Okay guys, this is an all hands on deck situation. If you're involved in Fenspace in any capacity I need your opinion on this.

I would like to move the fiction archives off of FenWiki. The MediaWiki format is not really suited for long-form fiction, as I'm sure most of us have noticed, and as the stories get longer the less suitable MediaWiki becomes for storing them. So I propose we move the stories offsite to an archive that's designed to handle fiction.

The pros are that the stories are easier to read, easier to find and (most importantly) easier for authors to upload from the forum. The big con is that we lose a measure of control over our work since we're not the ones maintaining the archive. I think that ease of access beats loss of control, but I don't know that, which is where you guys come in.

Is this something we should pursue? I have a plan of action that can be started if the Collective agrees to it, but before I start that up I want a consensus.

ETA: Just to be clear, based on current events should we decide to move the archives offsite we will not be moving to FFN.
Mr. Fnord interdimensional man of mystery

FenWiki - Your One-Stop Shop for Fenspace Information

"I. Drink. Your. NERDRAGE!"

(Bob, 5/23/2025: The new thread in this area made me go back here and try to clean up the outline. Well. MyBB apparently doesn't handle indented lines well, no matter how you try to do them in-editor. I'm probably going to have to create some custom markup to do it, in my copious free time. In the mean time, at least the line breaks have been fixed.)

Just what it says on the tin -- for comments, suggestions, and "hey, you told me you'd use X but it's not there". 

Page counts aren't final -- hell, I haven't even totaled them up yet to see if I'm near a multiple of 16 (although as I expect this to be a PDF, getting the page count to an integer number of signatures is unlikely to be particularly critical).

Effect: Though it's only barely over a minute long, for the duration of the effect Doug can speak or understand all languages, or convey entire paragraphs of meaning in a single nonsense word, as can anyone else in his area of effect. The short duration limits its utility as a translation effect, but it's easily long enough for "Don't shoot, I come in peace!" or "Lay down your weapons and surrender, or I'll have to get rough," and REALLY REALLY GOOD for quickly briefing or debriefing - especially welcome for after-action reports, when everyone involved just wants to get a shower, a drink, and some rest, not neccesarily in that order, not talk stuff over "before the details fade." A recording or listening to the conversation from outside the AoE (even with a device entirely inside it) is just the sounds, but if a recording device within range is sufficiently advanced to use speech recognition to produce a text transcript the translation effect DOES apply, to produce the transcript in the language it's programmed to recognize, again vastly simplifying making mission reports.

Given that a "less time spent on paperwork" spell is the holy grail of utility magic, I expect Doug would count this one of his best power songs once he discovers it.
--
"Anko, what you do in your free time is your own choice. Use it wisely. And if you do not use it wisely, make sure you thoroughly enjoy whatever unwise thing you are doing." - HymnOfRagnorok as Orochimaru at SpaceBattles
woot Med. Eng., verb, 1st & 3rd pers. prsnt. sg. know, knows

I am Geth N7, a terminal of the Geth, and I desire to interface with the Drunkards Walk Forum Consensus.

I was informed of this location by the human named Brent Laabs, and would like to show my appreciation to Schroeck-Administrator for allowing us to share knowledge and obtain understanding from this collective.

Via Lachlan Markay and Ace, who calls it “Nixonian.” This is the rare item that might actually make liberals angrier at the White House than conservatives. If you’d staked your party’s credibility on realizing the utopian dream of universal health care only to have Obama deliver this fartburger, you’d be furious. Why anyone on either side still wants Sebelius in charge, I have no idea.

Quote:Facing such intense opposition from congressional Republicans, the administration was in a bunker mentality as it built the enrollment system, one former administration official said. Officials feared that if they called on outsiders to help with the technical details of how to run a commerce website, those companies could be subpoenaed by Hill Republicans, the former aide said. So the task fell to trusted campaign tech experts.

Quote:How and why the system failed, and how long it will take to fix, remains unclear. But evidence of a last-minute surge in spending suggests the needs of the project were growing well beyond the initial expectations of the contractor and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
“Why this went from a ceiling of $93.7 million to $292 million is hard to fathom,” said Scott Amey, general counsel at the Project on Government Oversight, a Washington, D.C.-based watchdog group that analyzes government contracting.
“Something changed. It suggests they ran into problems and knew last spring that they couldn’t do it for $93.7 million. They just blew through the original ceiling. Where was the contract oversight?”…
The Obama administration was issuing regulations and changing policy regarding how the reform should be implemented late into this summer.Many required significant changes to the IT running Healthcare.gov, which kept contractors scrambling.

Since CD brought out  the transhumanist future, how about this one?
Bring back the dodo, passenger pigeon and the wooly mammoth
__________________
Into terror!,  Into valour!
Charge ahead! No! Never turn
Yes, it's into the fire we fly
And the devil will burn!
- Scarlett Pimpernell

http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2013/10 ... ring-sleep

Looks like ditching the meat brains might actually be the way forward to not needing as much or any sleep! Not that we're anywhere close to achieving that, but at least there's one more spark of hope to look to on the horizon.
--
"Anko, what you do in your free time is your own choice. Use it wisely. And if you do not use it wisely, make sure you thoroughly enjoy whatever unwise thing you are doing." - HymnOfRagnorok as Orochimaru at SpaceBattles
woot Med. Eng., verb, 1st & 3rd pers. prsnt. sg. know, knows

They go out, into the long grass of the unknown, in search of unique new knowledge, sample and quantify it, then proceed to rigorously pit their theories against each other and the world at large, refining them, transforming them now and then to more complete forms, yet unhesitatingly setting them aside and replacing them if a better theory comes along, and the ones with the strongest and most versatile collections (and a healthy dose of luck) gain recognition and position within their own ranks, but still have to pay $200 for a pokeball like any other kid off the street.
--
"Anko, what you do in your free time is your own choice. Use it wisely. And if you do not use it wisely, make sure you thoroughly enjoy whatever unwise thing you are doing." - HymnOfRagnorok as Orochimaru at SpaceBattles
woot Med. Eng., verb, 1st & 3rd pers. prsnt. sg. know, knows

Tech post for the wiki about the stuff in "Mixing Minds"

The 3rd Eye
»Do not speak the command, think the command! Don't give up early, the system will need a few hours to calibrate.«
- heard during a 3rd Eye training session

»Its hard to describe. It does only work for me if I think the command in Russian.«
- Nina Ustinyavna, explaining her difficulty with English commands

History

The 3rd Eye is a mind-machine interface that was originally developed from a mindwipe and -copy technology captured in the raid on the laboratory of the Boskonian scientist Quattro on Nehalenia in 2015. While Great Justice took the tech that had been used to influence the Panzerkunst couriers and left the biological parts to group of catgirl victims that had just founded Catgirl Industries. Carefully comparing the effects of the technology on a dozen victims looked like a good chance to learn something about it at that time.

Catgirl Industries took the technology and began to look for ways to detect its manipulations, but they also started a research project to look for positive aspects of the technology. Despite intensive research and quite a number of small self experiments, it took until 2019 for the first portable prototypes of the 3rd Eye appeared in the labs of Jenga.

The 3rd Eye was a limited and downsized variant of Quattros original technology, being able to interface with the a metahuman brain to send and receive sensory perceptions. Its transmitter array was much too limited to do the deep mind manipulation the full technology could do.

At least thats what everyone thought.

The Accident

In 2022 a mindtech research group at Jenga was experimenting with a new kind of firmware for the 3rd Eye, that should partly bridge the gap to the full sized version. Unfortunately for the researchers they had even underestimated the capabilities of the hardware.

Nearly a dozen researchers became influenced by the new firmware as the memories of the group began to swap back and forth between the catgirls. Luckily the situation was mostly resolved before the damage became permanent, but a few catgirls were missing months of their memory afterwards.

Aftermath

The 3rd Eye accident threw back all plans of Catgirl Industries to sell the technology by years. Shocked by the surprising capabilities of the system, the catgirls spent nearly a year analyzing the data from the accident to understand what had happened. In the end they had to acquire help from Prometheus Forge to design a new antenna array for the 3rd Eye.

This delayed the first limited release of the 3rd Eye technology until late 2024.

Functionality

The 3rd Eye is a mind-machine interface that can record sensory input from the user and overlay artificial sensory perceptions on them. This allows the 3rd Eye to function as a versatile augmented reality interface, similar to a cybernetic direct neural interface.

In addition to this a frequent user of the 3rd Eye can train something called command voice. Its a phrase for thinking about words and sentences without speaking them out. With enough training the 3rd Eye can detect the internal speech and use it as an additional source of input.

Catgirl Industries 3rd Eye

While CI's 3rd Eyes are similar to the exported versions, they have an additional feature.The devices can detect the general mood of a catgirl, which is by members of Catgirl Industries to create an artificial (and voluntary) kind of empathy between 3rd Eye using catgirls.

Quirks

• I know this voice! The mental voice generated by the 3rd Eye seems always to be familiar, but no user can really pinpoint why this happens.
  
• Training is everything. The command voice needs to be learned by device, which takes a couple of hours. A 3rd Eye can store only a few patterns of command voices.
  
• I don't remember you. If not used on a regular basis, a 3rd Eye forgets the patterns of an user within a few days. CI has been unable to fix this quirk.
  

• A 3rd Eye has to be worn with skin contact on the head or neck. Most catgirls wear it integrated in a collar.
  
• Every user develops his or her own way to project the command voice.
  
• There are rumors that CI has 3rd Eyes to generate a temporary and safe to use variant of the low-level groupmind that accidently happened in 2022.
  

• The 3rd Eye plays a major role in the story Mixing Minds
  

Hi, my screenname is Tennie, and I go by tennessean (note the lower-case "t") over on TV Tropes.  I first came here after seeing a link to a story that was posted on that site, several years ago.  However, I've been having a number of ideas that I felt that I should post on these forums, rather than letting them stay in my head and go to waste.  So last night I finally decided to screw up my courage and become a member of this forum.  I intend to have as a good a time here as I can, and I am looking forward to sharing my thoughts and ideas here!