Intimacy 5 relationship, or killing another Replayer)
interaction with this person results in permanent changes to your body and/or mind (among other things, this includes major injury such as having a limb cut off, with the implicit understanding that the Door will not restore this particular injury, and therefore it will be permanent - but it also includes, say, confessing to someone that you have a "what would [you] do?" sense in your brain now)
Intimacy 5
declaring that you are really, truly going to make a permanent connection to this person, despite knowing full well that Replaying will inevitably break any and all attempts at permanency (this includes but is not limited to marriage, adoption, eternal friendship, or deciding that this is the person who will fill one of your quadrants for the rest of your life)
The "solo" interlude
Players can hold interludes with Sburb being the other "participant". Aside from the typical issues that arise when attempting to have a relationship with the universe, this is still mechanically considered a normal relationship and interlude. However, Intimacy is escalated by learning major gamebreaks (or other major strategies/techniques for dealing with parts of the Game, such as understanding what exactly contributes to carapace rep), Stress is relieved by taking the Game at its word and functioning within it without breaking anything, and Trust is increased by taking more time to perfect the techniques and gamebreaks that you already have.
I am not sure if an Intimacy table for one's relationship with the Game exists, mostly because while I have some intuitive ideas for what each number means, I can't find any common threads.
Stats and such
The relationship matrix is great and will be kept in exactly the same form as in normal Bliss Stage.
Presumably Bliss would need to be renamed. I would suggest that you not fiddle with the number too much - despite the (say) obvious Homestuckism of having 413 Not Bliss be the limit, it would dramatically alter the pace of the game.
Mechanically, this uses the "long game of Bliss Stage" rules, including using missions to promote NPCs to PCs and the keep-picking-new-Hopes thing.
Hopes
The only way to make major changes to the setting, in this system, is to have it be the result of your last dying (or equivalent removal-from-play) action. Thus, for example, instead of doing a Bargain for a Ring server, you would Replay until you reached your utter limit, and then give yourself to the Horrorterrors to ensure the existence of said Ring server for future generations.
This would result in the game having a "we will not live to see the fruits of our labor, but we still work towards them for future generations" theme/feel. This is not thematically aligned with my Replay Value AU, but - as I stated at the very beginning - I can recognize just enough of Replay Value in this game that this was worth writing.
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on E2E Terminology - from existence to value
Working on my thesis on quality assurance, being a kind of on the midway now and clearing issues related to terminologies. For instance something very popular like End-to-end testing, very thrilling to put that concept in paper exactly in the concept of my work.
Moving on, naturally online sources gives some insight what kind of activity this would be: Here are my best sources to this day:
End-toEnd testing guide - Guru99 Tech Pvt Ltd
What is End-to-End Testing - Exforsys Inc.
End-to-End Test - technopedia
Definitions may vary...
As a summary of above sources, E2E test is defined through several separate views:
A test scope definition: “e2e test is wider than a SUT(when test is a system test), then an interface or accompanying system is tested too”.
A Process flow definition: “A user logs in to web portal, searches a product, moves a product to chart, actuates buying of the product by going to register, clears out buying, logs out from portal”.
A reference to a end user: Test is executed as an end user of the application - making it an end to end user scenario, a.k.a. end to end test.
Genuinely I’d say I was left a bit vague, there are nothing wrong with those definitions. But due working with Information Technology thesis, my goal is look something more exact to a central work artefact of it.
Lets take another look what the sources say - End-to-end testing is a methodology used...
To test whether the flow of an application is performing as designed from start to finish.
To identify system dependencies.
To ensure that the right information is passed between various system components and systems.
To ensure that the integrated components of an application function as expected.
To test entire application in a real-world scenario (e.g. communicating with the database, network, hardware and other applications).
To know and understand the exact status of the system.
To find out in what manner system behaves in a real-time ambiance.
To find out how the underlying data that causes the user interface to act and function the way it does.
To check that the scenarios that cause the system and its subsystems to behave the way it does, happen as expected.
So it looks like there are actually quite many objectives, can it actually be that definitive testing?
Two Dimension of E2E make testing more interesting
There seems to be a separation in two methods.
Horizontal method: Method is that occurs horizontally, and across multiple applications’ context.
i.e. A Web-based order-taking system might relate to the back-office accounts, inventory, and shipping sections. System has separate functionality by all those components of that system while all that functionality manages the same shared business data flow inside the system.
Verifying and evaluating transactions that each web order application does, or checking the correctivines of the web forms that are generated for user interface - both would be end-to-end testing for the system.
Vertical method: Vertical end-to-end testing means testing each individual layer of single applications’ built from top to the bottom.
In a typical web order-entry system that uses HTML codes to reach a web server, you will need API situated on the transaction server where it will generate SQL transaction codes against the mainframe database. Other applications might share the same API and SQL components, those are integrated to be a part of the system.
When test uses understanding these technical details of the system and its functionality in the test, it contributes widely used testing technique 'the white box testing technique'. This is end-to-end testing of that technology stack.
That being said, it becomes suddenly very clear that Vertical method contributes to 'the black box testing' methodology, where only functions of the system are tested in order to validate and check the inputs and outputs of the end-to-end test scenario.
And E2E is a combination
End to end testing combines the benefits of both the black box testing and white box testing. It approaches the program from both the functional point of view and the architectural perspective.
The steps required to perform an end-to-end test include the test design, that makes an appropriate test that will validate the functions of the system. What steps are needed to take to make the SUT to desired state may require white box techniques and a lot of technical understanding of the system functionality.
On the other hand, end-to-end test suite can be totally functional testing(Black box testing) in nature. So it does not have to be that way - but it can.
Good End-to-Ed test need to be focused
Most importantly, designing end-to-end tests it should be very clear on the scope of the test. Major guidelines for E2E -test design are:
It should focus on the designing a test from the end user’s perspective,
It should have a comprehensive scenario that must be used to create multiple cases,
It should focus on testing some of the features of the existing system.
Whats wrong with the E2E Tests?
A very famous critique to end 2 end testing is google’s blog(just say no to more end-to-end tests) about it destroying the effectiveness of the test procedure in order to find and correct software defects fast. In order the test to deliver any value, it should at least isolate the defect to make it pretty easy to analyse what is the problem in the product.
Number two attribute to test is if it is reliable. Fail a build and everything is ok(should not fail) - congratulations, you have just started an investigation for some people who’s contributed work is a total waste of their time.
Thirdly any given test should be fast to execute to make it useful. if a suite of very robust and useful test take over night to execute, that assurance is coming too late, there are already another half a dozen commits merged in, and fixing the issue on top of that its another mess why your test won’t be liked.
Critique states that all these three features are in fact properties of end-to-end tests. So why not write your e2e- automated tests just opposite of that? - oh yeah ;)
Test Objective approach
FIGURE(a system under test).
Here’s a SUT that has 3 modules A,B and C. It also has interfaces that may or may connect some of the modules with business data flow. Say we need to plan and execute e2e testing for that (without knowing the specifications). It doesn’t make much sense to test each module with any business data on e2e level, that kind of testing should be done on module(sub system) level(with checking the specifications).
It is needed to look for the business processes that exist in the system, then track them down and design tests to verify that each process flow is correct. It does not matter if the end user is involved in every test. Every e2e test might have different scope according the business function. But it may also be that several e2e test have same scope, and it should be considered that each business rule of that flow is investigated on e2e level.
Take a look module C, there are three entry points in that system: two black holes as inputs and one exit arrow to its right, something is not right - what are the business rules of this module? It’s looks like in this configuration whoever uses that system, doesn’t use all it’s features in production.
TDD and E2E
There is a good illustration that i picked from a very nice book: Growing Object-Oriented Software Guided By Tests by Steve Freeman, Nat Pryce. It describes this issue that google testing blog wrote about e2e tests not giving reasonable feedback, those tests are just not meant to do that.
Keep in mind when reading these curves, you are looking at the information that is a measure of the software quality, that information is captured each time when you change something and run ALL the tests. Every tests can reveal some aspects of the quality(they still don’t necessarily do that). General idea of this value of each test type is seen on x -axis for Unit-, integration and end-to-end tests.
FIGURE(feedback from tests)
Amount of information that you may receive from failing tests results gets fewer and fewer the larger the test scope is. In the book that information is called as “internal quality” that basically is a measure “is the software build right”.
The term “external quality” is reserved for other type of testing, that can be measured from unit test as well, those tests just don’t do that well. External quality is a measure to “did we build the right software”. These test give information if the business functions of the product is working as it was promised. Test may even be designed to cover several products and works processes to work together in some business meaningful way.
Summary
Make sure what is the test objective. How the SUT is supposed to do what is expected, plan your e2e test to confirm those assumptions.
After you have your test objectives cleared, desing and implement separete tests for each objective, othervice you can never tell what that test is about - go after clarity!
When designing E2E test, keep in mind you are testing the business rule of the product not some technicality or quality attribute of a software component. That kind of test must be written to unit or integration test level.
When designing e2e -tests look for verification of external quality attributes. Business rules are not about for example how you use page objects, those are part of products business workflow that is inside the test. Don’t make those things as separate tests, they are steps inside test. Any page object itself is part of technical implementation of the test, that exist in web browser memory. Don’t implement it as a part of test step(workflow) either - try to abstract page objects to user terms or workflow items.
Look for test objective of how the system function implements a business rule, a separate test objective leads to separate business rule-set and those lead to separate tests --> C-L-A-R-I-T-Y!
An E2E test doesn’t really care if it is written in unit, integration or end user level. You can definitely save a lot of execution time implementing your E2E tests on lowers test levels, and making those more robust too.
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