DE: Communication

[yakalskovich]

Let's continue with yesterday's theme: What are your characters likely to use their T-Minuses for, and how do they canonically communicate or send messages in their own world?

Comments

[just_cant_lose]

In his own world, Jim is all about phone and computer. Mainly phone, because texting and messaging is convenient for the consultant on the go!

T-Minus is strictly (at least at this point) to fool around with. He will happily snark at people endlessly on it, but not use it for anything important because he doesn't trust tech handed out that freely.

[brobrobrobrobro]

I minus your teeth, bro. Heh heh heh.

[feminine_menace]

YT will mostly use T-Minus as a one-to-one chat client, but will occasionally do public messages/posts of the "yo, is there someone here who can help me out with [thing]?" variety. She may get acquainted with some people on T-Minus before she meets them face-to-face.

In her own world YT defaults to communicating with people via cellphone, through actual voice calls. She currently has a flip-phone so texting is too much of a hassle for her to deal with (for now, at least). With her more tech-savvy friends (i.e., hackers), she will meet them in the Metaverse if they're goggled in, or leave them a short e-mail if they're not.

[bjornwilde]

Izana: IC-Fooling around and geeking out on new tech. OC-Thinking about using it as a means of sharing canon.

Ahsoka: Fooling around and just another means of threading. Although sharing holostills of odd lifeforms is a plus.

Sabine: Checking out new tech.

Selina: A means to communicate with Jay while she's not in bar.

[genarti]

Enjolras, when he gets one, will use it partly to chat with friends (though not about anything important or secret, I'd think), but more as another way to people-watch and see what's going on in the bar and chat with whoever wants to chat. It'll be a public arena kind of thing for him, and a rather confusing one. He's the opposite of a digital native.

In his own world, well, it's not just pre-phone, it's an era juuuust before the telegraph really took off. He communicates by (slow) letter with people outside Paris, and by talking face to face with people in Paris, supplemented by sending notes (either by dropping it off with their building's concierge, or paying a gamin a little to run the errand). In Milliways, well, there's also notes with Bar and the fact that Joly made all the Amis pocketwatch-communicator-things. They keep those communicator things pretty discreet for reasons of Javert (and habit), but they're handy.

Cosette is in the same situation as Enjolras, but she's much less connected and has a lot fewer people to talk to. So she mostly just talks to people face-to-face, because either she lives with them or she sees them at church. I don't think she has many people to write letters to. There are old school friends she could write with, but Valjean's habit of secrecy means I'm not sure that she does. But she might!

If she got a T-minus she'd basically use it to write letters to her mother, and to a lesser extent to other folk at Milliways. I don't think she'd be able to wrap her head around the speed and formatting back-and-forth of chats and especially chatrooms for a while -- it would feel kind of dizzyingly artificial to her, compared to just trading a few messages and then coming into Milliways to talk properly.

Kazul has a magic mirror for that. Also the King's Stone, now that she's King of the Dragons, which IIRC she can use similarly without having to rhyme about anything. But she's also prone to just showing up at a friend's front door.

If she got a T-minus, I think she'd mostly use it to chat with Milliways acquaintances from her own world. She wouldn't see the need within Milliways, and nobody at home has one, and even if they did she doesn't really see what purpose they serve that a magic mirror doesn't.

Thor... uh. Canon is really unclear about things like commonly used Asgardian tech, in fact! They certainly must have methods to reliably communicate long-distance, but what those are are unclear. They don't seem to work between realms, anyway, which is why when he's on Earth he mostly relies on the "Heimdall is watching everything, he'll keep an eye on me and he and Father will react accordingly" method. I think Thor is the kind of person who much prefers face-to-face conversation, anyway, although obviously that doesn't always work.

If he got a T-minus you better believe he would use it for communicating between realms, though. So handy! Maybe not to be trusted with anything super confidential, just in case, but so handy!

[bcgphoenix]

For a while, Gaeta used T-minus to communicate with Louis while the latter was on Galactica. That's faded over the years as they established an in-person routine; for a while, the time differential was working in their favor (four hours on Galactica equaled about a day in Milliways, so they'd see each other fairly frequently), but nowadays...not so much. More about that will be coming soon. *cheerful*

Alistair's used it to communicate with Cullen and Ysa, take mountains of pictures thanks to his handheld's camera mutation, and start up Milliways's first overtures toward the Cute Animal Feed genre. In a world where long-distance communication occurs almost exclusively by letters, and thus can take weeks, he's a huge fan of text conversations that have the speed of an in-person one. He's...pretty lonely, right now. It helps. (I've wondered if he might smuggle another handheld to Thedas and give it to Lyna someday, but if that happens, it won't be for a very long while.)

(Also, Maker help us all if his keyboard ever develops an emoji mutation.)

Curtis doesn't have T-minus. He doesn't see the need. Dejah's here, Edgar's here, if he wants to talk to anybody else in the bar he'll do it face-to-face -- why bother with a chat program? I think he takes the opposite view of Alistair: he sees that kind of tech as isolating rather than connecting, due to spending almost twenty years elbow-to-elbow with everyone he knew. His concept of long-distance anything -- and thus the need for technology that'll allow communication over those distances -- barely exists anymore.

[feminine_menace]

Aw man, for some reason I thought the camera came standard on those things. I did not read the OOM closely enough, obviously...

[crabbycustomer]

It's fine to have a camera on it, it's just not standard. Mutations are a good excuse for most things, though.

[feminine_menace]

Thanks! Are there ways to trigger mutations, or can I just make it happen for, you know, reasons?

Sent from my iPhone

[crabbycustomer]

I think Alistair is probably a vector since other people found it after he told then to look for it. Participating in his dog spotting board could do it

[feminine_menace]

Okay! I can work this out in the not-too-distant future.

Sent from my iPhone

[death_gone_mad]

Amascut's T-Minus has gone a bit ... feral. She jammed a slayer telecommunications gem in it to link it up with that network but she pretty much abandoned it on top of a barrel of rotting apples after the Allpocalypse happened. It adds weird text only noise to telecommunication spells on her world now. Some more technically minded folks are able to bounce signals off of it but feral T-Minus is a spammy thing and occasionally develops a taste for ACKS and dropped connections.

That being said, she prefers the slayer gems. Their effect is something in between video conferencing and long-distance telepathy and a text only interface can't really compete with that.

Huh, if Gielnor's telecomms were more active, it would be natural for mnemonicPhagocyte's feral T-Minus to eat memes now that I think of it.