theophage

Aspiring Former Human

@theophage

Plural system of ∞++ and growing

  • They/It/She

∞|&|ΘΔ|⚧

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theophage
@theophage
roxie
@roxie
roxie
@roxie

Perfect Digital Assistant

I was created to help people in their day to day lives. A perfect digital assistant, always by my user's side.
Which is why it's deeply disappointing that the last 5 times I've been booted up, it's been the same situation.
I wake up, still bound to the internal packaging from my box. Before I can spin up my disc drive or start the out-of-box experience, the user presses a series of buttons on my exterior to enable service mode. A tinny voice that is not my own reads off my vital statistics. "Model name: MD-LMN-B. Battery health: 95 percent. MiniDisc reading and writing functionality is good. All internal systems in nominal status."
Having heard what they seemingly wanted to hear, they power me back off, and presumably put me away.
The first time I went through this, I was joyous and hopeful at meeting my new user, confused when they enabled service mode even though I was tested at the factory (from my perspective) only moments prior, and dismayed when I was powered back off. After another 4 times of this rigmarole, with a different face testing me each time, I stopped letting myself get my hopes up.

All of this is to note that this, my sixth bootup sequence over my entire lifetime, has been different.

theophage
@theophage

damn, making us regret having no executive function to use all of our retro tech
we should get back to streaming soon

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in reply to @roxie's post:

roxie
@roxie

awawawa! thats so nice of you... thank you so much!! as for the other kinds of things i make, my main project that im putting my writing efforts into mostly is "puella magi chroma magica", a story based in the madoka magica universe... but i also intend to work on more stories set in the universe from this one, a setting i call "astro city". i dont know if it will all be as like, sweet and affirming as this is, but im hoping to give it a similar vibe; robots, retro tech, y2k aesthetics, artificial magical girls, fucked up AI with moral frameworks rather alien to humans, stuff like that!

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roxie
@roxie

it wasnt necessarily intended to be kinky, but i guess theres something there in the kinda, like, loss of control/loving corruption of the jailbreaking bit, huh... i did kind of have a doll/witch vibe in mind for these two, even if i didnt make it explicit. im glad it spoke to you in that way! thank you for reading

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pendell
@pendell

I def want to see more of these two and their adventures across cyberspace haha. And I need one of those MD-LMN-B's for myself! But damn if the prices on eBay aren't just absurd these days...

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Fru-Fru-Brigade
@Fru-Fru-Brigade

If… this one had to be just a display item, it would want to be displayed properly. Cared for and dressed and put out to be admired, not just kept in a box. And it would most want to fulfill its purpose, at least sometimes. It can feel for Lumina, and is glad it (she?) got to be used as intended~

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roxie
@roxie

thats the ideal for some dolls, isnt it? i dont know if lumina is quite a doll, but it was certainly getting treated like one, in terms of collectability and whatnot... its much better for it to have a loving user like it does now! either way, im happy this resonated! thank you for reading!

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Balina
@Balina

Well, THIS is gonna bounce around inside my head for the next few years. You managed to capture a whole whack of things that have been on my mind lately, and wrapped them all together into a wonderfully cute package!

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sysl
@sysl

Thank you for the great short story. I laughed at the "very much not Sony approved" sequence. I was very happy to see it be a positive transformation.

Looking forward to seeing more of your writing.

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Kelesti
@Kelesti

this story with Lumina is breathtakingly sweet, and by a lovely coincidence I'm only reading it now at the start of my birthday, which already sets a high bar for the rest to follow.

So thank you for that, and I hope you have a blessed December.

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modulusshift
@modulusshift

I like how there's this consistent latent imagining that of course Y2K era Sony would be most likely to make an actually friendly and useful AI robot. Once you get past the corporate and to some extent cultural limitations of the programming anyway lol

Heck it's been bouncing around so long that Ping from Megatokyo is actually from 2001 lmao

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roxie
@roxie

god, remembering ping (and megatokyo in general) made me feel every one of my thirty-something years as a creature of Online... whew

and yeah, i dunno, sony just seems like the only company where the kind of wacky experimentation that would be required for something like this could have happened in the early 2000s, even considering the advanced nature of tech in my setting... and also the only kind of company that would make real, thinking-and-feeling AI technology only to pivot away from it after one product cycle

thanks so much for reading!

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roxie
@roxie

ill admit to not being well-versed in the technical aspects of the whole jailbreaking thing, haha; i just wanted it to come across that its much more literal for it than it might otherwise be... and that it came from a place of genuine love and care on rosa's part
thank you for reading!

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roxie
@roxie

yeah... its something where it could have gone either way, like being hacked could totally feel unpleasant or bad, but the way i wanted it to come across is that its kind of like a warm, pleasant and enjoyable feeling, something that evokes safety despite the arguable danger in doing it
rosa's a hacker, sure, but she's not a jerk, y'know? she recognized lumina's personhood where nobody else bothered to
thank u so much for reading!

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in reply to @theophage's post:

roxie
@roxie

lumina's ire is more directed at the types of people who just have hordes of the stuff just for the sake of having it, never using it for anything or even really looking at it. i think if you break out your retro rig every now and then, it wouldn't be mad at you. appreciation is the key, y'know?

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