Fun with headlines.
Feb. 23rd, 2008 09:42 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
qcontinuumOOC: Crossposted from ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
theatrical_muse today.
Prompt 219: Headlines.
Technically speaking, we don't have headlines. Or newspapers. We have packets of discrete information containing the observations and perceptions we want to share with the Continuum, the personal memories attached to those observations (often heavily edited, although eventually, the raw memories *do* end up entering the Continuum's "database"), and generally an organizing structure of logic pointing out the conclusions we drew from these observations and why, which we push out to the rest of the Continuum in a format kind of more similar to an email, if an email was sent directly to your brain with hyperlinks that would allow you to enter someone else's brain and fully experience their memories in living color.
But Q are getting updates like this all the time, and usually, we ignore them. If the information's important, it's going to end up entering the Continuum database anyway and we can get it when we want to. Updates that tell us all about some incredibly trivial piece of new information no one cares about bombard us *constantly*... so we mostly do exactly what you do. We delete them without reading them.
In order to get people to actually pay attention to an idea that you want to broadcast to the entire Continuum, you put a header on it that will grab people's attention. Such as "I'm Ready To Die, How About You?" or "Harassing The Baby Because She Was Raised By Humans Just Makes You An Asshole".
When the Continuum ordered me to perform a test on humanity that was supposed to definitively prove whether or not they were sapient, except that it was an incredibly dumb test, and they ordered me to destroy the species if they failed the test... I was deeply unhappy with the idea, but because I was afraid that if I disobeyed they'd take my powers away again, I did it. But I cheated outrageously. The test they wanted performed involved time travel and whether or not humans could grasp non-linear time operations. I thought this had been pretty well established, and it doesn't exactly define a sapient species anyway, so it was neither a necessary nor a sufficient test, *plus* ordering me to kill them if they failed it was just insulting. I *knew* there was no good reason for that and some within the Continuum were just seeing how far they could push me. So, although my chosen exemplar of humanity had already had some experience with time travel, I went back in time and inserted some more incidents for him to deal with just to make sure he'd have the experience he needed when he faced the dumb test the Continuum was making me perform on him. I also randomly made some friends of his I don't even like deal with alternate universes and time-jumping to make sure he'd have intelligent advisers when the time came. (Well, I picked Worf. "Intelligent" advisers may be overstating the case. But I didn't need the Klingon screwing things up with *bad* advice.) And then I dropped outrageous hints all throughout the test. I came within a hairsbreadth of flat-out giving away the answer, in fact.
And then, after he passed the test (of course), I sent out an update with the headline "Humans Found Sapient, So Nyaah Nyaah Nyaah."
Predictably, most of the people who returned comment on the update felt the need to point out that I was being incredibly childish and immature... but you know what? They read it, which is more than most Q can say about *their* mass-broadcast Continuum updates.
theatrical_muse today.Prompt 219: Headlines.
Technically speaking, we don't have headlines. Or newspapers. We have packets of discrete information containing the observations and perceptions we want to share with the Continuum, the personal memories attached to those observations (often heavily edited, although eventually, the raw memories *do* end up entering the Continuum's "database"), and generally an organizing structure of logic pointing out the conclusions we drew from these observations and why, which we push out to the rest of the Continuum in a format kind of more similar to an email, if an email was sent directly to your brain with hyperlinks that would allow you to enter someone else's brain and fully experience their memories in living color.
But Q are getting updates like this all the time, and usually, we ignore them. If the information's important, it's going to end up entering the Continuum database anyway and we can get it when we want to. Updates that tell us all about some incredibly trivial piece of new information no one cares about bombard us *constantly*... so we mostly do exactly what you do. We delete them without reading them.
In order to get people to actually pay attention to an idea that you want to broadcast to the entire Continuum, you put a header on it that will grab people's attention. Such as "I'm Ready To Die, How About You?" or "Harassing The Baby Because She Was Raised By Humans Just Makes You An Asshole".
When the Continuum ordered me to perform a test on humanity that was supposed to definitively prove whether or not they were sapient, except that it was an incredibly dumb test, and they ordered me to destroy the species if they failed the test... I was deeply unhappy with the idea, but because I was afraid that if I disobeyed they'd take my powers away again, I did it. But I cheated outrageously. The test they wanted performed involved time travel and whether or not humans could grasp non-linear time operations. I thought this had been pretty well established, and it doesn't exactly define a sapient species anyway, so it was neither a necessary nor a sufficient test, *plus* ordering me to kill them if they failed it was just insulting. I *knew* there was no good reason for that and some within the Continuum were just seeing how far they could push me. So, although my chosen exemplar of humanity had already had some experience with time travel, I went back in time and inserted some more incidents for him to deal with just to make sure he'd have the experience he needed when he faced the dumb test the Continuum was making me perform on him. I also randomly made some friends of his I don't even like deal with alternate universes and time-jumping to make sure he'd have intelligent advisers when the time came. (Well, I picked Worf. "Intelligent" advisers may be overstating the case. But I didn't need the Klingon screwing things up with *bad* advice.) And then I dropped outrageous hints all throughout the test. I came within a hairsbreadth of flat-out giving away the answer, in fact.
And then, after he passed the test (of course), I sent out an update with the headline "Humans Found Sapient, So Nyaah Nyaah Nyaah."
Predictably, most of the people who returned comment on the update felt the need to point out that I was being incredibly childish and immature... but you know what? They read it, which is more than most Q can say about *their* mass-broadcast Continuum updates.