26 KiB
Munchkin the green pill.
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Author: u/ArgentStonecutter Emergency Mustelid Hologram*
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URL: https://www.reddit.com/r/rational/comments/5t2uyr/munchkin_the_green_pill/
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Score: 28
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Created: 2017-02-09T21:12:16
Post:
I'm sure everyone's familiar with this story by now:
http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/06/02/and-i-show-you-how-deep-the-rabbit-hole-goes/
The green pill guy in the story is particularly bad about using pill powers. Now, the green pill isn't one that's super effective (I was all over the black pill myself) but surely there's a better way to use it...
Comments:
u/None [+17] (7 minutes later)
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u/ArgentStonecutter [+5] Emergency Mustelid Hologram (2 hours later)
regarding the above point, the demon comic should apply--depending on how the power works, you'd be pretty much immortal
Alas, that's been taken down. Elaborate?
Whether you can imitate other humans isn't a given. It could be that you only have one template for each species, and you're already that one.
u/None [+2] (2 hours later)
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u/None [+7] (9 hours later)
It's only like the first chapter or so. Otherwise I think you have to buy it.
u/LeifCarrotson [+2] (19 days later)
Chapter 1 is still up, the rest is no longer online:
http://www.shigabooks.com/?page=038
Thanks for reading Demon Chapter 1
Demon chapters 2 through 21 are no longer available online but the collected volumes can now be ordered from First Second Books, amazon or your local bookstore.
PS: Support your local bookstore if you can.
Links: Volume 1, Volume 2, Volume 3, Volume 4. They're $20 each.
Not having read the books, the summary there seems helpful:
No matter how hard he tries, Jimmy Yee cannot die.
A noose around his neck, a razor across his wrist, and even a bullet to his head all yield the same results: he awakes from each suicide attempt, miraculously unharmed, in his shabby room at the Sunbeam Motel.
Has he gone mad? Or has he truly died and found himself in hell? Jimmy is willing to tear the world down around him to get at the truth. Highly analytical and utterly unscrupulous, he is uniquely suited to unraveling this bizarre mystery.
From the brilliant and profane mind of Jason Shiga, known for his high-concept graphic novels, comes Demon: a four-volume magnum opus about the unspeakable chaos that one indestructible man can unleash on the world—and the astronomical body count he leaves behind.
u/melmonella [+1] Tremble, o ye mighty, for a new age is upon you (17 hours later)
Especially the human-primate missing link.
Um. What human-primate missing link?
u/None [+1] (18 hours later)
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u/ArgentStonecutter [+3] Emergency Mustelid Hologram (21 hours later)
Chimpanzees are so close to humans genetically that this is a less important issues than it's been made out in the past.
Unless you're interested in the Pak hypothesis.
Speaking of which, would it be a good idea to turn into a Protector-stage human or not?
u/Flashbunny [+1] (a day later)
It's not especially important in terms of answering questions, but it has a huge emotional weight behind it - I can't imagine it would be hard to find some who would pay through the nose for some x-rays, pictures, DNA samples etc.
u/melmonella [+1] Tremble, o ye mighty, for a new age is upon you (21 hours later)
Interesting.
u/awesomeideas [+32] Dai stiho, cousin. (34 minutes later)
Humans are animals. Humans who have taken the other pills are animals.
u/ArgentStonecutter [+15] Emergency Mustelid Hologram (2 hours later)
That depends on whether, when you turn into an animal, you can turn into a specific animal or into a generic member of the species. Being able to turn into a different specific human would be super effective in all kinds of ways, but even being able to turn into a generic human-who-is-not-you is useful.
Or maybe when you turn into a human you always turn into you, and when you turn into a sparrow you always turn into the sparrow that got mauled by the hawk?
And picking up acquired abilities is a bit iffy.
Of course you could turn into a member of a species where every individual is a powerful wizard, that would be an inherent ability.
u/awesomeideas [+14] Dai stiho, cousin. (3 hours later)
It says "into any animal," not "any kind of animal."
u/DropZeHamma [+5] (12 hours later)
The question now is whether these descriptions are actually the definition of the power the pills grant you or if they were written by whoever created them.
In the second case I'd rather not rely on technically being correct, when there's a good chance the creator just didn't think about the semantics when they described their pill.
u/ArgentStonecutter [+2] Emergency Mustelid Hologram (13 hours later)
Any malicious narrator could paper over that difference. ^^
I'd still try something like the Mobiles from High Wizardry first.
u/throwaway11252016 [+9] (19 hours later)
This is head canon for me now. Black pill guy just ended up selecting for a future where green pill guy dies before he figures this out, so that he doesn't have to deal with the suboptimal outcome of competing with someone who has his power.
edit: To add, since black pill clearly uses the most OP interpretation of "can see one month into the future" it seems to be in line with the flavor of the story to give green pill a similarly OP treatment. Turns out early game advantage is the most OP of all though.
u/ArgentStonecutter [+2] Emergency Mustelid Hologram (21 hours later)
Black Pill guy seems to be more about synergy between powers, more than competing with them.
u/None [+3] (20 hours later)
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u/ArgentStonecutter [+1] Emergency Mustelid Hologram (21 hours later)
Even if that's not the case, humans who are much smarter than you are animals. You can transform into a great mathematician, a genius physicist
... or a Protector.
u/melmonella [+1] Tremble, o ye mighty, for a new age is upon you (a day later)
If your knowledge can be edited like that, do you still remain you?
u/Magnap [+6] (a day later)
Since the animal forms of green pill guy still identify as him, and are able to remember how to use the power, as well as reason about which animal to become next, which we wouldn't expect, say, a sparrow brain to be able to, that universe must have something akin to a soul.
u/JackStargazer [+4] Primordial Apologist (a day later)
Remember that God or something like it empirically exists in that world, because of the whole Shroud of Turin thing.
u/Magnap [+1] (2 days later)
I wonder how much of Christianity is true, then. Why be immortal in an entropy-plagued universe when you can be in Heaven?
u/Ozimandius [+12] (41 minutes later)
Obviously you are the world's best spy. Also, Assassin. The number of ways in which these jobs could be accomplished is basically endless.
You can make yourself near invincible by turning into a Tardigrade.
You could perform entropy shenanigans much like red does (for example creating a machine that can take advantage of spinning you up to several G's as a tick then turn into a blue whale - suddenly a lot more energy in the system.
Obviously lots of exploration could be done, the bottom of the ocean and places humans can't easily go.
We don't really know the extent of the power of the green pill so below is some speculation.
Dinosaur and other extinct species. Obviously interesting from a research perspective... Already mentioned but He also clearly violates physical laws so could provide energy in a variety of ways. Turning into a very large dinosaur for a sort of 'super strength' to increase the energy but only needing to eat what a human eats (as far as we know). Could also explore lots of other extinct species, depending on exactly how familiar with the species you need to be there could be all kinds of exotic creatures that are possible.
Not entirely certain if wounds taken in animal form carry over to human form and to what degree, knowing that would be useful (the only mention of wounds came from when the eagle had him by the leg in human form, it sounded a bit like he had taken more damage as a sparrow). If they do carry over, you can heal a lot faster in sloth form or even regenerate limbs in salamander form. If they don't, you can harvest materials more aggressively than mentioned earlier and perform all kinds of shenanigans.
If he is not limited to animals but any living creature: Having human intelligence as a bacteria would certainly be interesting from a scientific perspective and might yield useful information. Could you reproduce in bacterial form and split into several yous?
Could he turn into an aspen forest, which is technically a single organism? I just don't know the extent of his shapeshifting powers...
I'll try to think of some more but thats what I got for now.
u/ArgentStonecutter [+6] Emergency Mustelid Hologram (2 hours later)
Obviously you are the world's best spy. Also, Assassin. The number of ways in which these jobs could be accomplished is basically endless.
Depending on how the narrator nerfs the ability, of course.
You could perform entropy shenanigans much like red does (for example creating a machine that can take advantage of spinning you up to several G's as a tick then turn into a blue whale - suddenly a lot more energy in the system.
A perpetual motion machine with a cycle time limited by how fast you could transform would be pretty easy to design.
Obviously lots of exploration could be done, the bottom of the ocean and places humans can't easily go.
Blue pill guy is already doing that, but yeh.
Having human intelligence as a bacteria would certainly be interesting from a scientific perspective and might yield useful information.
Or insanity. Bacterial senses would be super different.
Could you reproduce in bacterial form and split into several yous?
And once you do, when you change back, does Rule 34 apply?
u/None [+3] (9 hours later)
Is "sense" even the right word for what bacteria do, qualitatively? What if you found that a bacteria is totally mechanical, with no brain or brain-equivalent for the mind to jack into? You'd just go totally dark, deprived of all senses, and then you'd probably die eventually.
u/Ozimandius [+4] (15 hours later)
Well, if he is able to think normally as a sparrow, obviously there are some supernatural shenanigans going on, which is why I mentioned it. You would obviously want to try it first on a sliding scale of creature sizes and brain capacities until you were sure.
u/CCC_037 [+3] (15 hours later)
You could perform entropy shenanigans much like red does (for example creating a machine that can take advantage of spinning you up to several G's as a tick then turn into a blue whale - suddenly a lot more energy in the system.
He'd get a lot less dizzy by simply standing on a spring-loaded platform and rapidly switching between blue whale and flea.
Though he'd still only generate a tiny fraction of the energy that Red does, of course.
u/Ozimandius [+2] (15 hours later)
We don't have exact numbers on red's super strength, but exerting 300,000 lbs of force would be hard to call a tiny fraction of it in my opinion.
u/CCC_037 [+3] (17 hours later)
We do have that people thought he had 'no upper limit'. I get the impression he could have easily picked up beached whales and tossed them into the sea in order to try to impress girls at some point. He might even have juggled them if he had the coordination.
u/GullibleCynic [+7] (8 hours later)
It says 'any animal', that leaves open at least three possibilities that I haven't seen yet.
Fictional animals
Alien animals
Future animals
Future variants of humans could be particularly useful as transformation subjects
u/ArgentStonecutter [+1] Emergency Mustelid Hologram (13 hours later)
I (indirectly) referenced fictional alien future animals in my comment about the species where every individual is a wizard. ^^
u/CCC_037 [+1] (15 hours later)
Nobody. Messes. With. The Kraken.
u/monkyyy0 [+5] (an hour later)
Knowing the end result? Do nothing stupid, get immortality.
Not knowing the end result, go into tentacle porn, maybe steal things, avoid the eyes military science at all costs.
u/ArgentStonecutter [+2] Emergency Mustelid Hologram (2 hours later)
Do nothing stupid, get immortality.
Assuming it's not accompanied by scientifically unlikely magic plot bunnies like "injuries and aging carry over no matter what you change into, don't spend too much time as a fast-aging species".
u/CreationBlues [+5] (7 hours later)
Nah, chill out as that immortal jellyfish. Since it goes back in it's life cycle, it should deage you if aging carries over
u/Icare0 [+3] (16 hours later)
Nah, shapeshift into a younger version of yourself every now and then and you are golden.
u/CCC_037 [+2] (15 hours later)
Don't they die easily if the water temperature isn't exactly right or something?
u/DaystarEld [+4] Pokémon Professor (20 hours later)
The problem with this pill, as this thread is demonstrating, is that there's such an endless amount of ways to interpret the powers it grants that it's hard to really know if it's overpowered or terrible.
Assuming it works even remotely like Animorphs (or, even better, r!Animorphs) would make it incredibly useful for a spy or assassin, but what I'm more interested in is the potential scientific benefits.
You would be the first conscious being who was capable of inhabiting another mind with (presumably) all its perspective and instincts intact, but your own intellect and values as well. You could learn so much about how different animals learn and experience the world, and help push our understanding of neuroscience immensely.
u/Teal_Thanatos [+3] (2 hours later)
that story was really good.
u/vakusdrake [+3] (3 hours later)
Assuming the most permissive version of this power, it is extremely powerful, rendering the red and yellow pills redundant, and even having a fraction of the abilities of the orange pill (or even just letting you copy any other people with powers).
As others have stated you can get free energy by turning into a heavier animal and then draining the created kinetic energy. However this is among the worst ways to get energy out of this power. Much more sensible would be to turn into a whale then have your head (well head area) chopped off then turn into something else before you could die. You could then extract all the caloric energy in that flesh (assuming it sticks around separated from your body when you change into something else, but I already said this was the most permissive interpretation).
However since this power would be most useful in preventing the heat death of the universe what you'd probably do is just feed the excess material into a black hole in order to get direct matter to energy conversion via black hole farming see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qam5BkXIEhQ, thus this power is vastly superior to the red pill for energy creation (though the best way to use the red pill would probably not be turning turbines but using the regen to create matter to feed to black holes)If you can turn into any animal (though I think it should be assumed you are limited to real animals that you know about), then by turning into specific humans you can read their mind, not only to gain any sensitive information they possess, but also potentially in order to learn skills faster, directly from their mind. [Animorphs the Reckoning spoiler] (/Some of you may remember something like this this from Animorphs: The Reckoning, which is where i'm getting this idea from). You may also be able to copy their powers, or at least copy the powers of orange (though only the knowledge he had already used his power to acquire).
Plus you may be able to turn into highly intelligent people and use your versions of their mind for advice. If you can copy powers then you can also turn into yourself turning into yourself, turning into yourself, etc. Which basically means you might be able to leverage this into gaining access to an arbitrarily large number of simulations of yourself (plus a simulation of one other mind) in order to get mental work done faster.
u/DropZeHamma [+6] (12 hours later)
I think you have to assume that your mind stays your own when you turn into another animal. If that wasn't the case you'd turn into a cat once and no longer have the mental capacity to turn back into a human.
u/vakusdrake [+1] (a day later)
I was assuming you keep your own mind (presumably with your consciousness somewhere outside of normal space), however if you turn into another animal that will include it's brain.
So it seems there's no variation of true shapeshifting (well except versions where you become what you turn into losing your previous identity, but those would be pretty useless, except for turning into yourself in order to regen) that doesn't basically mean you are effectively possessing a copy of the thing you're turned into.
u/ArgentStonecutter [+1] Emergency Mustelid Hologram (13 hours later)
If you pick the most permissive version of the power, there's all kinds of fictional animals that are basically gods you could turn into. ^^
How about the Entities from Worm?
u/Icare0 [+3] (16 hours later)
Screw "basically gods" stuff, if you are resorting to most permissive version of a power, flat out turn into god.
There are many gods that appeared in the form of animal while still retaining their powers. These powers included turning into the original form of the god. Shapeshift in that version of that animal, and then shift into the original form of the god. Zeus was into shapeshifting to animals to impregnate humans, Loki was a female horse once, and proteus could shapeshift into anything. The list is endless.
And that's before taking into account the human forms of the gods themselves. Shapeshift into the human form of YHWH, a.k.a Jesus Christ. Congrats, you just beat life.
Edit: and if fictional animals are fair game and you want to go into actual munchkin stuff, have you ever played Dungeons and Dragons 3.5? If so, ever heard of Pun-pun? Yeah, that. If you haven't, the fictional race Sarruk can graft supernatural and spell-like power into reptiles. The authors forgot to build in limits because the race was never meant to be used by players. From there, there is a well documented way to graft yourself with every power ever published for D&D, so you pretty much graft godhood into yourself.
u/ArgentStonecutter [+2] Emergency Mustelid Hologram (17 hours later)
There's a lot of animal gods it would be more fun to be, especially if you can avoid the personality flaws of the original. Coyote, for example, or the stone monkey, or some of the African deities. You can always power-up further later.
u/vakusdrake [+2] (a day later)
I was going for the most permissive reasonable interpretation (though to be fair that quite subjective). I don't think fictional animals would be reasonably, because while extinct animals still exist (see B theory of time) however whether or not nonexistent things can really be said to have qualities like being an animal in the same sense as "actual" animals is questionable. I don't like those sorts of "interpretations" in CYOA's because it's not a matter of interpreting the CYOA but interpreting reality (as in you need to assume certain philosophical/scientific models are true in the real world for those exploits to work in the CYOA)
Also if those fictional animals have magic powers then whether or not those can be replicated (without which turning into that creature may instantly kill you) is questionable. While I considered the possibility that the pill may let you copy the effects of the other pills by turning into their recipients, whether it can replicate effects that are not part whatever magic system this CYOA operates on is much more questionable.
Also "animal" may refer to the biological phylogenetic definition, in which case any creature that doesn't share a genetic common ancestor with earth animals would be automatically disqualified.
Still I think the most plausible exploit along these lines is to assume that a singularity will be created in the future (with all these pills it seems inevitable), and that people will create proper animals using genetic engineering that are basically benevolent biological superintelligences that have inbuilt biological nano machinery, and of course if they would ever be created then they exist and can be selected. Though if you don't know about them how you could go about selecting them seems questionable, but this can be solved by drawing up many of the details about the animal in the present. Sure you may not know very many details, but given this power doesn't require substantial knowledge of biology/genetics you presumably don't need very much info.
u/ArgentStonecutter [+2] Emergency Mustelid Hologram (3 days later)
The universe is infinite, and the pill powers are immune to relativity so you're not limited to the light cone of the local universe... so animals that are basically identical to any possible fictional animals must exist somewhere, down to a DNA based metabolism if that's a requirement. Even if you can't turn into impossible creatures, you should be able to turn into any possible creature fictional or not.
If that works you can also use this to explore the limits of physics and metaphysics.
(see also, Creatures of Light and Darkness (Zelazny, 1969), and Thief of Time (Pratchett, 2001))
u/diraniola [+3] (3 hours later)
The guy was obviously an idiot. When he was injured, he could have transformed into either something that doesn't have legs to be injured, or an animal with an amorphous body structure to heal quickly.
Even before that, turning into something like an alligator when the hawk attacked would work much better. Hard scales protect you from it's claws while you eat the hawk.
Even before that, why fly around as a sparrow when you can fly around as a hawk, or an eagle? Why would you chose one of the smallest birds, pretty low on the food chain?
Anybody who is given the option to take any of the pills and chooses green is probably not the smartest person, but I guess it is nice to have that confirmed in story.
u/ArgentStonecutter [+2] Emergency Mustelid Hologram (13 hours later)
Even before that, why fly around as a sparrow when you can fly around as a hawk, or an eagle?
That was my very first reaction too.
u/Icare0 [+2] (16 hours later)
Yeah, he was simply unoptimal to the extreme.
If I could choose, it's a Peregrine Falcon for sheer speed. Better yet, a brazilian free-tailed bat is the 5th fastest animal on earth, has the fastest ground speed at over 160km/h and echolocation. Nothing will ever catch me, and if I get caught the correct action is to change into something microscopic ASAP to both escape and assure a perfect landing due to Square-cube law.
And why the hell turn into any sea animal, when a regular ship like a cruiser tops them all? You're a shapeshifter, money shouldn't be a problem with you being the best assassin in the world.
u/AntiTwister [+2] (an hour later)
You might consider this related.
u/None [+2] (8 hours later)
To hell with the green pill (black pill master race, anyway)
What the hell did yellow and pink see?
u/MeMyselfandBi [+2] (8 hours later)
I think that whole "seeing into God's mind" thing meant that Yellow had absorbed literally all knowledge of that universe, including the fact that reality was actually a simulation of some sort, thus making any action or inaction pointless and free will an illusion, creating an existential conundrum that would destroy any conscious being with such a limited capacity for information, such as a human.
u/monkyyy0 [+2] (a day later)
I thought those with the pills were "god" and he was reading his own mind plus the others creating a feedback loop
u/Evan_Th [+1] Sunshine Regiment (a day later)
I thought that what happened the mind of God is literally incomprehensible, so Yellow's mind threw an exception trying to do the impossible.
u/Liberticus [+1] (2 days later)
the mind of God is literally incomprehensible
What does this mean? Is it impossible to understand for anyone or just humans? Wouldn't god himself suffer the same problems as yellow did if it's incomprehensible for anyone?
u/Evan_Th [+1] Sunshine Regiment (2 days later)
I guess you could make a story out of that, but I was assuming it was just incomprehensible to humans, or perhaps to anyone aside from God Himself. Given the sheer difference in magnitude between a human mind and His, something like this shouldn't be too surprising.
u/Liberticus [+1] (2 days later)
Thanks, got it.
I don't believe in any gods myself so I find it hard to put myself in the mindset of someone who does. I find religion and gods to be interesting topics, though.