Hey, bandit:

Until events move (shove, shove) -- how about updating the Sheepdog reports?

WinterRat: I haven't forgotten about this.

Shoving this back to the front...

I've been thinking of how to keep Shadowland updated regularly, without looking contrived. The problem is, basically, that we have such a vast disparity between RL time and LitS time, and so many characters spread out over LitS time, that I can't have a (meta)human making regular posts to LitS Shadowland unless the person never did anything else.

That's when it hit me: I don't need a human posting, because I've got a perfectly serviceable proto-AI that can do that already! For those who don't know, one of the focuses of my character James is his agent, named Jane. The idea is to make Jane, rather than my own character's online nick Blondie, a new Shadowland news aggregator. This gives us all kinds of flexibility. We don't have to worry about time of posting, because the girl never needs sleep. She can miss some continuity-related issues and it doesn't matter; we can blame it on a glitch in the programming, or a memory fragmentation error, or some other random sci-fi justification. Even if Eyes dies, she can still be there, doing her thing, so long as we leave her program alone.

So, how's this for a setup: A few months before the events in LitS started, James gets the idea to partially crowdsource his Agent's future development, particularly in the areas of information processing and human-AI interactions. So, he lends Jane out to Shadowland--still thinking of a good nick for her, Jane-in-the-box is taken, isn't it? --for use as a news aggregator, clearing it with the sysops so they relax their "no bots/botnets" policy for her. In return, he gets to run a series of secondary programs on Shadowland, which take the interactions Jane has both with her news posts and the reactions to them (and her reactions to the reactions, etc etc) and use them to optimize and improve on Jane's core programming.

We end up with a mini proto-AI running around, seeking to find "good" and "interesting" news tidbits for posting. Shadowland benefits because they get what is essentially a self-improving newsbot (plus semi-regular discussions of the nuances of Frame Core development, which we'll not bother posting as it would be rather dry); James benefits because he gets lots of data to put into improvements on his precious Agent. We benefit because we can have 10,000 posts in Shadowland, under the same person, in a week and it doesn't impact the believability too much.

What do you think. Doable?


Also, anyone remember where we posted the personalities for all the Shadowland NPCs?

Eyeless,

One of Max's contacts is a reporter. He could also be used to post items on Shadowland, either by me or pretty much anyone. I can give you some background info on him if you would like.

I like your idea. I think it could work.

Sure, post it up. The more characters we have here the better, especially characters for shadowtalk "commentary" as there tends to be more of them per post than the initial poster.