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hthrflwrs
@hthrflwrs

i'd be like. so good at being a side character in a time loop. you walk up to me, say "i'm in a time loop," tell me exactly one thing you'd have no possible way of knowing, and i'll do whatever you need to try and break the loop. need me to stand outside in precisely one spot for seventeen hours? hell yeah i'm on it


hthrflwrs
@hthrflwrs

you: hey i'm in a time loop and need help
me: what number am i thinking of
you: thirty six
me: hell yeah, how can i help


CERESUltra
@CERESUltra

My wife, my girlfriend and I all have a time loop contingency where if any of us say that we are stuck in a time loop, the others will take that on trust, and help however we can.

Also, for the same reason, we occasionally do a time-loop check. So far, none.

And in case there's any doubt, I swear with my hand on a hardcover copy of House of Leaves that this is not a fucking bit.


SomeEgrets
@SomeEgrets

going to spin up a system that automatically generates and encrypts an implausibly guessable number or passphrase every morning, that even i don't know until i decrypt & verify it, for the explicit purpose of verifying time loops


SomeEgrets
@SomeEgrets

further thoughts: any number generated after the loop starts is fallible since the mere presence of a time looper existing changes the state of the loop from the very beginning, in different ways every loop, since they themselves are changed by each loop

this possibly leads to circumstances (whether large scale or butterfly effect) that would result in a different secret number being generated

so any absolutely rock solid secret would need to be generated in advance of the loop start

thus, our validation code would need to be generated up to 24h ahead of time to ensure that it will always be absolutely valid even in the face of changes introduced to the loop

most time loops are only a day, but several high profile loops in popular culture are longer (eg. Majora's Mask) so for safety, I'm going to suggest generating codes up to one week +1 day safety margin in advance


SomeEgrets
@SomeEgrets

final thoughts: time loop validation as a service, that automatically deletes the decoded passphrase if it is ever successfully decrypted, so it can't be used as validation in the same loop that it's given out

which would prevent someone with insider access or a copy of your compromised key, password, etc. from being able to trick you, because your validation would already have been deleted from this loop and you would be unable to check+verify it


tubular
@tubular

the character galerius that you meet at the start of every loop will just listen to you if you tell him he's in a time loop and it's critically important that he does a list of weirdly specific things. he just thinks you are an oracle or whatever. it owns so much


ugh i should write about the forgotten city (2021). but i have so much on my plate-brain right now. i feel like i slept on the forgotten city, because i saw half a zp about it and decided it was amateur hour compared to outer wilds1. but then even jacob geller did a piece on it and eventually i realized i'd been continuing to hear about this game for like a year, so i'm like,

fine, alright, i'm in.

i finally knocked it out in august 2022 and it was spectacular. i completely hyperfocused on the negativity in the zp and was probably looking for a reason not to buy it2. as much as those bad aspects are there, they did not ruin the game. i definitely did not get the impression yahtzee hated it, once i knew what he was referring to.

it was a delightful game and its shape is quite cleverly designed. i had a lot of thoughts about it and it was surprisingly accommodating of them. i have more thoughts to think about it so that's on hold for now until i finish these other games. but i started thinking about galerius and it got me thinking some more and i had to vent the excitement somehow.


  1. luckily i can resist the urge to talk about outer wilds. that game hit me very personally and i am at peace with this

  2. it's on steam sale for the next ten hours or so, lol


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in reply to @hthrflwrs's post:

I've thought about this a lot and come to the conclusion that I probably wouldn't even need a shibboleth. Maybe if it's a complete rando, but if anyone I actually know came up to me and said "I need you to do some wacky thing and if I explained why you wouldn't believe me" I'd just shrug and trust them by default

This happens in an ep of Legends of Tomorrow, in which a nice-boy character tells the time-loopee "just tell me you're in a Groundhog's Day next time and I'll be on board immediately", and he is!

i'm a bad timeloop friend

you: hey I'm in a time loop and need help
me: what number am i thinking of
you: well yesterday i lied and said thirty six because it was my first time talking to you in the loop and you said no, and when i asked what it really was, you told me you never actually think of numbers and told me to get bent
me: that does sounds like me, oh gosh why am i such an asshole?
you: so... are you helping?
me: can't you see i am having an identity crisis right now, get bent